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There’ve been complaints about younger workers – often Millennials, which will be the term I will use from here out – are losing out on traditional, organic networking and collaboration at work because they’re stuck between a set of headphones.  “Anti-social”, “anti-collaborative” and “career-killing” are phrases tossed about in articles at and linked by HBR.

However, Scott Berinato, an HBR blogger, tried out some auto-analytics to measure his productivity and came up with a contrary picture.  Read the article here (Here’s the article he references, which is great on its own). But the basic takeaway I got is that this is a changing world driven by increased exposure to lots of different tech; incoming workers were raised on this new tech; and old expectations should be examined and, if necessary, changed.

How do you feel about your employees or coworkers spending their time with headphones on?