When Facebook Comes to Work: Understanding the Work Practice of the Digital Native

Brynn Evans

The most valuable thing I learned in graduate school is that progress is not linear. It would take me 10 days of hard work before a big insight would come along and give me the equivalent of a week's worth of progress. Although I'm talking in the past tense here, this simple life lesson is true of my current work too — and of the work style of many so-called knowledge workers.

This pattern reveals itself in other domains as well. Imagine that a soccer game is coming down to the wire, tied at 0–0. From an absolute perspective, each team has made zero "progress." Of course, both teams have played a full game — they're exhausted — but nothing quantifiably distinguishes them from each other. Yet, at the last possible moment, either team could orchestrate a single clever play and score the tie-breaking shot. The game would technically end with a winner and a loser, although a score of one to nothing hardly reflects the deliberate work that both teams put in throughout the match. Still, what matters is that the winning team finally pulled through.

This perspective is important to keep in mind as you read this chapter. Although digital natives may conduct their work differently, they still recognize the need to pull through and meet the same deadlines. Even if they appear to be progressing slowly, be aware that, in their work too, progress is not linear.

Work as a Practice

This chapter is about the way that digital natives approach work — something that I'll refer to as their work practice. We all have a work practice that's unique to us; but if you've been employed in an office setting for more than 10 years, chances are that your work practice revolves around the office. When you're at work, you're working. When you're home, you're not working. This is a mindset (and perhaps a coping strategy) that many people adopt in order to lead a balanced life. Yet it's a work practice that is likely absent among the digital natives at your company, even if you still work in a traditional office environment.

What exactly is a work practice? It's not a matter of what work gets done but rather how it gets done. It's the doing of the work; it's the process of producing; it's a frame of mind for dealing with the mundane as well as the urgent. Included in this frame of mind are habits, standards, expectations, and social norms. For example, a familiar standard is the one-hour lunch break. Additionally, there are certain workplace expectations, which may vary within enterprises (e.g., how quickly to respond to a coworker's email). Finally, basic social norms apply regardless of company culture (e.g., it's rude to be on Facebook during a client meeting).

However, digital natives have a different set of habits, standards, expectations, and social norms that stem from being raised in a culture deeply immersed in technology. While their differences may not always clash with nonnatives, their work practice is unique and demands patience and compromise from non-natives to understand it and make the most of it. It certainly matters that your employees — from whatever generation — get their work done: Business is business. However, if you have a greater appreciation for digital natives' attitudes about working, you will learn better how to coexist productively and appreciate the perspectives and techniques that help them succeed.

The Life and Times of a Digital Native

The following account depicts a young woman, Robin, whose childhood was filled with digital technologies, which were used for both work and play. Today, her behaviors reflect the attributes of a digital native, quite distinct from the attributes of workers from previous generations. As you read the following story, consider how Robin's upbringing might affect her current work practices:

Robin is a 25-year-old technical project manager at Intuit. Growing up in a large family, she needed to jockey for attention with her three younger brothers. She took to video games as a way to compete with them, spending hours on gaming consoles and on the family computer late into the night. She was a natural with computers and even won a programming contest in high school. However, her intellectual passions were history and English.

Her parents sent her to college with a personal laptop. It became her life. She used it for taking notes during class, researching material for writing assignments, and doing homework. It was with her in the dorm, on the front steps of the cafeteria, in the noisy student center, and in off-campus cafes. She never hesitated to call upon the trustworthy machine in the middle of a conversation (even once with the dean of her university) if she thought that Google or Wikipedia could resolve some pressing issue or embellish an important...