Technology

I think amongst all this is where people get lost. Nearly everyone is capable of having these conversations, not everyone recognizes all the opportunities they have to have them. For the older folks, they can't imagine having conversations like this anywhere but the water cooler, or after a meeting is over, over a lunch they invite their coworker to, or in a closed office. Younger generations, as you mentioned, grew up socializing on the internet so opening a DM, sending a text, or otherwise chatting off topic in a digital channel are all skills they already use. One might make the argument that short videos, text on images, voice chat, streaming, emoji, and other kinds of more modern communication modalities are all extensions of the same thought. If more CEOs and people in power spent time asking their workers and reaching out to people who are capable of socializing effectively online, rather than simply blaming the modality, we'd be in a much better place today. In fact, finding the companies which do this right is likely finding the companies which will be successful in the future - virtual work brings a lot of clear and unambiguous benefits, the trick will be finding out how to offset the negatives.