In his recent address to the Press Club in Canberra, IBM Australia's CEO and managing director Glen Boreham mentioned that nearly all of the company's 10,000 employees work from home at least one day a week. "The very nature of work is changing," Boreham said, and in the future working from home may become the rule, not the exception.

Peter Gasparovic, CIO of Mission Australia, says that Gen Y craves flexibility for more than just where and when they do their job. "What works for this group best are things like flexibility in the way they go about doing their job," Gasparovic says. "Giving them the flexibility to not necessarily follow procedure, but say to them: 'Look, this is the policy, how would you go about doing this?' Actually using them to brainstorm and go through the processes or procedures that were in place and say: 'How can we do it better?'"

Gasparovic says an employee asked him for six months of unpaid leave for an extended visit to the UK. He granted the request, and even though everyone thought he had gone bananas, he is happy to have made it. Not only did the employee come back from the UK bursting at the seams with new ideas, Gasparovic says, "he was so grateful for the opportunity he was given, I think I have won his loyalty forever".

According to freelance mobile analyst Nigel Deighton, if Gen Y employees are any less loyal, it may be their bosses' fault. "Most established companies expect loyalty but don't earn it," he says. "I'm stunned by the number of organizations that treat their trash cans with more consideration than their people. And then management gets a little upset because a person in which they have invested time, money, effort and training quits to move ahead."

Deighton says that corporations seeking to improve staff loyalty should try to customize staff members' roles to fit the skills and interests of individual employees. "Take the entrepreneur who made a good idea fly and then got bored with the dross of day-to-day operations," he says. "Wouldn't it make more sense for the company to put a process guy in place once the outcome is decided and focus the entrepreneur on the next new task?"

There are clear challenges involved with hiring and retaining Gen Y employees. But they are challenges that are likely to drive workplace innovation and improve communication between employees, even if face-to-face communication decreases.

"Like most things in life, you need the people to challenge you occasionally," Tony Newman, general manager of Information Systems at Mitsubishi Motors Australia, says. "While at the time, you might resent it, you do realize that you do need to be continually challenged."

- D BUSHELL-EMBLING