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The needs of employees have changed dramatically over the past 30 years. Fueled in part by a rapid increase in the number of women entering the workforce, more and more employees are expecting — and demanding — a balance between the expectations of work and the demands of personal life. No longer can managers tell employees to leave their personal lives at home. Today’s managers recognize that what happens at home has a dramatic impact on performance at work — and vice versa.

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in their “2008 Employee Job Satisfaction” survey report, 44 percent of employees cited the flexibility to balance work/life issues as a very important aspect of job satisfaction.

The SHRM study further indicated that many companies offer nontraditional scheduling options to employees to help them balance their work and personal lives. Fifty-nine percent of HR professionals indicated their organizations offered flextime, which allowed employees to select their work hours within limits established by the employer. In addition to flextime, 57 percent of human resource professionals indicated that their organizations offered some form of telecommuting: 47 percent of respondents reported that their organizations offered telecommuting on an ad-hoc basis, 35 percent on a part-time basis, and 21 percent on a full-time basis. Thirty-seven percent of HR professionals said their organizations offered compressed workweeks, where full-time employees are allowed to work longer days for part of a week or pay period in exchange for shorter days or a day off during that week or pay period. Eighteen percent of HR professionals reported that their organizations offered job sharing, in which two employees share the responsibilities, accountability and compensation of one full-time job. These types of flexible scheduling benefits allow organizations to recruit and retain motivated workers who may not be able or willing to work a traditional nine-to-five schedule.

Contributing to the change in expectations among employees is the aging of the baby boomer population and the advent of the Gen X and Gen Y (or millennial) employee. Gen X employees include the 46 million people born between 1960 and 1984 (although the exact years vary depending on who you ask). They have been characterized in the media as skeptical and impatient with the status quo, questioning of authority, and fiercely independent. Having witnessed the sacrifices their parents made for their jobs — and the subsequent impacts of staggering job losses in the 1980s and 1990s — they demand a balance between their work lives and home lives. Gen Y employees, generally the children of the baby boomer population, were born between 1977 and 1994 and make up more than 70 million people in the US — about 20 percent of the population. It is the largest generation since the baby boomers.

Gen Y is technologically competent, social-minded and very empowered — they are the offspring of perhaps the most indulgent parents in history. Consequently, they are highly confident and very optimistic about the future. Their expectations may be too high, however, when those expectations butt up against the realities of the workforce. Interestingly, Gen Y is said to be most closely aligned with their baby boomer colleagues, with Gen X in the middle — representing a group that is likely to be less loyal to employers. In fact, the US Labor Department indicates that Gen Xers hold an average of nearly nine different jobs by their thirties. They change jobs in search of new skills, increased responsibility, and new experiences. Their tendency to change positions frequently has had a major impact on the temporary-worker industry.