NPR's Morning Edition is airing a series on "flex work" this week.  In the first installment, Jennifer Ludden reports that more employers are moving away from a traditional, 9 to 5 workday, and finding that "loosening the traditionally rigid work schedule pays off," in increasing their retention rate.  And, she reports, the driving factor comes from younger, single workers as much as it does from workers trying to balance family duty with their jobs:

You may have heard that millennials in the workplace are lazy and "entitled," but [University of Minnesota sociologist Phyllis] Moen says that's a bad rap. She says young workers simply don't want to wait decades until retirement for their quality of life — an attitude that has been reinforced by the recession, as they've seen parents and boomer relatives lose their jobs.

"They no longer believe in the myth that working in rigid ways for long hours necessarily pays off," Moen says. "That's a real change."

Another change is the degree of mobile technology young workers have grown up with.

"This generation is completely untethered. They have laptops in grade school," says Jody Thompson, a co-founder of Culture Rx, a consulting firm that promotes a completely flexible work style. Thompson says young people today are used to getting stuff done — on their laptops, cell phones, iPods — wherever they are, whenever they want.

"Then we bring them into the work environment and we say, 'Here's this 6x6 square you're going to work in, with a desktop computer,' which to them, by the way, is a gaming computer," Thompson says. "'And here's your phone with your cord. You come in at 8 and you leave at 5, and between 10 and noon, that's when we're creative.'"

Thompson says young workers simply can't relate to such a system.

Take a listen to part one of the series:

Update:

Part two is now available online.  The subject: a radical flex work experiment in Minneapolis.  Ludden reports:

Hennepin County is practicing what's called a results-only work environment, or ROWE, which gives everyone in a company the freedom to do their job when and where they want, as long as the work gets done. The state of Minnesota signed a contract for the program last year as part of a campaign to reduce rush hour traffic on 35W in Minneapolis. Nationwide, 3 percent of businesses now say they have a ROWE, though as far as participants here in Hennepin County know, theirs is the first public agency to adopt it. Many are ecstatic at the way it's working so far.

Listen to part two here:

Read more about the series at the Morning Edition page on NPR.org, here.