54% of Millennials claim they want to start a business, or already have one. Millennials also cite work-life balance as the most desirable trait in a career. Either most Millennials don’t know what it takes to start a business, or most Millennials don’t know what it takes to start a business. Something about Entrepreneurship is so romantic to Gen Y that it drives us to desire two (frequently) mutually exclusive dreams. You can read poll after poll, but nobody has yet captured our real workplace preferences.

The reality is the business world doesn’t even have a vocabulary for what Gen Y wants. It feels alien. We are caught in tidal pools—one foot in the water, one fin on land, neither completely at home. The old world is still trying to manage a dichotomy, but the new world has already moved on. For Boomers, work is something that happens at a specific place and a specific time. Learning occurs in a classroom. Studying happens in a library. Working occurs in an office. Generation Y was never constrained in this fashion: learning and studying happens wherever I take my laptop.

Approaching the issue in this context illustrates the preconceived notions we have about the topic; we talk about work lives and private lives like they are two different balls to be juggled. Gen Y quit juggling when Apple crammed the Palm Pilot (remember those!?), the iPod, and the Cell Phone into one chassis (when we were 15 years old). We’ve eaten the forbidden fruit, and it’s changing the way we see the world. When you spend six years at University (thanks for the Associate’s degree, Mom!), you learn which specific work environments are most conducive to your productivity. After all, we are digital natives that have spent more time in school than any other generation.

Managers and gurus believe that we want a balance between our work lives and our private lives. This couldn’t be further from the truth. What we want is integration.

Gen Y is so dependent on technology that we unconsciously look for ways to further leverage our time with it. Telecommuting is the natural conclusion to what new technologies allow us to do. For the digital native, there is no question that it is better than the alternative: 60% of Millennials feel like they have the right to telecommuting and a flexible work schedule. The only thing we wish we had 9 to 5 of are numbers on our paycheck. We want to seamlessly transition between work and play at any time.

This new demand leaves offices managing Millennials in a bind: if flexibility makes Gen Y happy, then how do you ensure that we are completing a satisfactory amount of work during our nonconventional work schedule? Hours worked per week is a powerful indicator of commitment and productivity for older generations, whereas Gen Y views it as an indicator of efficiency (or lack thereof).

And thus is the conflict: task vs. time orientation, or goal vs. grind. Goal-oriented Millennials want to complete tasks at whatever time or location necessary. Grind-oriented Baby Boomers want to fill a time frame with tasks to pursue day after day. The Baby Boomer model harkens to the barriers between our professional and personal lives, before e-mail, cell phones, and laptops snuck our offices into our homes. The new model is an indicator of the freelancing, entrepreneurial Gen Y mindset; if some of my office is in my house, can some of my house be in my office? When can they be the same thing?

The challenge left to managers is finding the best way to organize tasks that ensures high productivity. Many Gen Yers like to have some say in this task list. Or, as my parents would so eloquently demand, “What do YOU think you should do?” This is a useful diagnostic tool for managers: does the employee innately under or over schedule their work load? Do they then consistently meet their own performance goals? The moment that goal-orientation creates a productivity loss is when every Boomer’s nightmare has come true: the Gen Yer lacked the discipline to work from home. There is a fine line between liberation and taking advantage of a lack of supervision.

A company culture that supports flexible scheduling for Gen Y will see the rewards. Like all good employees, strong Millennials generate results when given the tools they need and prefer to accomplish extraordinary things. Some offices report a 30% increase in productivity when using this new technique. Could yours do the same?