You can call them impatient, demanding and entitled, but if you don't offer incentives to retain young workers, someone else will.

Leslie Kwoh at The Wall Street Journal reports that more companies are "jumping through hoops to accommodate [Gen Y's] demands for faster promotions, greater responsibilities and more flexible work schedules."

Why?

Because Gen Y workers will outnumber any other generation within a few years. By 2020, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that Millennials — those born roughly in the 1980s and 1990s — will make up 40 percent of the workforce.

The bottom line is that baby boomers are retiring, and millennials will be working for the next several decades. Furthermore, they have the skills needed in the future workplace — tech-savviness and the ability to innovate — and they're more racially diverse than any generation before, which means they'll be able to relate to different customs and cultures more quickly.