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It is true that the younger generation thinks differently and works differently than the baby boomers who often hire them into jobs.

But, according to a partner in a major accounting firm with offices in Kamloops and the Okanagan, there are valuable lessons to learn from a mindset that values quality of life over “stuff.”

“The generation below me don’t want to work that hard,” Sue Porter, who was speaking for herself so didn’t want her firm named, told iNFOnews.ca. “I think they’ve got it right. I don’t think I should be working nearly as hard as I do so, from that perspective, I’ve drawn a conscious line in the sand that my mental health is way more important than anywhere I work.”

The reality of a shrinking workforce was evident before the COVID pandemic and had been forecast for decades as the baby boomer generation aged.

That motivated Porter to study what was happening – research that took a major leap forward with COVID.

“When the pandemic happened, I sent all of our team home, which drove one of my partners absolutely crazy because he’s old school and he needed bums in seats,” Porter said. “I kept saying to him: ‘When we’re recruiting these young people, we’re lying to them because we’re telling them we’re flexible in the workplace and you can work from anywhere. We show them pictures of these beaches where you can actually work from as long as they’re available between 8 and 4:30, which are our business hours.' I feel bad every time I recruit someone from TRU.”

Head office made a corporate decision to “walk the walk” of flexibility. But it takes time for those kinds of shifts in mindsets to filter down, she said.

The firm lost a number of employees during the pandemic.

“Young people quit because they didn’t want to work from home or they didn’t have a purpose,” Porter said. “They had to figure out what their purpose was.”

Some quit without having another job to go to, something her baby boomer generation was not likely to have ever done.

READ MORE: Staffing shortage twice as bad at Kamloops hospital versus Kelowna

She cited the example of one young worker who didn’t want to work from home. Within a week he had a job at a bank then, a couple of months later, he took job at the university.

But, when COVID restrictions eased and he was able to work in the office of the accounting firm, he was happy to come back.

“He said: ‘You know, I was glad I went out there and saw that the world isn’t always greener somewhere else. I didn’t realize what I had,’” Porter said.

While her direct experience is with her own firm and her own employees, she talks to a lot of clients who share their experiences.

As she sees it, there are three major groups of young workers.

Like many of her employees, they leave to seek their purpose in life.

Another group she learned about from a healthcare client in Valemount where a number of young people were buying land and living communally and off the grid.

That’s happening near many small B.C. communities, including Armstrong and Enderby, she said.

“They’re like-minded couples,” Porter said. “Some of them have children. Some of them do not. They’re living off the land. They’re being self-sustainable. They don’t have debt. It seems like we’re going back to 100 years ago to how my grandparents lived.”

The other group are those who, especially during COVID, worked in industries where they were vulnerable or worked for crappy bosses so they went back to school and retrained in other fields.

Some were able to collect the federal CERB money. When that ran out, they were able to collect Employment Insurance for a year but that has now run out as well so she’s seeing far more applications now than she has in the past couple of years.

READ MORE: Worst of Thompson-Okanagan worker shortages are behind us: economist

But, whatever “group” they belong to, Porter sees the next generation of having one thing in common.

“We’ve been taught by society how to acquire stuff and reach these lofty goals and then you’ll be happy,” she said. “What about being happy along the way? That’s what the young people have figured out that my generation didn’t know.

“They have dialed into what is the most important thing to them and that’s what they’re keeping at the forefront of their brain. It’s not money. It’s not stuff. It’s not fancy houses and cars. It’s experiences. It’s time with people I love. And the stress is non-existent for them, which is great.”

What this means for employers, is they have to learn to embrace that change in attitudes.

She has workers from foreign countries, for example, whose parents and even spouses live on the other side of the world so they’re awake late into the night in order to keep in touch.

“They don’t always get up and come to work at 8 o’clock in the morning,” Porter said. “They come in around 9 but they’ll work until god knows when so they have that flexibility and they should have that right. I don’t want to be a sweatshop. If anything, their mental health, their well-being and their time with their families should be their major priority.”

She’s also found that the younger generations don’t like to be micromanaged.

“I can give them a task and, if I don’t micromanage them and say this is how you do it and I just let them do it, they will do it faster and better than me because they think differently and that I need to learn from them,” Porter said. “I think we need to work together.”

Employers who can’t find workers, only have themselves to blame, she added.

“If you were a good restaurateur, you got people back,” Porter said. “If you’re not, you should actually look at yourself in the mirror.”

The hard reality is that the baby boomers are retiring and there are not enough babies being born to replace them.

That means immigration and technology will be vital for dealing with the labour shortage.

But so is an understanding of how people think differently than previous generations.

“It’s been interesting for me because I find it fascinating and I wanted to be able to understand because people kept coming to me and saying: ‘How can people just vaporize?’” Porter said. “I don’t think they have.”

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