MY GEN Z TEAM KEEP BEING SIGNED OFF FOR STRESS – BUT OUR WORK ISN’T STRESSFUL

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I’ve hit a crisis point with the team I manage and I can’t help but feel incredibly frustrated. Although they span all ages, problems keep cropping up with the Gen Z cohort; three of them have taken multiple stress leaves in quite quick succession.

I’ve noticed that if they are asked to juggle multiple projects they get overwhelmed, and really don’t seem to thrive under any pressure – which is part of the job description. 

I could be wrong but I don’t think the work is particularly stressful; our workloads are project-managed effectively, and we all work collaboratively as a team, and this just doesn’t seem to be an issue for staff who are in their thirties and forties. 

Also, we sometimes go for drinks after work and the Gen Z employees always opt out (which is totally fine), but in the office they also aren’t keen on being social or chatting – they isolate themselves, even from each other.

I just get the feeling they seem frailer than most, and I can’t keep running a ghost team like this – what can I do or say?

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With a corporate career spanning sales, marketing, recruitment and people development, Isobelle Panton is now best known for her Corporate Agony Aunt Instagram and TikTok pages, where she has over 120,000 combined followers tuning in for her no-nonsense careers advice. Isobelle describes herself as “everyone’s big sister in business” and “the mentor most companies don’t provide”, having built a reputation for cutting through the noise with honest, practical, and sometimes uncomfortable truths. She’s on a mission to make career progression more accessible, relatable, and attainable. 

You might recall your twenties being a carefree time, but the fact is, 40 per cent of Gen Z today say they feel stressed all or most of the time, according to a global study by Deloitte – with a third of those saying their jobs contribute highly to their stress levels.

Rather than work continuing to be a source of stress for your younger team members, and simply demanding they magically be more resilient, let’s try and understand what their experience feels like – it’s likely to be different from yours.

Be the manager your team needs

My advice to people who are feeling frustrated with their team, is to recognise how that feeling that you hold, is almost definitely reciprocated by the team. So it’s important to disarm that, to try and better empathise with the people around you. No one wants to be signed off with stress. No one wants to turn up to work and do badly. That isn’t anyone’s agenda, regardless of age. If someone is fundamentally feeling under a lot of pressure, then those feelings are valid.

You have to consider that your ways of working may need to change into something that meets in the middle, rather than wanting your team to fit the mould of what’s gone before. This will come from being proactive and understanding how they would like to work, how they would like to be better managed, and what a positive equilibrium would look like in terms of projects versus stress.

It’s important to also actually quantify what the sources of pressure and stress are for them – and the difference between good and bad pressure. I know you say you don’t find the environment particularly stressful, but remember, you are someone with significantly more work experience, so it’s important not to put our own labels of stress onto other people.

Pressure where the whole team is pulling towards a deadline is good pressure. Pressure because the team is understaffed and expected to over deliver is bad pressure. That’s the fault of the company and its culture, not the individual.

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Great managers can’t outrun a bad culture, but they can still be pillars of light for their team. If you can’t change the whole company culture, and you can only influence the day to day satisfaction – and therefore performance of your team – just focus on that.

Conduct a team audit

Something that I do with all of my teams is, I sit down with them as a group, holding a no-judgment space where everyone gets to speak. I ask them what their non-negotiables are. What do they love about their jobs, and their company? If we could wave a magic wand and fix some things right now, what would we fix? We do an exhaustive list.

I ascertain which are just a little bugbear and which are actually really important to employee engagement and therefore productivity. We also ascertain the things that shouldn’t be changed because they work, and lean into things that need redefining, reprioritising, and reworking.

I then pick three things that I pledge I will fix, and they pick the three that they pledge to commit to. Rather than over promising and underdelivering, we focus on just three. If you can fix the majority of the part of the team that’s broken, all the other things seem so insignificant.

Every month thereafter, I sit down with them and I ask them, on a scale of one to 10, how happy are you at home at the moment? On a scale of one to 10, how happy are you at work at the moment? Admittedly, some people can find that a bit controversial and invasive. In my experience, if people say they are a nine out of 10 at home every single week, and then the next week, they say that they are three; whether they want to talk about it or not, I know that they need an arm around them, or they need distance, and possibly help with their workload, too.

Corporate life has to become more emotionally connected, so what you’ll find is the more you take a sincere interest in your Gen Z team members’ personal lives, the more you will get out of them. They will know that you’re invested in them, personally and professionally.

Update your social policy

You mention your younger colleagues, while stressed, are not keen to unwind with you over a drink in the pub. But – Gen Z are increasingly rejecting alcohol, with stats from Mintel highlighting that a third of Brits aged 18 to 24 don’t drink at all. Our workplace socials have to then reflect that change – I’m a big advocate of events that are representative of diverse audiences. Again, we can’t just be retrofitting what we used to do, to the talent that we’ve got today.

Why not ask the team what social events they would actually attend, rather than just saying: “We’ve put drinks on – why aren’t you there?” I used to say to my team: “We’ve got X amount of budget this month. What do you want to do?”

Some months we had no budget, so we’d get a coffee and go for a walk in the park. Those were often our best socials, as opposed to a big drunken night out. We have to change to an opt-in approach that’s more representative – of our religious colleagues, our sober colleagues, our colleagues that are parents. People might think that’s a woke take. But if you want to retain top talent, then you have to do it.

I’d also urge you to try and remember what it was like when you were in your twenties and just starting out. I remember crying my eyes out in the toilets at work when I was 21, and I have always been considered as a high performer, so God knows how the people around me were feeling.

The best role you could play is to be the most progressive pioneer within your organisation, to show, regardless of the stereotypes people have of Gen Z, how you nurtured this talent. Rather than feel like you’re struggling to cope with your younger team members – think about how you are empowering them.

As told to MaryLou Costa

2025-03-24T12:39:21Z