To be utterly fed up of what UK workplace culture has become?

[ExpectationManagementCharm]

I'm a middle manager in a large UK firm. I am not a new manager; and I'm not young, late 30s. I am generally perceived to be at the "laid back"/supportive end of the management spectrum (but I'll fight tooth and nail for one of my team if I think they're being asked unreasonable stuff/being treated unfairly).
However, I'm tearing my hair out at being at the "crunch point" of upper level expectations to get on and deliver stuff vs. how my more junior employees expect to work these days. I'm so exhausted and getting no support from anyone. I can no longer see if it's just my workplace or the norm.

Example1: Junior staff expecting to not dial into team meetings beacuse of trivial reasons - some of which are downright unprofessional (i have my weekly run with a PT booked then- but this is within normal work office hours e.g. 2pm on a Thursday). While my HR policy states that I need to be "flexible" for personal reasons, which means I then need to follow up separately with that person each time. Result - less work for employee, HR is happy, senior management say no problem, more work for me.

Example 2: Junior staff (especially our newly graduated colleagues) expecting to be able to get out of (reasonable) work deadlines by using the word "anxiety" all the time. "I couldn't deliver a client item/I was feeling anxious" (meaning I had to pull an all nighter to get it finished to meet our deadline). I try and escalate to HR - but I need to be "understanding". Result - employee's piss poor performance slides, HR are happy, senior management say no problem (because client delivery didn't suffer), I get to work an all nighter to cover the gap.

These are multiple examples, across lots of team members over the last ~ 5 years, but it's definitely got worse over the last year or so. The concept of "my word is my oath"/reliablility seems to have completely gone out of the window.

Yet my employer's HR team just turn it back on me as a team manager to manage, leading to more work, which means I just have another thing to do.

I'm currently pursuing performance improvement plans with 2 of my team at the moment, whose hiring i was not involved in, and i'm going mad trying to fit in what HR expect (to follow the process) alongside juggling my own actual workload. I'm not just a people manager, yet HR seem to think i have free time to spend doing delicate, intensive people management activity, despite my already crushing workload.

Does anyone else recongnise this or is it time to look for a new employer?

FWIW, i love my team (in general) but the recent piss taking has really taken its toll - I feel like no one at work has my back at all.

This is why I'm glad to be a project manager - no direct line management responsibilities but paid and respected as a manager - just of projects not people.

That being said I do have a weekly PT 2-3 and it's blocked out in my calendar as non bookable time. I don't take the piss though, and my company are very flexible and support work/life balance. The whole crying MH is poor because companies want to be supportive when it's genuine, but now it seems like a get out of jail free card and something lazy people can use for an easy life, especially when they WFH and just want to mope around on Netflix!

I read PT as personal trainer session, not as physiotherapy. Quite different, really.

I’m going to apologise OP. As a university faculty member I admit that we are fully contributing to your problem of entitled new graduates. It is our fault. Possibly the fault of parents too. However, there is no corrective at Uni, which ought to be the transition time to adulthood.

I can’t even really blame our SLT… this govt and the Office for Students (and bloody rankings like The Guardians NSS) want students to think of their education as a product to be consumed. To put pressure on university leadership to actively seek good student rankings, to appease, to constantly ask via ‘student voice’ what do you want?

Students learn they have the power.

By osmosis they gladly and unconsciously accept that responsibility for their performance is on bad teaching etc, nothing to do with their efforts. They email with comments such as "I look FORWARD to having my assignment REMARKED at the EARLIEST opportunity". Or tell me that x seminar is inconvenient because it clashes with their polo playing. Not all. Of course many are eager and hard working. But that’s not the lesson we’re teaching.

I was too friendly with a young team (and one my age, who was worse!) I was managing recently. It was my usual style, but I found out from that particular job that it just doesn’t work anymore. Things are different now.

In my day, I did what I was told in work. Didn’t question my manager. This lot nearly drove me over edge with their demands / expectations. Doing the actual work seemed beside the point, for them!

I do think employers struggling with the snowflake generation should pay more attention to offering returnships to mums who’ve been out of work for 5 yrs but previously held demanding jobs. Mums know all about doing hard work when it needs to be done and not when you feel like it.

(Can you imagine “My baby just vomited everywhere again and their nappy’s exploding but I’m feeling anxious right now so I’m going to shrug and go for a jog and hope someone else deals with it”)

Agree with all of this. Also expect me to be more like their mother/personal coach than a boss.

I had someone burst into tears when I advised her that some insurance policy documents I had been sent had serious errors and that I was surprised they hadn't been checked before issue. Re-sent, still wrong. Such incompetent staff who are lacking in integrity and moral fibre are infuriating for you; even more so for clients.

A new graduate employee wanted to raise a full grievance about their boss for bullying - because they'd massively failed to meet their targets for several months in a row and the manager was (completely correctly & as per policy) discussing a performance plan.

Another was unhappy they had to phone in sick themselves and not get their mum to do it.

Again, not all are like this. Others are bloody hard workers, great team members and motivated. Even they're exasperated at the Entitled Ones.

Well this is why when I was a trainee solicitor I didn’t see a dentist or GP for ten years. I was expected to be at work. Not saying that is ideal either, but sloping off in the middle of a working day to see a dentist/GP would have been unthinkable to both me and my employer.

Plus aince then GPs have started offering telephone and zoom appointments and walk in climics at stations have been created so it’s much easier now

The problem is here is that you are a manager who doesn't really want to manage. Managing a team means managing performance and behaviours in the team as much as it means managing delivery. It's just not a matter of giving people a to-do list and signing off their sick leave - you do need to spend time on things like performance and development and the work culture within your team. That's what a manager is for. It's not HR's job to manage your team for you - they can set company policies and advise on processes, but they aren't responsible for managing your team.

I work for an organisation that has a hybrid working arrangement, so we mostly divide our working time 60-40 or 80-20 between home and the office. We also have a flexible working policy. But that doesn't mean people are allowed to slack off from dialling into meetings because they've got a PT session planned! I've certainly gone for a run or gone to get my haircut during the working day before, but not at the expense of attending meetings or getting my job done - instead, if I was going for a run at 3pm I'd maybe treat that as a break and work over lunch instead, or I'd start work at 7am and finish at 3pm, or I'd go out at three and then do a bit more work in the evening. And for things like regular childcare, it should be discussed in advance and then clearly marked in the team member's calendar so people know not to book meetings with them during that time in the first place (my boss takes 3pm-4pm off most days for the school run, for example, and makes up the time by starting early, and it's clear from his calendar that he can't make meetings at that time).

Sorry Op other posters are right. PT in the middle of the working day? so no, and schedule a follow up performance chat. Ask the usual "is everything ok at home, why can't you exercise outside working hours?" Question but be clear it never happens again. If it does, it's a formal performance management for skipping essential calls.

Re: anxiety, tread carefully but expect GP evidence for absences from major workloads. Let them fail. Sack them if they keep failing. They'll get the message

I remember after an all nighter (following an almost all nighter) my line manager pulled me in and I expected her to say "why dont you go home for a few hours while we wait for the lawyers to turn the contracts round?" but instead she said " M&S opens at 8. you can put a change of clothes through expenses" It's like a Gen Z horror story.

There are two uses of the word anxiety. In the absence of a clinical diagnosis of anxiety as a debilitating health condition, your junior employees need to understand that this is not an excuse. They either manage their time well or they feel stress as the deadline approaches. Stress and anxiety are normal healthy emotional responses most of the time. If they don't want to experience them then they need to manage their time more effectively. If the expectations of what can be achieved in the time allocated are too much then you need to tell your bosses that the deadline needs to be delayed. Continually doing other people's work for them is not the answer.

Me too. Medical stuff, absolutely ok but they are one off.

I used to be a teacher. How l would have loved to timetable one a meeting with my PT rather than face Y9 last thing on Thursday.

He’s seriously taking the piss.

Not really if the workplace has flexible working policies.

I often break for an hour or two a day to go for a run/gym/meet up with friends who are only not busy in the week etc.

Sounds like an annoying situation for you.

HR doesn’t report to you and you don’t report to HR. If you and your team don’t have the resources to get a task done, that’s a conversation to have with your manager.

If your business does not have core hours, they’re selling that flexibility to employees as a perk. Surely employees should be able to exercise that perk if that’s the expectation from the business and the employee? I’m sure the business is trying to pay people less money or to get better people as a result. Perhaps the business expects individual teams to define core hours though?

Whenever I read about Gen Z employees supposedly taking the piss I just think, I wish I'd had their boundaries, their awareness of work/life balance, their awareness that their employer is not their friend and their vocabulary to articulate their needs at their age. More power to anyone prioritising their mental and physical health in the one life they have to live.

Laughable comment

You need to check in far more frequently with your team.

At the start of each project you need to set out a timetable with steps along the way and dates at which sections of the project will be completed. Your team clearly needs this sort of spoonfeeding.

The check ins need to feature actual work submitted and reviewed, and a hefty verbal component.

And I'm also glad that even though I'm at least one generation removed from Gen Z, I work for a company that gives me the flexibility to exercise during core hours and where I'm not afraid to say I'm anxious and struggling if that's the case.

I guess the issue then is what if everyone has different times they're not available so you can't actually schedule a team meeting? It makes sense to have blocks of core hours where everyone has to be available. Also, approaching critical deadlines, flexibility works both ways.

Agree with @Workbabysleeprepeat

They need to show proof of any medical conditions they claim and follow procedures when requesting allowances for said condition.

I work in an operation with over 200 staff on each shift. We have decided not to take any more Zoomer graduates on. We only have a handful left, thankfully. New graduates back in the 1990s and early 2000s were fantastic people - confident, great attitude to life, solid work ethic, lovely, inspiring people to be around and really bright, open-minded and intelligent with lots of skills. They were special people and were accordingly very well paid and looked after.
Not any more. They are now joyless, entitled, lazy, vain and they are hopeless workers, get very upset if they have to think on their feet, always declare they have something permanently wrong with them and are constantly clinging to their mobile phones. There is also an awful lot of crying - something which we never saw in the past unless a tragedy had happened. They all have the same world view which seems to have been instilled into them, which is very creepy.

No-one's got time for that bullshit in the real world and no-one wants to work with people like that.

Most update their calendars, this has been a thing in every workplace I’ve been in for the past 10 years.

Never caused an issue regarding arranging team meetings

Some of the posters on here seem to be stuck in the working policies of the 1980’s