Is Gen Z Really Lazy at Work, or Just Done with Burnout Culture?

I was sitting across from a 25-year-old accounts manager who had just been described by her boss as ‘not committed enough.’ She had left work at 5pm to get to her favourite gym class.

When I asked what it was like hearing that, she said something I hadn’t expected. That she was tired. Not physically. Tired of performing commitment in a way that had nothing to do with the quality of her work, and tired of the unspoken rule that staying late meant caring more. She’d watched women fifteen years older than her run themselves into the ground and call it ambition.

As a psychotherapist and advisor for twenty-five years, I have worked with leaders, co-founders and teams. Conversations like this one are happening everywhere right now. Different names, different industries, same dynamics.

One generation looks at the other and thinks: they do not understand. They do not care. They do not want to work hard. The other looks back and thinks: You do not look well. You do not have to do it that way. You don’t value what I bring.

The sad reality is that both are missing the point.

The Lazy Label (and Why It Sticks)

I don’t believe Gen Z is lazy. A 2023 Samsung survey found that half of 16–25-year-olds want to start their own business. Over 80% of Gen Z entrepreneurs describe their ventures as purpose-driven. They are not short of ambition, but they do not believe that destroying yourself for work proves you have any.

But I can understand why this label sticks. I grew up in a world where you showed your worth by showing up early, late and at weekends. The unspoken contract was simple: sacrifice your time, and we will reward you with stability. And for a long time, that contract held.

Gen Z grew up watching that contract break. They watched their parents get made redundant after decades of loyalty, and they have never known a world where a job for life was a realistic promise. When they create their own thinking about their time and energy, they are described as lazy. But they have looked at the deal on offer and decided it is not worth burning out for. That is not a character flaw. It is a survival response.

The Burnout Problem Nobody Wants to Own

What we need to acknowledge is that all generations are exhausted. Gen Z is exhausted by a system that measures commitment in hours rather than impact. Older generations are exhausted by the feeling that the rules have changed, and nobody told them. Society for Human Resource Management research shows that 61% of Gen Z workers would leave a job for one with better mental health support. Deloitte found that only 56% feel comfortable discussing mental health with their managers.

What none of the surveys talk about is that exhaustion is not really about workload or burnout. It is about disconnection.

The Gen X colleague sees someone who will not pick up the phone and thinks they are avoiding real communication. The Gen Z colleague sees someone who insists on a call for something that could be a message and thinks they are wasting time.

The challenge is that both are failing to understand what the other actually needs.

Guess Who Ends Up Bridging the Gap

If you are a woman reading this, you already know the answer.

Research published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2024 confirmed what most of us have known: women carry a disproportionate share of the invisible cognitive labour, the remembering, the anticipating, the smoothing over. At home, yes, but at work too. Women are more likely to be the ones translating across generational lines. Softening the feedback that came out too bluntly from the Gen X director. Explaining to the senior partner why the new starter is not being difficult. Doing the relational labour that keeps the team functional while still being expected to deliver on their actual role.

McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research has consistently shown that women in leadership invest more in supporting their teams’ wellbeing than men do. That work matters. It is also unpaid, unmeasured, and very rarely mentioned in a performance review.

I see this in my work constantly. Women who are exhausted not by the work itself but by the weight of making the relationships around the work function. And when they burn out, nobody connects it to the relational load they have been carrying. They just get told to be more resilient.

What Is Actually Going On

There is a term I keep coming back to in my work: relational poverty. It is what happens when the connections between people thin to the point where they can still function together, but they cannot actually relate. They can exchange information, but they cannot be honest. They can sit in the same meeting but not feel safe enough to say what needs to be said.

Gallup puts the global cost of disengagement at $8.9 trillion. But behind that number is something simpler. People go to work every day and feel alone in a room full of people. Not because anyone is intentionally being cruel. Because the quality of how people relate has eroded to the point where genuine connection feels like too much effort.

Gen Z did not create this. They inherited it. And they are the first generation to say out loud what others have been tolerating quietly for years: the way we are with each other while we do the work is not working.

Gen Z is not lazy. They are relationally different. Shaped by a world that trained their expectations in ways previous generations do not fully understand.

The question is not whether they are tough enough for the workplace. It is whether the workplace has the capacity to hold what they are bringing. Whether we can stop turning generational difference into a hierarchy of who is doing it right.

Because we need both the innovation and the resilience. We just have to stop blaming each other long enough to figure out how to relate and reconnect.