Ethical to go on stress leave for remainder of notice period?
I work a very busy IT support job in the UK. Recently handed in my notice in due to a lack of proper pay rises in two years despite there being tons of work to do all the time.
I have to work this week and next week before my notice period is over.
It's extremely stressful. Every day it's constantly busy, there's always too much to do, constant task switching, it's hard to think straight.
I feel pretty wrecked by the work, completely drains the life out of me. Constantly feels like I'm fighting to keep my head above water with the insane ticket volume. I barely have the energy to do anything in the evenings. I'm really dreading tomorrow as it looks like I'll have even more to do than I had today, and God knows what else I'll have been assigned on top of that when I log in.
Coasting for the remaining days isn't really an option as we just get assigned tickets and have to complete them. We can escalate stuff but need to work on it for a certain amount of time first. I can't really just let things pile up and ignore the customers chasing me, it'd get out of hand really quickly.
Luckily I'm able to afford taking a break for a while after this job to recover from burnout and think about next steps. I don't know if I'd do another IT job, maybe it's worth trying another one but right now I can't even read IT job descriptions without feeling some dread.
On the one hand, the company should hire more staff. It doesn't need to be this chaotic and busy, it's a by-product of their greed.
On the other hand, I don't want to make things even busier for the others on my team, who are all really nice people.
I don't know if the company is going to replace me when I've left, but I know that they haven't been replacing leavers in the last year or two, so probably not.
I really don't want to do this job anymore but I'm torn about taking sick leave and making things harder for others on the team.