Manager engagement fell five points in a single year, from 27 percent to 22, according to Gallup's 2026 report. Engagement across the whole workforce fell one. Gallup's global figures usually move slowly, and this year the headline barely did. The gap that opened between managers and everyone else is the story.
Managers fell five points while the workforce fell one
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report draws on the Gallup World Poll, with fieldwork across the 2025 calendar year, 263,810 respondents of whom 141,444 were employed, across more than 140 countries and territories.
| Measure | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Global employee engagement | 21 % | 20 % |
| Manager engagement | 27 % | 22 % |
| Employees thriving in life overall | 33 % | 34 % |
Overall engagement fell by one point. It was the second consecutive annual decline, and a movement that size is barely distinguishable from noise. Manager engagement fell by five. Against 2022, when it stood at 31 percent, managers are down nine points.
Wellbeing went the other way. The share of employees thriving in life overall ticked up. So this is no general souring of everything measured. The fall is specific to one layer.
Managers carry most of the variance in team engagement
Gallup's longstanding estimate is that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. The wording is careful and it usually gets restated more loosely. It is an estimate. It concerns variance across business units. The outcome it explains is engagement.
Taken at face value, it makes the manager figure a leading indicator of the headline. The manager number moved five points last year and the overall number moved one. If the relationship holds even weakly, the second is where the first goes next.
The number matters for a second reason. It measures the people who deliver every other people initiative. Engagement surveys, development programmes, performance processes and change communication all reach an organisation through line managers. A population at 22 percent engagement is the delivery mechanism for everything else the function is trying to do.
The role has grown in ways the survey cannot test
Gallup's data measures; it does not explain, and the report does not establish causes. The shape of the decline is consistent with a set of changes to the job that are well documented elsewhere and that compound.
The span widened. Successive rounds of delayering have removed management layers while keeping the same number of people to manage. The remaining managers get more direct reports each.
The coordination load rose. Hybrid working moved a large share of team coordination from ambient and incidental to explicit and scheduled. Knowing how someone is doing used to be a by-product of sitting near them. It is now a calendar entry.
The role kept its individual contribution. In most organisations a first-line manager still carries a personal workload alongside the management responsibility, and the management part is the part with no deadline attached.
Their own managers are also at 22 percent. Whatever is happening at the first line is happening a level up too, which removes the support the role depends on.
The Gallup data establishes none of these as a cause. All of them fit a decline concentrated in one layer while the population around it holds roughly steady.
Training changes behaviour most at the junior level
One piece of evidence points somewhere useful, and it comes from the training literature, not the engagement data.
The 2017 meta-analysis of leadership training, pooling 335 independent samples, tested whether the seniority of participants moderated outcomes. Programmes delivered to low-level leaders produced significantly stronger transfer, meaning behaviour change back at work, than programmes delivered to middle-level or high-level leaders. On learning there were no significant differences by level.
So the layer under the most pressure is also the layer where development has the strongest measured effect on what people do. Most leadership budgets are distributed the other way. They concentrate spend at the top, where the cost per participant is highest and the measured transfer is weakest.
Training programs provided to a sample of low-level leaders were associated with significantly stronger transfer effect sizes than those provided to high-level leaders or middle-level leaders.
The usable comparison is between units in one firm
Gallup puts the cost of low engagement at approximately 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, or 9 percent of global GDP. That is a modelled figure at a scale where the error bars are as large as most national economies. It is an order-of-magnitude statement, not an accounting one.
The local version of the point can be measured. If managers explain most of the variance in team engagement across business units, then an organisation's spread of manager engagement predicts its spread of team engagement. A single company can check that with data it already holds, by comparing its own units with each other. The global average adds little to that.
Whether manager quality drives people out of the door is a separate and more contested claim, examined in whether people leave managers or companies. What happens to managers themselves in the first two years of the role is in what makes the first management job so hard.
What the survey cannot say is which of the four changes to the role is doing the damage. Wider spans, heavier coordination, a retained personal workload and a disengaged layer above would each produce this pattern. Gallup's data cannot separate them.
Common questions
What is the current global employee engagement rate? 20 percent in 2025, down from 21 percent in 2024, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report.
How engaged are managers? 22 percent in 2025, down from 27 percent in 2024 and from 31 percent in 2022. Managers are declining considerably faster than the overall workforce.
Do managers really account for 70 percent of engagement? Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. That is an estimate about variance between units, not a claim that a manager causes 70 percent of an individual's engagement.
How is Gallup's engagement figure measured? Through the Gallup World Poll, with fieldwork across the 2025 calendar year, 263,810 respondents of whom 141,444 were employed, in more than 140 countries and territories.
Is employee wellbeing falling too? No. The share of employees thriving in life overall rose from 33 to 34 percent in the same period, which is why the manager decline reads as specific rather than general.
Where does leadership development have the strongest effect? At the junior end. A meta-analysis of 335 samples found significantly stronger behaviour change for programmes delivered to low-level leaders than to middle or senior leaders, with no difference in how much they learned.
What is the estimated cost of low engagement? Gallup puts it at approximately 10 trillion US dollars in lost productivity, or 9 percent of global GDP. It is a modelled estimate at global scale and should be read as an order of magnitude.
