Gallup's global engagement figures usually move slowly. The interesting number in the 2026 edition is not the headline, which barely moved. It is the gap that has opened between managers and everyone else.
The numbers
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, the second consecutive annual decline and the sort of movement that is barely distinguishable from noise. Manager engagement fell by five. Against 2022, when it stood at 31 percent, managers are down nine points.
Wellbeing, meanwhile, went the other way: the share of employees thriving in life overall ticked up. So this is not a general souring of everything measured. It is specific to one layer.
Why the manager number is the one to watch
Gallup's own longstanding estimate is that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. The phrasing is careful and it is worth quoting precisely, because it is usually restated more loosely: it is an estimate, it concerns variance across business units, and 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.
There is a second reason the number matters, which is that it is a measure of the people who deliver every other people initiative. Engagement surveys, development programmes, performance processes and change communication all arrive in an organisation through line managers. A population at 22 percent engagement is the delivery mechanism for everything else the function is trying to do.
What is actually happening to the role
Gallup's data is a measurement rather than an explanation, and the report does not establish causes. But 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, which arrives on the remaining managers as 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.
None of these is established by the Gallup data as a cause. All of them are consistent with a decline concentrated in one layer while the population around it holds roughly steady.
The one encouraging finding
There is a piece of evidence that points in a useful direction, and it comes from the training literature rather than from the engagement data.
The 2017 meta-analysis of leadership training, pooling 335 independent samples, tested whether the seniority of participants moderated outcomes. It found that programmes delivered to low-level leaders produced significantly stronger transfer, meaning behaviour change back at work, than programmes delivered to either 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 actually do. That is a fortunate coincidence and it is the opposite of how most leadership budgets are distributed, which 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.
What a five-point fall costs
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, and it should be treated as an order-of-magnitude statement rather than an accounting one.
The more usable version of the same point is local. If managers explain most of the variance in team engagement across business units, then an organisation's distribution of manager engagement predicts its distribution of team engagement, and that is measurable inside a single company with data it already has. The comparison worth running is not against the global average. It is between the units in the same firm.
Whether manager quality drives people out of the door is a separate and more contested claim, and it is examined in what the evidence says about leaving managers rather than companies. What is happening to managers themselves in the first two years of the role is in what makes the first management job so hard.
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.
