Tag: employee engagement

About the paper

The paper examines employee engagement, wellbeing, daily emotions, job-market sentiment and the human side of AI adoption, arguing that management quality is a decisive factor in whether AI translates into organisational value.

It is an original survey-based research report built primarily on Gallup World Poll data, supplemented by additional random U.S. workforce web samples; the report draws on 263,810 respondents in 2025, including 141,444 employed adults, and on a full 2009–2025 trend base of 5,754,327 respondents, covering more than 160 countries and areas worldwide.

Length: 251 pages

More information / download:
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

Core Insights

1. What is the report’s central argument about the global workplace in 2026?

The report’s central argument is that the workplace challenge is not simply technological change, but whether organisations are managed well enough to convert change into performance. Gallup explicitly frames the report around “the human side of the AI revolution” and says the manager is the strongest predictor of employee AI adoption apart from technical integration. In other words, the report treats management effectiveness, employee engagement and organisational readiness as the real bottlenecks in turning AI into measurable gains.

That argument rests on a broader point: workplaces are entering the AI era while employee engagement is weakening rather than strengthening. Global engagement fell again in 2025, to 20%, its lowest level since 2020, and Gallup argues this matters because engagement is a practical indicator of readiness for disruption and change. Low engagement, in this framing, is not just a morale issue but an economic and strategic one.

2. What are the report’s most important global findings on engagement, wellbeing, emotions and the job market?

The most striking headline is that global employee engagement declined for a second consecutive year, falling to 20% in 2025 from a 2022 peak of 23%. At the same time, 64% of employees are classified as not engaged and 16% as actively disengaged. Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the global economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP.

By contrast, wellbeing improved slightly. Global thriving rose from 33% to 34% in 2025, the first improvement in three years. But that modest recovery sits alongside persistently high negative emotions: 40% reported stress, 22% anger, 23% sadness and 22% loneliness. The report makes clear that these emotional burdens remain above pre-pandemic levels, suggesting that the workplace has not returned to its earlier psychological baseline.

Job-market sentiment also improved, but only slightly. Globally, 52% of employees said it was a good time to find a job, up one point from the previous year, though still below the 2019 peak. So the overall picture is mixed: modest improvement in wellbeing and job confidence, but continued weakness in engagement and continued elevation in emotional strain.

3. Why does Gallup place so much emphasis on managers?

Gallup’s answer is that the recent global deterioration in engagement is largely a management story. The report says lower engagement among managers accounts for most of the recent downturn, and manager engagement has dropped by nine points since 2022. On the chart on page 7, managers fall from 31% engaged in 2022 to 22% in 2025, while non-managers move only marginally, from 20% to 19%. That is a significant loss of what Gallup calls the former “engagement premium” of being a manager.

The report also argues that managers are pivotal to meaningful AI adoption. In Gallup’s Q1 2026 U.S. workforce survey, the top two drivers of frequent AI use are integration with existing systems and manager-led adoption. Employees in AI-investing organisations who strongly agree that their manager actively supports AI are 98.7 times as likely to strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done, and 97.4 times as likely to strongly agree that AI gives them more opportunities to do what they do best every day.

Gallup’s perspective is therefore not that AI will bypass human leadership, but almost the reverse: the better the management layer, the more likely AI is to become valuable. The report even suggests AI could improve global engagement if it helps managers apply stronger people-management practices more consistently.

4. What patterns does the report reveal across regions, and what do they imply?

The regional data show a world that is far from uniform. On engagement, the United States and Canada rank first at 31%, followed closely by Latin America and the Caribbean at 30%, while Europe ranks last at just 12%. That makes Europe the lowest-engagement region globally despite relatively strong life evaluation and job-climate scores. This suggests that a region can look comparatively strong on broader life outlook without generating much attachment to work itself.

On wellbeing, Latin America and the Caribbean lead at 56% thriving, closely followed by Australia and New Zealand at 55%, whereas South Asia is lowest at 16%. On job climate, Southeast Asia leads at 64%, while the Middle East and North Africa is lowest at 36%. The United States and Canada stand out for a sharp deterioration in job confidence, dropping 10 points year on year to 47%, making the region second-to-last on that measure.

Emotionally, the picture is equally uneven. South Asia has the highest anger and sadness, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia the highest loneliness, while Post-Soviet Eurasia records the lowest stress. The report’s implication is that there is no single global workplace condition. Instead, different regions combine engagement, wellbeing, stress and job optimism in distinct ways, which matters for both management practice and interpretation.

5. What does the report suggest about AI, jobs and the future of work?

Gallup presents AI as a force that is already boosting individual productivity for many workers but has not yet reliably produced organisation-level gains. The report notes that in U.S. organisations that have implemented AI, 65% of workers say AI has had a somewhat or extremely positive effect on their productivity, yet only 12% strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done in their organisation. This gap between personal efficiency and institutional transformation is one of the report’s core tensions.

The report also shows rising concern about AI-related job loss. In Q1 2026, 18% of U.S. employees said it was somewhat or very likely their job would be eliminated within five years because of technological innovation, rising to 23% in organisations where AI had been implemented. In finance, insurance and technology, the figures are higher still. At the same time, Gallup says the employment effects are not uniformly negative: larger AI-implementing employers are more likely to be reducing headcount, while smaller ones are more likely to be expanding.

The broader conclusion is that AI is reconfiguring work, but outcomes depend heavily on context, especially leadership, workforce choice and upskilling. Gallup repeatedly links optimism and wellbeing to employees feeling they have choices in the work they do. So the report’s future-of-work message is not deterministic. AI may intensify pressure, flatten structures and increase job anxiety, but it may also improve management and expand capability, depending on how organisations lead the transition.

About the paper

The report synthesises Gallup’s annual global employee-experience research, combining Gallup World Poll data with additional random samples of working populations in the United States and an opt-in web component for China.

It is an original quantitative research report based on surveys of employed adults aged 15+; the 2024 findings draw on 227,347 employed respondents collected from April to December 2024, within a wider 2009–2024 trend dataset of 5,490,517 respondents across more than 160 countries and areas.

Methodological details are clearly stated, though some country results are suppressed where sample sizes are too small.

Length: 141 pages

More information / download:
https://www.gallup.com/file/workplace/659528/state-of-the-global-workplace-2025-download.pdf

Core Insights

1) What is the central argument of the report about the state of the global workplace in 2025?

Gallup’s central argument is that the global workplace is at a critical moment: employee engagement and wellbeing have deteriorated just as organisations are entering a period of major transformation driven by AI and broader workplace disruption. The report frames this as a leadership challenge rather than a purely economic or technological one. Leaders must decide whether to use this moment to strengthen management, reconnect teams and improve performance, or risk further decline.

The report’s headline evidence is stark. Global employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% in 2024, only the second decline in the past 12 years and equal in size to the fall recorded during the year of COVID-19 lockdowns. Gallup estimates that this drop cost the global economy US$438 billion in lost productivity. At the same time, global life evaluation among employees fell to 33%, suggesting that workers’ overall sense of wellbeing has weakened as well.

So the report is not merely saying that people feel a bit less positive about work. It is arguing that the workplace is becoming more fragile at exactly the point when organisations need resilience, adaptability and trust.

2) What does the report identify as the main driver of declining engagement and wellbeing?

Gallup is unusually direct: the main driver is managers. The report says manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, while individual contributor engagement stayed flat at 18%. No other major worker category saw as large a decline. Young managers under 35 saw a five-point drop in engagement, and female managers saw a seven-point drop.

The same pattern appears in wellbeing. Older managers saw a five-point decline in wellbeing, while female managers again recorded a seven-point drop. Individual contributors, by contrast, improved slightly on life evaluation. Gallup therefore presents managers as the pressure point where workplace strain is showing up first and most intensely.

The report links this to the accumulation of post-pandemic disruption: retirements and turnover, the hiring boom and bust, rapidly restructured teams, tighter budgets, supply chain issues, changing customer expectations, digital transformation, AI tools, and new employee expectations around flexibility and remote work. Managers sit in the middle of all of that. In Gallup’s telling, they have become the human shock absorbers of organisational change.

3) Why does manager engagement matter so much for organisational and economic performance?

Gallup’s answer is that managers are the single biggest determinant of team engagement. The report states that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager. That means problems at management level do not stay there. They cascade downward into team morale, effort, productivity and retention.

The report stresses that engaged employees are more productive, less absent, better at building customer relationships and more effective at generating results. It also notes that countries with less engaged managers tend to have less engaged individual contributors. So this is not just an internal HR issue. Gallup connects manager disengagement to broader business performance and even GDP growth.

That is why the report repeatedly warns that if manager engagement keeps falling, the damage will not stop with managers and will not stop with engagement. Gallup presents manager burnout as a leading indicator of wider organisational decline: poorer performance, more absenteeism, more turnover, weaker team cultures and reduced economic output.

4) What do the global and regional data reveal about the current pattern of employee experience?

At global level, the picture is mixed but troubling. In 2024, 21% of employees were engaged, 62% not engaged and 17% actively disengaged. Only 33% were classified as thriving in life overall, while 40% reported daily stress, 23% daily sadness and 22% daily loneliness. Half of workers were watching for or actively seeking a new job.

The regional pattern is highly uneven. On engagement, the highest regional levels were in the United States/Canada and Latin America/Caribbean, both at 31%, while Europe ranked last at 13%. On thriving, Australia/New Zealand led at 56%, followed by Latin America/Caribbean at 54% and the United States/Canada at 52%, while South Asia ranked lowest at 15%. Europe is notable for combining relatively high life evaluation with the lowest engagement, suggesting that people may feel comparatively well in life while still feeling detached from work.

The emotional pattern is also revealing. Stress is especially high in the United States/Canada, Australia/New Zealand, East Asia and the Middle East/North Africa. Loneliness is highest in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, while anger and sadness are most elevated in South Asia and parts of the Middle East/North Africa. Meanwhile, Europe has the lowest regional engagement but also among the lowest levels of anger and loneliness. This suggests that disengagement is not always accompanied by emotional volatility; in some regions it may look more like resignation or detachment.

Another notable point is the work-location breakdown. Globally, exclusively remote employees show the highest engagement at 31%, compared with 23% for hybrid workers and 19% for on-site non-remote-capable workers. Hybrid and on-site remote-capable workers have the highest thriving scores at 42%, while fully remote workers report the highest loneliness, sadness and stress. So the report hints that flexibility may boost engagement and wellbeing in some respects, but also carries emotional trade-offs.

5) What actions does Gallup recommend leaders take in response?

Gallup’s prescription is focused almost entirely on rebuilding management capability. The report lays out three actions.

First, ensure all managers receive training. Fewer than half of the world’s managers, 44%, say they have received management training. Gallup argues this is the most achievable intervention and says managers who receive training are half as likely to be actively disengaged as those who do not.

Second, teach managers effective coaching techniques. Gallup cites evidence that participants in manager training focused on best practices saw up to 22% higher engagement than non-participants, their teams saw engagement rise by up to 18%, and manager performance metrics improved by 20% to 28%, with effects lasting nine to 18 months after training.

Third, invest in ongoing manager development to improve wellbeing. The report says manager training can raise manager thriving from 28% to 34%, and when that training is paired with active encouragement for development, thriving rises to 50%. Gallup therefore treats manager development not just as a performance tool but as one of the most effective wellbeing investments leaders can make.

This leads to the report’s broader conclusion: the role of the manager needs to be rethought. Gallup argues that improving manager engagement is the key lever for reversing declining productivity, improving employee wellbeing and unlocking a much larger economic upside. It estimates that if the world’s workplace were fully engaged, US$9.6 trillion could be added to the global economy, equivalent to 9% of global GDP.

Overall, the report’s message is clear: the workplace problem is not simply that employees are tired or dissatisfied. It is that the management layer is under strain, and unless leaders strengthen it deliberately, the costs will spread through teams, organisations and economies.