Global employee engagement drops to 20% — and managers are leading the slide
The News
Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, based on surveys of 141,444 employed adults across more than 140 countries during 2025, paints a sobering picture: global employee engagement has fallen to 20%, down from a peak of 23% in 2022. It is the first time Gallup has recorded two consecutive years of declining engagement.
The sharpest decline came from one group in particular: managers. Manager engagement collapsed from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025 — a nine-point drop that effectively erases the "engagement premium" managers once enjoyed over individual contributors. In South Asia, manager engagement fell eight points, accompanied by a measurable reduction in the number of managers in the workforce. Gallup notes this coincides with AI adoption in India's IT sector, where organisational flattening and mid-level role cuts are reshaping management structures.
Gallup estimates the productivity loss from low engagement at $10 trillion — equivalent to 9% of global GDP. The report also found that employee wellbeing ("thriving") rose slightly to 34%, but daily negative emotions — stress, anger, sadness — remain above pre-pandemic levels. Job market optimism improved marginally to 52%, though it fell sharply in Australia/New Zealand (−12 points) and the US/Canada (−10 points).
Why It Matters
For TA leaders, the manager engagement collapse is the most actionable signal in this report. When the people who interview, select, and onboard new hires are themselves disengaged, it ripples through every metric you care about: quality of hire, time-to-productivity, and first-year attrition. Gallup found that best-practice organisations achieve 79% manager engagement — nearly quadruple the global average — which means this is not inevitable. It is a choice about how seriously you invest in the managers who shape your new hires' first 90 days.
Separately, the report's AI adoption data — based on US workers — should give TA leaders pause. While 65% of workers said AI improved their personal productivity, only 12% said AI has transformed their organisation. The gap between individual AI use and organisational AI value is precisely the space where talent acquisition operates: your organisation may be hiring AI-savvy people who find their tools useless once they walk through the door.
Taking Action
All action is situated in your corporate context. These are starting points, not prescriptions — choose what fits.
Connect
Who to talk with in your enterprise
Your head of talent analytics: Do we track engagement by manager cohort? If not, the data to surface this correlation — engagement scores of hiring managers cross-referenced with their new hires' first-year retention — is almost certainly sitting in your HRIS and ATS, unjoined.
Your L&D lead: What does manager onboarding look like for newly promoted or externally hired people leaders? Gallup's data suggests most organisations are promoting people into management and then abandoning them.
Inspect
What to take a closer look at
Pull your last 12 months of new-hire attrition data and segment it by hiring manager engagement score (if available) or by hiring manager tenure. If you do not have hiring-manager engagement data, that is itself a finding worth raising. Also: check whether your onboarding programme includes any element designed to assess and support the manager who will receive the new hire — not just the new hire themselves.
Reflect
What to think about more deeply
If 79% of managers at best-practice organisations are engaged — and your figure is closer to the global 22% — what exactly are you paying your management layer to do?