Gallup 2026 Global Workplace Report: The Collapse of Manager Engagement

Today we start with a report. Last month, Gallup released the 2026 “State of the Global Workplace” report.

Every year, many such reports are released by various institutions, and their contents are often similar—discussing whether employees are satisfied and the impact of AI.

However, this year’s report is different. It mentions a very “surprising” trend. We’ll dive into the specifics later.

Let’s start with the report’s general conclusions. According to Gallup’s survey, only 20% of employees worldwide were “truly engaged” in the past year. This is the lowest point since 2020. “Truly engaged” means you aren’t just working overtime due to workplace pressure, but you are willing to actively invest in your work. Only 20% of people fall into this category.

What about the remaining 80%? Some are coasting, some are struggling, and some are in the most dangerous state—what Gallup calls “actively disengaged.” This means they aren’t just uninvested themselves; they are actively undermining the morale of those around them.

It’s important to understand that “disengaged” people are just numb and coasting; they don’t actively harm others. But “actively disengaged” people spread negative emotions, distribute complaints, and drag those around them into a state of “laying flat.” This group accounts for about 16% of all employees.

The 10 Trillion Dollar Productivity Loss #

At the same time, Gallup estimates that this global “low engagement” causes approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity annually.

Note that this doesn’t mean companies are paying $10 trillion in “wasted” salaries. Rather, it means that if that 80% of disengaged employees worked like the 20% of engaged ones, the world could create an additional $10 trillion in GDP. It measures opportunity cost—the money that “could have” been earned but “actually” wasn’t.

What does $10 trillion look like? It’s equivalent to 9% of global GDP. To put that in perspective, the total defense spending of all countries combined accounts for only about 2% of global GDP. In other words, the opportunity cost of low engagement is more than four times the global military budget.

However, if you know a little background, you’ll realize that declining engagement started last year and isn’t entirely surprising. The truly surprising discovery in Gallup’s report lies elsewhere.

The Collapse of Manager Engagement #

This round of collapse didn’t start with employees; it started with managers.

Usually, when we talk about “employee disengagement,” the finger is pointed at employees—some say young people are “laying flat,” not working hard, and only thinking about “slacking off.” This has become a default narrative shared by bosses, the media, and management courses.

But Gallup’s 2026 data tells a different story. When they separate employee and manager data, they reach a key conclusion: employee engagement has remained largely flat or even seen a slight recovery in recent years. But manager engagement is rapidly collapsing.

Specifically, manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025—a decline of 9 percentage points in just four years.

According to surveys by many institutions, manager engagement has historically been higher than that of regular employees. The reason is simple: when you become a manager, you gain not just a higher salary, but also a greater sense of control. You decide the direction, influence the team, and see the actual results of your decisions. This feeling of “I am important” naturally makes managers more willing to invest more.

But in the past year, manager engagement has plummeted so sharply that there is now almost no gap between them and regular employees.

So, why are managers collapsing?

According to Gallup’s research, this is likely because companies worldwide are trending toward “organizational flattening.”

Over the past few years, a large number of global companies have been cutting costs, with wave after wave of layoffs. These layoffs usually target the management layer first, with middle managers being the first to be “optimized.” Consequently, the remaining managers must lead larger teams and take on more responsibilities, but the support and resources they receive have not increased—in fact, they have decreased.

Imagine this scenario: you used to lead 8 people and could have a one-on-one talk about work progress with each person every week. You understood everyone’s state and had the energy to drive their growth. Now the team has grown to 20 people. Your time hasn’t increased, but the people and tasks you need to manage have more than doubled. As a result, you spend most of your time “firefighting.” Managers have become transactional machines rather than the spiritual pillars of their teams. The sense of meaning is slowly lost in this process.

Worse, manager engagement directly transmits to the entire team.

According to Gallup, 70% of a team’s engagement depends on the direct manager. If the manager is struggling just to survive, it’s almost impossible for the team to be truly engaged. This isn’t just about the manager’s emotions being “contagious”; there is a specific logical mechanism. What did managers do before? Allocate resources, recognize achievements, provide feedback, help everyone find meaning, and block pressure from above.

When managers collapse, no one does these things anymore. Consequently, the corresponding costs are transmitted directly to the employee level.

The True Bottleneck of AI Adoption #

This brings us to another discovery in the report, which is also related to managers.

In the past two years, global companies have invested heavily in AI—hundreds of billions of dollars in AI tool procurement, training programs, and system upgrades. Everyone is saying AI will change work, but Gallup conducted a specific survey in the US among employees who already have AI tools deployed in their companies, asking if AI has truly changed the way they work.

The result: only 12% of employees “strongly agree” that AI has truly changed how work is done. Gallup also surveyed companies that have invested in AI and found that 95% have not observed profit growth, and 89% of executives admit that labor productivity has not improved.

In other words, the money was spent and the tools were bought, but performance hasn’t changed and efficiency hasn’t improved. Why is that?

Gallup’s report says the key issue still lies with managers.

Their research found that the strongest factor influencing whether an employee truly uses AI is not the usability of the technology itself, but whether their direct manager is actively pushing the team to use AI. How big is this difference? The data shows that in teams where managers actively push AI, employees are 9.3 times more likely to think AI has “truly changed the way work is done” compared to teams where managers do not. If managers themselves are indifferent to AI, their teams will rarely take the initiative to embrace it.

Gallup’s CEO said in the report: “Companies have invested heavily in AI, but the results are not reflected in profitability. Gallup’s data points to an answer long ignored by the corporate world: managers.”

Managers as the Infrastructure of Meaning #

At this point, some might wonder about “engagement.” Whether an employee is engaged is an internal thought; how can that be measured through a survey?

Regarding this, Gallup has a set of 12 questions known in the industry as “Q12.” These 12 questions don’t ask if you like your job; instead, they ask things like:

Do you know what is expected of you at work? Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right? At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work? Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages your development? And so on.

Do you notice? Many of these questions are directly related to “what your manager has done.”

In other words, by Gallup’s standards, whether someone is engaged is closely related to whether they are recognized, cared for, and encouraged.

Conversely, questions like “Are you satisfied with your salary?” do not appear in Gallup’s engagement survey. Note that this doesn’t mean salary isn’t important. Salary is, of course, the most indispensable part of a job. However, salary is most closely associated with “job satisfaction.”

What is the difference between satisfaction and engagement? Simply put, satisfaction is about “removing pain.” Because pay has improved, your worries, dissatisfaction with life, and pain that can be solved with money are gradually addressed.

Engagement, on the other hand, is about “building meaning”—whether you genuinely like the job. The most critical variable is whether there is someone in your daily work who makes you feel “your efforts are seen, your work is meaningful, and you are growing.” That person is usually your direct manager.

We’ll stop here for the Gallup report. Finally, looking beyond the report, you’ll find that the role of “manager” has undergone a subtle shift in the past year.

For example, we previously discussed the views of Shanda CEO Chen Tianqiao. He believes that with the popularization of AI employees, not just managers, but the entire field of “management” will face its sunset. Why does a company need “management”? Because humans are not machines—they can be lazy, have selfish motives, and make mistakes. Therefore, systems and management are needed. But AI employees don’t have these problems; if the problem disappears, the solution is no longer needed.

Similarly, Paul Graham, the “Godfather of Silicon Valley startups,” has been saying for years that “professional managers” don’t make companies better and that founders should be on the front lines themselves. Here again, the finger is pointed at “managers.”

However, from the Gallup report, we can read another dimension of managers. Beyond daily tasks, management, and coordination, they also fulfill a critical function that we can call “meaning infrastructure.”

A good manager might just be the “meaning infrastructure” of an organization.

Even if they don’t produce a specific product, if they can do one thing well, they remain essential: making everyone feel that “what I do is meaningful.” Recognizing you, seeing you, and giving you feedback—these things may seem “routine,” but they are the underlying support for whether someone can truly invest in their work. Once this meaning infrastructure fails, it directly impacts the overall engagement of employees.

Shen Zuyun, an expert in school organizational change, has a perspective that originally applied to schools but might also apply to companies. She says managers need to cultivate two core abilities: first, to shape a sense of meaning for employees so their value is seen; and second, to amplify that sense of meaning so their value is recognized.

That’s all for today’s topic.