Global employee engagement fell to just 20% in 2025, according to a new Gallup study, marking its lowest level since 2020.
The 2026 State of the Global Workplace study, conducted across 140 countries and based on responses from more than 141,000 employed workers as part of Gallup's wider World Poll, brought the findings into sharper focus by recording the first back-to-back annual decline since tracking began.
The productivity cost attached to those numbers is hard to ignore. Gallup estimates that low engagement erased an estimated $10 trillion from the global economy in 2025, signaling that what might appear to be a soft people issue carries hard economic consequences.
Inside the Data: A Workforce Pulling Away
The headline figure of 20% tells only part of the story. With each percentage point representing approximately 21 million workers, the three-point drop from the 2022 to 2023 peak translates to tens of millions of employees moving away from meaningful attachment to their work. The decline was not isolated to a single region, although the scale of the drop varied significantly across geographies.
Wellbeing data offered a rare bright spot: the share of employees considered to be "thriving," a measure combining current life satisfaction with a five-year outlook, edged up to 34%, marking the first increase in three years. However, negative daily emotions remained elevated above pre-pandemic levels across much of the world, suggesting improvements in broader life outlook have not yet translated into stronger connections to work itself.
For Travis Stolz, Operations Manager at Amazon, the implications of the findings are clear. "The solution isn't simply better technology or tighter processes, it's better leadership," he said.
"When leaders invest in coaching, meaningful conversations, and creating an environment where people can thrive, engagement becomes a competitive advantage rather than an organizational challenge. People remain the most important input to every business outcome."
It is clear that managers remain key to employee engagement. However, what happens when managers themselves become disengaged?
The Manager Problem Nobody Is Talking About
The sharpest finding in the report may be what happened to manager engagement specifically. In 2022, managers reported engagement levels of 31%, a significant premium over individual contributors. By 2025, that figure had collapsed to 22%, with the steepest drop occurring in the most recent year alone. For the first time, managers no longer report higher engagement than the employees they are responsible for leading.
