Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025. That is the lowest level since 2020 and the second consecutive year of decline, per Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report. Every region of the world declined. Not one improved. One factor sits at the center of that collapse more than any other: managers are disengaging at a faster rate than anyone else in the workforce. Since 2022, manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points, from 31% to 22%. The largest single-year fall happened between 2024 and 2025, when it dropped five points in twelve months. No other worker category comes close to that rate of decline.
For years, managers held what Gallup called an “engagement premium.” They were meaningfully more engaged than the people they led. That premium has essentially vanished. Managers are now only about as engaged as the individual contributors on their teams. That shift matters enormously because managers account for 70% of the variance in team-level engagement, one of the most consistent findings in three decades of Gallup research.
Disengaged managers produce disengaged teams. Those teams drag down productivity, retention, and customer outcomes.
Manager Engagement: Who Is Being Hit Hardest
The decline in manager engagement is not evenly distributed. Certain groups are carrying a disproportionate share of the pressure.
Young managers under 35 saw a five-point drop in engagement in a single year. Female managers saw a seven-point drop. Both groups face the same expanded responsibilities and leaner teams as their peers, but with less institutional support and less tenure to draw on.
Inclusion Geeks’ analysis of Gallup’s 2025 Workplace Report describes the pressure clearly. Managers are facing executive demands that conflict with employee expectations. Many are navigating team restructures and AI adoption without the tools or clarity they need.
The emotional toll is significant. Managers are substantially more likely than individual contributors to report high stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness on any given workday. The people carrying culture, driving performance, and championing new technology are simultaneously the most disengaged group in the global workforce.
Manager Engagement: What Is Driving the Decline
Several structural forces converged to push manager engagement down. Understanding them is the first step toward addressing them.
Organizational flattening removed layers of management across many industries without reducing the work those managers were doing. Remaining managers absorbed larger spans of control with no corresponding reduction in accountability. Gallup’s own data shows that manager engagement declines as team size grows. Cutting managers without restructuring their responsibilities created exactly that condition at scale.
Conflicting expectations left managers caught between two sets of priorities. Senior leadership pushed for efficiency, AI adoption, and transformation. Direct reports needed support, clarity, and psychological safety. Managers absorbed the friction between those two realities without the authority to resolve it in either direction.
Reduced support from above compounded both problems. HR Dive’s reporting on Gallup’s 2026 findings identifies fewer direct managers, stretched communication channels, and managers being less accessible to their teams as direct consequences of layoffs and restructuring. Employees reported noticing the difference.
The AI pressure point added a third layer. Gallup found that managers are critical to AI adoption. Employees whose manager actively supports AI use are 8.7 times more likely to say it has transformed how their work gets done. Yet fewer than one in three employees in AI-implementing organizations say their manager actively supports it. Disengaged managers cannot champion what they themselves are skeptical of.
Manager Engagement: Why This Matters Beyond the Headline Number
The manager engagement crisis is not a morale problem. It is a business performance problem with a measurable price tag.
Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the global economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity in 2025 alone. Manager disengagement sits at the center of that figure. When managers check out, new initiatives stall in planning. Teams revert to old behaviors. Change loses momentum before it lands. Forbes’ reporting on the management engagement crisis notes that performance declines are not isolated. They compound across teams and departments in ways that are difficult to reverse once entrenched.
The retention impact is equally significant. Disengaged managers stop recognizing their teams, avoid meaningful development conversations, and fail to build the psychological safety that keeps employees invested. All three failures accelerate turnover among individual contributors. Disengagement cascades downward before it ever shows up in exit interview data.
Only 19% of managers report strong delegation skills. Fewer still receive consistent training in communication, conflict resolution, or feedback. The tools that would help managers do their jobs better are not reaching the people who need them most.
What Companies Need to Do Right Now
Fixing manager engagement requires treating managers as employees whose experience deserves the same intentional investment as the people they lead. Most organizations do not currently do that.
Recognize managers for their work. Recognition programs tend to flow downward. Managers are often the ones giving recognition without receiving it. A senior leader who publicly acknowledges a manager for developing their team sends a signal that the investment is seen. Peer recognition between managers builds the lateral connection that remote and hybrid work has eroded.
Build clearer expectations around scope. Managers who do not know what success looks like cannot optimize for it. Many carry informal accountability and expanding scope that was never formally documented. A defined role clarity process with regular senior check-ins reduces the ambiguity that quietly drains motivation.
Invest in manager development consistently. Training for managers is often front-loaded at hire and rarely revisited. Regular skill development in coaching, feedback, and conflict resolution builds the capabilities that prevent burnout and keep managers connected to purpose.
Reduce span of control where possible. MangoApps’ analysis of Gallup’s 2026 data makes the structural argument clearly. Organizational flattening should not be a transaction. Scope of responsibility and team engagement must be considered alongside any restructuring. Cutting layers without rethinking accountability accelerates the exact problem organizations are trying to avoid.
The Recognition Gap That Nobody Is Closing
One specific and addressable cause of manager disengagement rarely makes the headline list: managers feel unseen.
They see individual contributors get recognized for deliverables. Senior leaders get recognized for strategy. Managers translate strategy into execution and carry the relationship weight of every person on their team. Most receive recognition for neither.
Performance Intelligence’s 2026 analysis of the Gallup report frames the structural problem directly. The leader holding the key to AI adoption and team-level engagement is also the most disengaged cohort in the global workforce. Building recognition upward into the management layer is not a soft HR initiative. It is a structural fix for the most expensive engagement problem on the board.
A recognition and engagement platform that makes acknowledging manager contributions as easy as recognizing individual wins closes that gap systematically. Managers who feel recognized are more likely to recognize their teams. Recognized teams are more engaged. The chain runs in one direction, and it starts at the manager level.
Become a Beta Tester for Fun Intended and Save 75%
Fun Intended is building a recognition and engagement platform designed to work at every level of an organization. That includes the management layer, currently the most disengaged and the most consequential.
Join the beta program today and get 75% off access to the full platform. Help shape the product, get early access to every feature, and be part of a community rethinking what engagement looks like when it reaches every person in the chain of command.