Manager Engagement Is Falling Faster Than Anyone Else's

For most of the past decade, managers were the steady part of the workforce. They reported higher engagement than the people they supervised and served as a buffer when morale dipped. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report shows that buffer wearing away.

Global employee engagement declined for a second straight year in 2025, falling to 20 percent. That is the lowest level since 2020 and three points below the peak of 23 percent recorded in 2022 and 2023. Gallup estimates that low engagement cost the global economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity.

The drop is concentrated in the middle

The decline did not hit every group equally. Engagement among individual contributors slipped only slightly, from 20 percent in 2022 to 19 percent in 2025. Manager engagement fell from 31 percent to 22 percent over the same span. Between 2024 and 2025 alone, it dropped five points, from 27 percent to 22 percent. Gallup says that is the largest year-over-year fall in manager engagement since it began tracking the measure in 2009.

Managers in the United States fared better than the global average, with 36 percent engaged in 2025, and engagement in the U.S. and Canada held steady overall. That should not comfort American employers too much. A national average can hide sharp differences between companies, and plenty of U.S. teams are led by managers who are just as worn down as their peers abroad.

Why manager engagement matters so much

Prior Gallup research has attributed roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement to the direct manager. When a supervisor is disengaged, the effect spreads. Employees notice when one-on-ones get canceled, when feedback stops and when a manager no longer pushes back on unrealistic deadlines.

Gallup also found that manager engagement tends to fall as spans of control grow larger, though strong talent and training can offset that effect. Many organizations flattened their structures in recent years and gave remaining managers more direct reports. The 2026 data suggests that trade-off has a cost.

The timing makes the finding more urgent. The latest federal data shows quits rising to their highest level since March 2025. When workers feel they have options, a disengaged manager becomes a direct retention risk.

What the best organizations do differently

Declining manager engagement is not inevitable. Gallup found that best-practice organizations reached 79 percent manager engagement in 2025, nearly quadruple the global average. Those organizations tend to share a few habits.

They train managers for the people side of the job as deliberately as they train for the technical side, and they start that training before someone is promoted rather than after. Gallup data shows that providing manager training raises manager thriving from 28 percent to 34 percent, and adding ongoing coaching and development lifts it to 50 percent. They keep spans of control manageable. They also give managers clear goals and the authority to act on them, so the role feels like leadership rather than message relay.

Most importantly, they treat manager wellbeing as an operating priority. A manager who is stretched across too many reports, too many meetings and too many administrative tasks will not have the energy to coach anyone.

HR leaders can begin with a simple audit. List every people manager, their number of direct reports, and the turnover and engagement scores for their teams. Patterns usually appear quickly. A handful of managers often account for a large share of regrettable turnover, and those managers are frequently the ones with the widest spans or the least training.

Industries with heavy frontline staffing feel this most. In senior living, workers rank supportive supervisors among the top three reasons they stay. In policing, first-line supervisors shape whether new officers make it through their first year, a theme in our police staffing report. On manufacturing floors, the shift lead is often the difference between a new hire who stays and one who leaves in week three, as we noted in our manufacturing coverage.

The 2026 report reads like a warning, but it also offers a clear target. Engagement fell where organizations asked the most of managers and gave them the least support. Reversing that is one of the few workforce investments that improves retention, productivity and hiring at the same time.