In the News · Manager Engagement Series, Part 3
Manager Engagement Fell to 22% Globally. A Small Group of Companies Hit 79%.
The decline is well documented. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report puts global manager engagement at 22 percent, down from 31 percent in 2022, with the sharpest single-year drop landing between 2024 and 2025. Global employee engagement overall sits at 20 percent, the lowest since 2020.
This piece is about the other number in the same report, the one almost nobody covered. In organizations Gallup classifies as best practice, manager engagement came in at 79 percent. Same year, same economy, same labor market, same technology. A 57-point spread.
What the 79% Organizations Do Differently
It would be easy to read the decline as inevitable, the natural result of flatter org charts, wider spans of control, and managers absorbing whatever the last restructure left behind. Gallup’s own data argues otherwise, because a meaningful group of organizations is producing the opposite outcome under identical conditions.
Gallup attributes the difference to a small set of unglamorous practices: clear expectations set and re-set rather than announced once, consistent communication rhythms, real manager training rather than a slide deck, and a visible habit of acting on what employees say. The distinction is between measuring engagement and running it.
A second finding in the same report lands in the same place. Despite enormous investment, only 12 percent of workers strongly agree the AI era has changed how work actually gets done. Gallup identifies the strongest predictor of successful AI adoption as whether an employee has a manager who actively supports their engagement with new ways of working, ahead of technical integration itself. The technology is not the bottleneck. The management layer is, and it is also the lever.
For anyone planning a leadership meeting or manager summit this year, the practical implication is that the room most likely to be quietly checked out is the one you are counting on to carry the message back. Gallup also found managers reporting materially worse daily emotions than individual contributors, including higher stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness. That is not a group that responds well to being told to try harder, and it is exactly the group the 79 percent organizations invest in first.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, based on 141,444 employed respondents across 140+ countries. Figures in this piece are global unless stated otherwise.
Manager Engagement Series
- The diagnosis — US engagement at a decade low, and why role clarity is the mechanism behind it
- The structural shift — managers used to be more engaged than their teams, and that buffer collapsed
- What works — you are here
Speakers on Building the 79% Version
Speaking to managers this year?
Tell us who is in the room and what you need them to walk out believing. We will match you with a speaker who can talk to a stretched management layer without talking down to it.