Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity, according to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace Report. The finding caps two straight years of decline and marks the first time Gallup has ever recorded two straight years of decline since it began tracking global engagement.
A five-year setback erases pandemic-era gains
Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, down from a peak of 23% in 2022, a level that also held in 2023, representing three percentage points lost since that peak.
Despite the recent downturn, engagement remains eight percentage points higher than it was in Gallup’s first measurement in 2009 and five points higher than it was a decade ago.
Globally, 64% of employees are not engaged and 16% are actively disengaged, leaving just one in five workers genuinely invested in their work. Each percentage point accounts for approximately 21 million employees , meaning the three-point slide since the 2022, 2023 peak reflects roughly 63 million people who have become disengaged from their jobs.
Gallup estimates that disengagement cost the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. The associated productivity losses equal 9% of global GDP. The report draws on survey data from 141,444 employed respondents across more than 140 countries and territories, gathered throughout 2025.
Manager burnout is driving the slide
While engagement among non-manager roles has remained largely flat in the past three years, manager engagement has dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. The decline in global engagement was driven by a five-point decline in manager engagement between 2024 and 2025.
The report notes managers have lost the “engagement premium” historically held over individual contributors. From 2022 to 2025, the gap in engagement between managers and individual contributors has gone from managers +11 down to managers +3, meaning managers are now barely more engaged than their employees. That leaves the people responsible for leading teams, driving culture, and enabling performance themselves disengaged.
The collapse is particularly significant given Gallup’s own research finding that the daily cost of disengaged workers flows well beyond missed targets, touching team morale and everyday workplace culture. Prior Gallup analysis has attributed roughly 70% of variance in team engagement to the direct manager.
AI investment is not closing the gap
Only 12% of employees in AI-implemented organizations strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done in their organization. The report’s findings suggest the problem is not AI itself but the way organizations are structured and led.
Less than one-third of U.S. employees in AI-implementing organizations strongly agree that their manager actively supports their use of AI. Employees whose manager actively supports AI use are 8.7 times as likely to strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done , meaning technology investments appear to stall without the human infrastructure to support them.
Roughly 40% of employees worldwide said they experienced a lot of stress during the previous day. Daily anger stood at 22% globally, sadness at 23%, and loneliness at 22%.
What the data means for workers and employers
No world region recorded an increase in engagement over the past year. South Asia posted the steepest regional decline. The breadth of the drop signals structural forces rather than country-specific disruptions.
Separately, survey data on Gen Z workers across 44 countries has shown that younger employees are increasingly sequencing their ambitions rather than abandoning them, a pattern that Gallup’s engagement figures may partly reflect as workers recalibrate their relationship with traditional workplace expectations.
FlexJobs’ 2026 State of the Workplace Report is based on a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. professionals. Some 79% of those surveyed said they are more likely to accept a new job than they were a year ago. The share of professionals who have recently quit or are thinking about quitting rose from 33% in the previous report to 41% in the latest FlexJobs report.
Gallup’s global data and domestic job-mobility figures together point to a workforce that is not simply passive but increasingly willing to act on its dissatisfaction.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report features annual findings from the world’s largest ongoing study of the employee experience. The full 2026 edition covers more than 5.7 million respondents over the life of the study , with country-level breakdowns and wellbeing trend data stretching back to 2009.
