Your managers went first

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 reports that 20 percent of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, down a point from the year before and the lowest reading since 2020. That is the headline, and it is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is who fell. Manager engagement dropped from 27 percent to 22 in a single year, and is down nine points since 2022. Non-managers sat at 19 percent, roughly flat. The decline is concentrated almost entirely in the layer that is supposed to be delivering the fix.

That matters more for distributed organisations than for anyone else, because remote and hybrid work quietly transfers work onto managers. Coordination that used to happen by proximity becomes something a manager schedules. Visibility that used to be ambient becomes something a manager documents. Feedback that used to be incidental becomes a meeting a manager has to hold. None of this appeared in a job description, and almost none of it arrived with training or with anything removed to make room.

A third finding fits the same pattern. Gallup reports that the 2025 improvement in job-market optimism came entirely from workers whose jobs cannot be done remotely and who are fully on site, up two points. Fully remote workers fell five points. Remote-capable workers who are nonetheless on site fell fourteen — the largest decline in the survey, belonging to people who can see the flexibility they are not being given.

Gallup puts the global cost of low engagement at roughly ten trillion dollars in lost productivity. Numbers that size are hard to act on and we would not build a plan around one. The actionable version is smaller and sits inside your own organisation: if your managers are less engaged than the people they manage, no policy you write about culture, flexibility or return to office will be implemented as designed, because implementation is their unfunded second job.

There is one bright spot. Thriving — Gallup's broader wellbeing measure — rose from 33 to 34 percent, the first improvement in three years. People are doing slightly better in their lives while doing slightly worse at work. That gap is not a paradox. It is a fairly precise description of what many workers now expect from an employer, which is less than they used to.