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There is a single data point that few leaders have truly internalized. Not for lack of reading it, but because its implications are uncomfortable. According to the Gallup 2026 Report, global manager engagement has plummeted to 22%. In 2022, it stood at 31%. In just three years, nearly a third of global managerial engagement has evaporated.
This isn’t just another HR statistic. It is the signal of a silent crisis spreading, layer by layer, through your organizations.
For a long time, being a manager was associated with a higher level of engagement than that of their teams. Managers believed more in their work, felt more invested, and carried the mission with greater intensity. Gallup called this the "managerial engagement premium."
That premium has vanished. The most brutal drop occurred between 2024 and 2025: five points lost in a single year, from 27% to 22%. This is the sharpest annual decline recorded since Gallup began measuring this indicator.
The 2025 report had already identified the most affected profiles: young managers under 35 lost five points of engagement, and female managers lost seven points in a single year. These are precisely the profiles upon which many organizations pin their hopes for managerial renewal.
The question must be asked clearly, without oversimplifying. Managers aren't disengaging because they lack willpower or skills. They are disengaging because they are being asked to do the impossible.
The Gallup 2025 Report describes in detail the context in which managers have operated for the past five years: post-pandemic resignation waves, frantic hiring cycles followed by hiring freezes, repeated team restructurings, slashed budgets, new employee expectations regarding remote work and flexibility, accelerated digital transformation, and now AI reshuffling the deck. Each time, the manager is on the front line, struggling to hold together top-down mandates and bottom-up realities.
The 2025 report quotes an American supervisor who summarizes the situation perfectly: he says of his teams that he loves them and that they will do anything he asks, but the enthusiasm is gone. And you can feel it.
That is what managerial disengagement looks like daily. It’s not a spectacular resignation. It’s a slow, invisible erosion that eventually weighs on everyone.
Another factor emerges in the 2026 report: organizational flattening. In several sectors, particularly tech in South Asia, companies are reducing middle management layers, partly driven by AI. The result: remaining managers find themselves overseeing larger teams, which, according to a Gallup study on American managers, mechanically lowers their engagement.
Gallup puts it bluntly: 70% of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager. This is not an estimate; it is the result of decades of meta-analyses involving millions of workers across hundreds of companies.
This means a manager’s disengagement does not remain confined to their own experience. It flows downward. It contaminates the team, affects customer relations, and erodes productivity. If multiple managers in the same organization are in this state, the effect aggregates until it impacts overall results.
The 2025 report is explicit: if the trend does not reverse, it will no longer be just a question of engagement. It will be a question of global economic productivity.
Perhaps the most important point of the 2026 report, and the one deserving the most attention, is this: in so-called "best-practice" organizations, those that have made engagement a real strategic priority, 79% of managers are engaged. That is nearly four times the global average.
These organizations exist in every sector and every region of the world. What distinguishes them is not their size or industry; it is their deliberate choice to invest in the development of their managers, training them, listening to them, and giving them the tools to succeed.
The 2025 report quantified the effects of this investment with useful precision. Training focused on coaching techniques improves the engagement of managers themselves by up to 22%, and that of their teams by up to 18%. Managerial performance increases by 20% to 28%. Furthermore, these effects persist between nine and eighteen months after training, suggesting this isn't just a "honeymoon phase" effect.
Even more striking: without training, manager well-being stands at 28%. With training, it rises to 34%. If active support for continuous development is added, it reaches 50%. Managerial training may be the most cost-effective well-being initiative an organization can implement, yet fewer than half of managers worldwide report having received any.
Re-engaging managers cannot be solved with a team-building day or an annual survey. It requires a structured, continuous approach anchored in field reality.
Managerial disengagement is not an HR problem. It is a performance, culture, and strategy problem. Gallup’s data shows with rare clarity that organizations choosing to address it seriously reap measurable, lasting benefits at every level of the company.
The question is no longer whether your managers are under pressure. It is what you are doing with that information.
Don’t let disengagement become the norm in your organization. To detect weak signals and restore manager engagement, you must first be able to measure it.
Find out how eBloom helps leaders track and drive engagement in real time.
Sources: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report; Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report.
From HR digitalization to AI integration and new employee expectations, the human resources sector is rapidly changing. Based on responses from over 450 Belgian companies, our report gives you a head start to prepare your teams and strategy for the realities of tomorrow.
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