Employee engagement continues to decline, plummeting to 20% in 2025 – meaning four out of five in the workforce are disengaged according to recent research, State Of The Global Workplace 2026. This is lowest point for employee engagement since 2022, when it measured 23%.

But being a manager isn’t a solution, either. The largest year-over-year drop in engagement occurred in managers; between 2024 and 2025, it declined from 27% to 22%. While managers used to enjoy an “engagement premium” at work, they now are increasingly only as engaged as those they lead. The analysis authors note that that declining manager engagement is not necessarily inevitable: Within best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged at work – nearly…