Global employee engagement hit a five-year low in 2025. For the first time on record, it declined two years in a row. Your clients are focused on finding talent, and that’s a real problem. But the deeper issue, the one most of them are missing, sits one layer up.

According to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, the largest ongoing study of the employee experience, the decline in global engagement isn’t distributed evenly across the workforce. It’s concentrated in management. And for staffing firm CEOs, that distinction matters more than most of the workforce trends getting column inches right now.

The manager layer is driving the engagement decline

Global engagement fell to 20% in 2025, down from a peak of 23% in 2022. Since that same year, manager engagement has dropped nine points. Between 2024 and 2025 alone, it fell five points, the largest single-year decline on record for that group. Non-managers, by contrast, saw a slight rebound last year.

Gallup’s data shows that declining manager engagement accounts for most of the overall drop. When the people responsible for activating everyone else disengage, the effect compounds through the entire organization.

Several pressures are converging to create this. Organizations are flattening their management structures, partly because AI adoption in some sectors has accelerated cuts to mid-level roles. The managers who remain are overseeing larger teams. Gallup’s research confirms that manager engagement declines as team size grows, though strong management development can offset that effect.

The emotional weight of the role is also showing up in the data. Managers and leaders are more likely than individual contributors to report daily stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness. Senior leaders generally evaluate their overall lives more positively. But their daily experience of the job is harder. Management has always carried that cost, but current conditions are making it more visible.

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