The numbers that should stop every leader in their tracks.
Gallup recently dropped their 2025 State of the Global Workplace report. 160 countries. Nearly a quarter of a million workers. The findings are hard to sit with.
One in ten.
That’s the number of UK employees who are engagedat work right now.
The other nine? Not burned out. Not actively miserable. Just… present. Going through the motions. Collecting a salary in exchange for a fraction of what they could give.
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First, let’s be clear on what they’re actually measuring. Gallup defines engagement as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” They split everyone into three buckets: engaged (psychological owners, driving things forward), not engaged (quietly quitting), and actively disengaged (actively undermining).
Now the numbers:
🌍 Global: 21% engaged — down from 23%, matching the lowest point recorded during COVID-19 lockdowns.
🇺🇸 US/Canada: 31% engaged — the highest of any region, but with the highest stress levels (50%) and the highest intent to leave (50%). Clearly not a sustainable combination.
🇬🇧 UK: 10% engaged. That’s 30th out of 38 countries surveyed. One in ten, second lowest compared to EU countries. Let that land.
The shocking stat? Low engagement now accounts for nearly 9% of global GDP. We’re not talking about another HR problem; THIS IS THE PROBLEM. That’s estimated at $438 billion globally in lost productivity in a single year.
And here’s what’s driving it:
It’s not the frontline workers who are falling away. It’s the managers.
Global manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%. Among managers under 35, it dropped five points. Among female managers, it dropped seven. Meanwhile, 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager according to Gallup. So, when the managers go, everything follows.
The cause isn’t laziness or lack of commitment. Since the pandemic, managers have been asked to square the circle of new executive demands and employee expectations as the shock absorbers — and the shock is no longer absorbing.
So what does the playbook actually look like?
Gallup points to three things:
1. Train your managers — properly. Less than 44% of managers globally have ever received management training. Yet Gallup finds that basic training cuts active disengagement in half. This isn’t a budget issue. It’s a priority issue.
2. Teach coaching, not command-and-control. Trained managers improved their own engagement by 22%, and their teams by up to 18%. Coaching teams is the performance lever most organisations are leaving untouched.
3. Invest in manager wellbeing — not just performance. Training alone boosts thriving from 28% to 34%. Add ongoing encouragement and development, and that number jumps to 50%. The people holding your culture together need to feel held too.
We talk a lot about trust and energy in organisations. This data tells us exactly where it’s leaking.
It’s not leaking at the top. It’s not leaking at the bottom. It’s leaking in the middle — in the layer of people we promoted, overloaded, and then left largely on their own.
Most organisations respond to an engagement crisis by doing more to people. More surveys. More town halls. More cascaded communications from the top. More manager training programmes designed and delivered by HR.
That’s not wrong. But it’s incomplete. And it keeps power in the wrong place.
The evidence increasingly points somewhere else: the most durable fix comes from the team itself.
Gallup’s data actually supports this. 70% of team engagement is directly attributable to the manager — but Gallup also consistently finds that the conditions for engagement (belonging, contribution, growth, being known) are largely created laterally, by colleagues, not vertically, by hierarchy.
The groundswell model flips the script:
Instead of asking “what will leadership do about engagement?” — ask “what does this team need to do for itself?”
In practice that looks like:
→ Peer accountability, not performance management. Teams that name their own norms and hold each other to them outperform teams waiting for their manager to set the standard. Trust is built horizontally first.
→ Recognition that travels sideways. Most recognition programmes are top-down. But the moment a colleague sees you and names it publicly — that lands differently. It’s not a reward. It’s belonging.
→ Psychological safety created by the group, not granted by the leader. Leaders can model it and destroy it, but they can’t install it. It grows when teams practise it repeatedly in low-stakes moments — until it’s just how they operate.
→ Energy as a shared resource, not a personal responsibility. High-performing teams actively manage collective energy — they notice when someone’s depleted, they redistribute, they create space. That’s not a soft skill. That’s operational intelligence.
