It’s a tough time to be a manager, and a new report shows many of them are feeling the pressure right about now.
Global employee engagement in 2024 fell, driven largely by a decrease in managers’ engagement at work, according to Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report published Wednesday.
“Managers have a lot of things coming at them, and I think we really have to think about what managers are mainly responsible for,” Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and wellbeing, told Business Insider.
Around the world, employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% last year, costing the global economy approximately $438 billion in lost productivity, the report estimates. It’s only fallen twice in the last 12 years, the other time being in 2020.
While individual contributors saw their engagement stay the same at 18%, manager engagement dropped from 30% to 27%.
“If you go to the micro level, to the team level, managers with higher engagement have higher team engagement. Managers with lower engagement have lower,” said Harter. “So the role of the manager is just critical to getting this right.”
Breaking out specific groups, managers under 35 and female managers saw a 5% and a 7% drop in engagement, respectively.
The report drew from data from 227,347 employed respondents ages 15 and up, with responses collected from April 2024 to December 2024.
For engagement specifically, respondents were asked to give their level of agreement on a scale of 1 to 5 regarding 12 statements on topics like support, professional development, company mission, and purpose at work. Based on their responses, they were determined to be engaged, not engaged, or actively disengaged.
Managers are naturally in a delicate position, juggling senior leaders’ demands from one direction and their direct reports’ desires from another.
But the last few years have also introduced new responsibilities for many managers in addition to their traditional duties, as the report notes. Think supply chain disruptions, a job market roller coaster, the introduction of AI tools, and growing employee desires for flexibility following pandemic-era remote work.
“The new demands coupled with the old demands of the manager’s job have caused kind of an overwhelming feeling for a lot of managers,” said Harter.
So what can be done about manager engagement, and as a result broader employee engagement? Gallup’s report highlights upskilling and training.
Employers should provide basic role training for new managers; only 44% of managers globally say they’ve gotten management training, according to the report. Managers new and old would also benefit from ongoing coaching in management best practices and having someone at work who actively encourages their development, the report noted.
Harter also recommends managers set clear expectations with employees, have regular check-ins ideally once a week, and have a system in which each person “knows how well they’re doing in terms of how they perform individually, how they collaborate with their team, and then how they bring value to the customers that the organization is serving.”
“I think performance management and employee engagement and wellbeing all can fit together if we really help managers,” Harter said. “Managers can get better if they have the right kind of ongoing training and learning that goes with the role.”
