The most quoted number in Gallup's latest workplace data is the one about everyone: global engagement at its lowest since the pandemic. The number that should actually change how a leadership team spends its next budget is the one about managers. Their engagement fell faster than anyone's, and when the manager layer disengages, the whole team feels it. Perks do not touch this problem. Capability does.
Gallup's 2025 data shows manager engagement fell to 22%, down from 27% in 2024 and nine points since 2022, helping pull global engagement to 20%. The fix is not perks or wellbeing apps, which do not touch the cause. Managers disengage when they feel under-equipped for the human parts of the job. Capability, built by rehearsing real conversations, is what rebuilds engagement.
Why this matters now
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace reports that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020. The steepest single fall inside that figure was among managers: manager engagement dropped to 22%, down from 27% in 2024, a five-point slide in one year and nine points since 2022. Gallup is blunt about the mechanism. Managers shape the daily experience of the people they lead, so when they disengage, the effect does not stay contained. It cascades.
The cost of getting this wrong is not abstract. Gallup puts the drag of low engagement on the world economy at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity, about 9% of global GDP. That is not a wellbeing statistic. It is a performance one, and it lands hardest on organisations that have cut their management layer thin and left the survivors to cope.
The two responses that make it worse
Faced with a disengaged management tier, most organisations reach for one of two levers, and both miss.
The first is to cut. When margins tighten, the management layer looks like overhead, so spans of control widen and managers absorb bigger teams with no extra time. The result is a manager who is now responsible for more people and even less able to do the human parts of the role well. Engagement does not recover from a heavier load.
The second is to soothe. Wellbeing apps, mindfulness subscriptions, an extra day off. These are not bad things, but they treat manager disengagement as a comfort deficit when it is really a competence deficit. A manager does not dread Monday because they are short of perks. They dread it because they have a difficult conversation to hold, a piece of feedback they have been avoiding, a conflict in the team they do not know how to defuse. No app reaches that.
Why the usual training does not move it
The standard corporate answer to a manager-capability gap is a course. A day in a room, a model on a slide, a workbook, a certificate. People leave able to describe the framework and no better at using it, because knowing how a difficult conversation should go is not the same as being able to hold one when the other person gets defensive and your own heart rate climbs. As we have written before, manager training fails to change behaviour when it stops at information and never reaches rehearsal.
This is the gap between knowing and doing, and it is where most L&D spend quietly disappears. The manager who has read about coaching still defaults to telling. The manager who has been taught to give feedback still softens it into uselessness. The behaviour under pressure is the old one, because the new one was never practised under anything like pressure.
What actually rebuilds it
Some things cannot be taught, they have to be felt. A manager becomes engaged in the role by becoming genuinely capable in it, and capability in the human parts of management is built the way any hard skill is built: by doing the real thing, repeatedly, with feedback, in conditions close enough to the genuine moment that the response holds when it counts.
That is the design behind our work with management populations. In our leadership training and coaching skills training, trained actors play believable team members who push back, deflect and react the way real people do, and managers practise the actual conversations, the underperformance chat, the feedback they have been dodging, the conflict between two reports, until the skilled response is the automatic one. It is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the point. You cannot rehearse a manager into readiness by keeping them comfortable.
You cannot perk your way out of a capability gap. Managers re-engage when they feel good at the hardest parts of the job, and those parts are learned by doing, not by being told.
None of this happens in a single day. Manager capability is the true unit of culture change, and rebuilding it is an embedding job, not an event. But the direction is clear from the data: the organisations that respond to Gallup's numbers by cutting managers and buying perks will watch the line keep falling. The ones that respond by making their managers genuinely good at the human parts of the role, through practice rather than slides, are the ones that turn it around. It is the same logic behind why behaviour change improves leadership performance: the lever is behaviour, and behaviour is built by rehearsal.
If your engagement scores are sliding and the manager layer is where it starts, that is where the work is.
In Summary: Manager Engagement and the Capability Fix
Gallup's 2025 data shows manager engagement fell to 22%, down from 27% in 2024 and nine points since 2022, dragging global engagement to 20% and adding to a productivity loss Gallup estimates at roughly $10 trillion. The two common responses, cutting managers and adding perks, both miss the cause. Managers disengage when they feel under-equipped for the human parts of the job, and that competence is rebuilt through rehearsal, not slides.
- Manager engagement fell to 22% in 2025, the steepest fall inside a global engagement figure that hit 20%, its lowest since 2020.
- Cutting the management layer widens spans of control and worsens the load; perks treat a competence deficit as a comfort deficit.
- Standard courses build confidence without behaviour, because knowing how a conversation should go is not being able to hold one under pressure.
- Capability, and with it engagement, is rebuilt by rehearsing coaching, feedback and difficult conversations with feedback, until the skilled response is automatic.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Gallup find about manager engagement in 2025?
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace found that manager engagement fell to 22% in 2025, down from 27% in 2024, a five-point drop in a single year and a nine-point decline since 2022. Because managers shape their teams' experience, this fall helped pull overall global engagement down to 20%.
Why do perks fail to fix manager disengagement?
Perks target comfort, not the source of manager strain. Managers disengage when they are overloaded, under-equipped and unsure how to handle hard conversations, feedback and conflict. A wellbeing app does not teach any of those skills, so the underlying behaviour stays the same and engagement keeps sliding.
What actually rebuilds manager engagement?
Capability rebuilds it. Managers re-engage when they feel competent at the human parts of the job: coaching, feedback, difficult conversations and decisions under pressure. That competence is built by rehearsing the real moments with feedback, not by reading frameworks or clicking through an e-learning module.