Employee Engagement Is Falling. It Doesn't Have To.

Global employee engagement dropped for the second consecutive year in 2025, hitting its lowest point since 2020. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report puts the cost at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity, about 9% of global GDP. No region of the world increased engagement last year.

That kind of headline tends to land as a weather report. Unfortunate, largely outside anyone's control, something to acknowledge and move on from.

The data tells a different story.

Within best-practice organizations in Gallup's own research, 79% of managers were engaged at work in 2025. That’s nearly four times the global average of 22%. The decline is real, but it is not universal. Some organizations are moving in the opposite direction, and the difference between them and everyone else is not industry, size, or economic condition. It is whether they treat engagement as something to measure and act on, or something to observe from a distance.

CultureID has been measuring employee experience across over 1,000 organizations for 14 years. One pattern holds across the entire dataset: 89% of clients improve their engagement scores in their second year of measurement. The gain comes from seeing where the problem actually lives, something most organizations guess at and get wrong.

Two questions on the CultureID survey produce a finding that reframes how most organizations think about engagement strategy. "I trust my supervisor." "Overall, this organization treats employees fairly." Across organizations with 50 or more employees, the answers to those two questions are almost always identical. The correlation between them is r = 0.98. An employee who strongly agrees with one is highly likely to strongly agree with the other.

They are not measuring two things. They are measuring one thing twice.

For most employees, the organization as an institution is too distant to experience directly. Senior leadership is abstract. Policy is impersonal. What registers as "the company" is the person closest to it: the immediate supervisor. Manager scores and overall organizational engagement scores move together almost one-for-one. Knowing the average score employees gave their managers predicts 80% of an organization's overall engagement number.

This is why the global decline is concentrated where it is. Gallup's 2026 report identifies manager engagement as the primary driver of the overall drop. Manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022, reaching 22% in 2025. Managers used to carry an engagement premium over the people they led. That gap has closed. And because manager engagement and organizational engagement travel together, the decline at the manager layer pulls the whole number down.

The CultureID benchmark adds a structural dimension to that finding. Across 9,701 manager records, top-quartile performance drops steadily as team size grows. At 2 to 4 direct reports, 28% of managers reach the top performance quartile. At 8 to 10 reports, that falls to 15%. Above 11 reports, fewer than 10% get there. Gallup's own research confirms the same pattern: manager engagement declines as spans of control grow.

The behaviors that separate high-performing managers from low-performing ones, consistent feedback, visible recognition, genuine attention to each person, require time per person. As team size grows, the math works against the manager. An overextended manager is a structural problem, not a personal failing.

Organizations that understand this stop asking why engagement is low and start asking where it is low and what is making it hard for those managers to do their jobs. That shift, from observation to diagnosis, is what the 89% improvement rate reflects.

Global engagement is falling. For organizations paying close attention to where engagement actually lives, it is rising.