70+ Employee Engagement Statistics for 2026

Last updated: June 2026. By Beth Williams, CEO, Primeast North America.

Why this matters: the cost of low engagement

Disengagement is not a soft problem. It carries a hard price, and that price is rising.

• Low employee engagement costs the global economy around US$10 trillion, roughly 9% of global GDP. (Gallup, Global Employee Engagement Continues to Decline, 2026)
• The single-year decline in 2024 alone cost the world economy an estimated US$438 billion in lost productivity. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• Each percentage point of engagement represents roughly 21 million employees worldwide. (Gallup, 2026)

That last number reframes the whole conversation. A two-point fall is not a rounding error. It is tens of millions of people quietly checking out, and a measurable drag on global growth. To understand what is actually moving, it helps to start with what employee engagement is and then look at where the numbers are heading.

What you’ll find in this report

This report compiles the most recent, verified employee engagement statistics for 2026, drawn from primary sources including Gallup, CIPD, Engage for Success, Korn Ferry, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and the ONS. Jump to any section:

• Global employee engagement statistics
• The manager engagement crisis
• Engagement and business performance
• Wellbeing and engagement
• Work setting and the remote-work paradox
• Retention and the Great Detachment
• AI and employee engagement
• Engagement by demographic
• UK employee engagement statistics
• US employee engagement statistics
• What this means for leaders
• How to cite this page, and our sources

Global employee engagement statistics

The headline figure has changed, and it is the main reason this report needed rebuilding. For years the story was slow progress. Now engagement is going backwards.

• Just 21% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2024, down from 23% the year before. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• Engagement fell again in 2025, to a global average of around 20%. (Gallup, 2026)
• This is only the second time engagement has dropped in 12 years. The other fall was in 2020. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• No region increased its engagement in 2025. (Gallup, 2026)

The previous edition of this report led with “23% engaged”. That was the peak, not the present. The current picture is a workforce that is slowly, steadily detaching, and the decline has one main author.

The manager engagement crisis

If you want to know why global engagement is falling, look at managers. They are disengaging faster than the people they lead, and that matters more than any other single statistic in this report, because managers set the weather for their teams.

• Global manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% in a single year. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• Individual-contributor engagement stayed flat at 18% over the same period. The decline is concentrated in the management layer. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• Engagement among female managers fell by 7 points, and among managers under 35 by 5 points. (Gallup, press release, 23 April 2025)
• Managers account for around 70% of the variance in their team’s engagement. (Gallup, Why Managers Are the Key to Engagement)
• Employees who report to a highly engaged manager are 59% more likely to be engaged themselves than those who report to an actively disengaged manager. (Gallup, Managers’ engagement makes a difference)

This is the leverage point. Managers are stretched between senior expectations and team needs, often promoted for technical skill rather than people skill. That is a known pattern: skilled workers often struggle when they move into management, and inconsistent management carries a real cost to performance. Fix the manager layer and the rest of the curve starts to move with it.

Engagement by region and country

Region by region, the 2024 picture is mixed, but the trend line is down or flat almost everywhere. These are the share of employees engaged, with the change on the prior year.

• United States and Canada: 31% engaged (down 1 point), still among the highest in the world. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• Latin America and the Caribbean: 31% engaged (up 2 points), a new regional high. (Gallup)
• South Asia: 26% engaged (down 3 points), the fall driven largely by India. (Gallup)
• Post-Soviet Eurasia: 26% engaged (up 2 points). (Gallup)
• Southeast Asia: 26% engaged (up 1 point), more than double its 2011 level. (Gallup)
• Australia and New Zealand: 23% engaged (up 1 point). (Gallup)
• Sub-Saharan Africa: 19% engaged (down 1 point). (Gallup)
• East Asia: 18% engaged (unchanged). (Gallup)
• Europe remains the lowest-engaged region in the world, for the fifth year running. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)

At country level, the latest Gallup three-year rolling figures show:

• United States: 32% engaged. (Gallup, US country data)
• Indonesia: 27% engaged, unchanged on the prior period. (Gallup, Indonesia country data)
• South Africa: 18% engaged, a 5-point fall. (Gallup, South Africa country data)

Engagement and business performance statistics

The business case has not weakened, which is what makes the decline so costly. Gallup’s meta-analysis, drawn from more than 180,000 teams, compares the most engaged business units with the least engaged. The gap is stark.

Highly engaged teams (top quartile) versus the least engaged (bottom quartile) see:

• 78% lower absenteeism. (Gallup, Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition)
• 21% lower turnover in high-turnover organizations, and 51% lower turnover in low-turnover organizations. (Gallup)
• 23% higher profitability. (Gallup)
• 18% higher sales productivity, and 14% higher production-record productivity. (Gallup)
• 63% fewer safety incidents, and 32% fewer quality defects. (Gallup)
• 10% higher customer loyalty and engagement. (Gallup)
• 70% higher wellbeing in the workforce. (Gallup)

Engagement is not a wellbeing nicety that sits to one side of the business. It tracks directly to profit, safety, quality, and retention. Which is why a two-year decline should worry any leadership team.

Wellbeing and engagement statistics

The human cost of the decline shows up most clearly in wellbeing, and the latest numbers are the worst on record.

• Only 33% of employees worldwide are thriving in life, the lowest figure in over a decade. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• Half of engaged employees are thriving in life, compared with only a third of those who are not engaged. (Gallup, Global Engagement Falls for the Second Time)
• Around 20% of employees experience loneliness for much of the previous day, and it is highest among the fully remote. (Gallup, Employees Worldwide Feel Lonely)
• About 40% of employees experienced a lot of stress the previous day. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace)
• In Sub-Saharan Africa, daily stress reached a new high of 47%. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• In the US, the fourth quarter of 2025 was the first time on record that more workers were struggling (49%) than thriving (46%). (Gallup, Worker Thriving Declines, 2026)

Disengagement and poor wellbeing feed each other. Spotting the early signals is a core management skill, which is why it helps managers to know how to spot employee burnout and to recognize change fatigue before it hardens into disengagement.

Work setting and the remote-work paradox

Where people work shapes how engaged they are, but not in the way most return-to-office debates assume. The data reveals a genuine paradox.

• Engagement by work setting: fully remote 31%, hybrid 23%, on-site but remote-capable 23%, and on-site non-remote-capable 19%. (Gallup, The Remote Work Paradox, 2025)
• Yet fully remote workers are the least likely to be thriving: only 36% are thriving, compared with 42% of hybrid and on-site-capable workers. (Gallup)
• Around 75% of office workers want to work away from the office at least some of the time. (Korn Ferry, Workplace Flexibility Checklist)
• 58% of workers would stay in a job they disliked if it offered flexible working, and 66% would quit if a flexibility policy stopped working for them. (Korn Ferry)
• Of the 59% of employees who work full-time in the office, only 19% actually want to be there. (Korn Ferry, Workforce 2025)
• 60% of remote-capable employees want a hybrid arrangement, about a third want fully remote, and fewer than 10% want to be fully on-site. (Gallup, Indicator: Hybrid Work)

The lesson is not “remote good, office bad”. It is that the most engaged group can also be the most isolated. Flexibility drives engagement, but connection drives wellbeing, and leaders have to design for both.

Retention and the Great Detachment statistics

Employees are not necessarily quitting in larger numbers. They are detaching: staying in post, but disengaged and watchful. Gallup calls it the Great Detachment.

• 51% of employees say it is a good time to find a job, the lowest figure since 2021. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025)
• 50% of employees are either watching for or actively seeking a new role. (Gallup)
• In the US, only 46% think it is a good time to find a job, with job-market optimism down 23 points since 2019. (Gallup)
• US employees are job-seeking at the highest rate since 2015, while employer satisfaction sits at a record low. (Gallup, The Great Detachment)
• 80% of workers say they would stay because they have a manager they trust. (Korn Ferry, Workforce 2025)

That final number closes the loop on the manager crisis: the same managers who are disengaging are also the strongest reason people stay. Retention strategy increasingly runs through the manager. It also runs through fairness and meaning, which is why values alignment has become a retention strategy in its own right, and why more HR teams are using predictive analytics to get ahead of retention risk.

AI and employee engagement statistics

Artificial intelligence is now a live factor in how engaged, anxious, or optimistic people feel about their work. The picture is split between excitement and fear.

• Around 80% of professionals want to improve their AI proficiency. (LinkedIn, Workplace Learning Report 2024)
• At AI-advanced “frontier” organizations, 93% of workers are optimistic about their future work opportunities, compared with 77% globally. (Microsoft, 2025 Work Trend Index)
• Around 40% of workers worry about their job stability, with AI cited as the single biggest source of that fear. (Adecco, Global Workforce of the Future 2024)
• About half of employees in customer service and R&D have a positive outlook on generative AI. (McKinsey, Superagency in the Workplace, 2025)
• In the UK, only 16% of employees have had tasks automated by AI, but 85% of those who have say it improved their work. (CIPD, Good Work Index 2025)

The engagement risk is not the technology itself. It is the uncertainty around it. Where leaders give people skills, clarity, and a say, optimism rises sharply. Where they leave a vacuum, fear fills it.

Engagement by demographic statistics

The decline is not evenly spread. Younger employees and the management layer are pulling the average down fastest.

• Younger employees are disengaging quickest: in the US, Gen Z engagement fell by 5 points year on year. (Gallup, US Employee Engagement Sinks to a 10-Year Low)
• Engagement among managers under 35 fell by 5 points globally, and among female managers by 7 points. (Gallup, press release, 23 April 2025)
• 49% of Gen Z employees want better communication and teamwork training, compared with 27% of baby boomers. (Korn Ferry, Workforce 2025)
• UK senior managers feel more pressured than their teams: 25% are always or often under excessive pressure, against 19% of non-managers. (CIPD, Good Work Index 2025)

The generation entering and rising through the workforce is also the one most openly asking for development. That is an opportunity, not just a risk.

UK employee engagement statistics

The UK picture is one of stubborn stagnation rather than sharp decline, with a few signs of recovery in 2025.

• The UK’s national engagement score was 62 out of 100 in both 2022 and 2023, rising to 65 in 2024, and remains below pre-pandemic levels. (Engage for Success, UK Employee Engagement Survey)
• Employees with no access to learning and development score just 47 on the engagement index, against 75 for those with five or more development opportunities. (Engage for Success)
• Only about two in five UK employees (42%) feel that senior leaders and line managers sufficiently prioritize people issues. (Engage for Success)
• Just 32% of UK employees say they feel full of energy at work, and 51% are enthusiastic about their job. (CIPD, Good Work Index 2025)
• 50% say time flies at work, and 50% feel immersed in what they do. (CIPD)
• 23% of UK employees feel exhausted at work, 21% feel under excessive pressure, and 12% feel lonely at work. (CIPD)
• Only 52% feel they are paid appropriately for their responsibilities and achievements. (CIPD)
• UK workplace wellbeing sits against a broadly stable national backdrop: 4.9% of UK adults reported low life satisfaction in late 2025, broadly unchanged from 5.3% a year earlier. (ONS, Measuring Progress, Well-being and Beyond GDP, June 2026)

The pattern is clear: where employees get development and feel their leaders prioritize people, engagement holds up. The starting point is measurement, and a good employee engagement survey gives leaders the baseline they need to act.

US employee engagement statistics

The US is where the decline is sharpest. Engagement has fallen to a level not seen in a decade.

• Only 31% of US employees were engaged in 2024, the lowest level since 2014, and it held at 31% into 2025. (Gallup, US Employee Engagement Sinks to a 10-Year Low)
• 17% of US employees are actively disengaged. (Gallup)
• Every one-point change in engagement represents roughly 1.6 million US employees. (Gallup)
• Only 46% of US employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% in March 2020. (Gallup)
• Just 39% strongly agree that someone at work cares about them as a person, down from 47% in 2020. (Gallup)
• Only 30% strongly agree that someone encourages their development, down from 36% in 2020. (Gallup)

The biggest declines are in the basics: clarity of expectations, feeling cared for, and feeling encouraged to grow. These are not perks. They are the day-to-day work of a manager, which brings the data back to where it started.

What this means for leaders

The numbers point to one conclusion. Engagement is falling, managers are the cause and the cure, and the fixes are within reach. Three moves matter most.

1. Re-engage and equip your managers first. They move about 70% of the variance, and they are the group disengaging fastest. Developing the manager layer is the single highest-return action available to you. This is the core of what we do at Primeast, through experiential leadership development and performance management training that changes behavior, not just understanding.

2. Measure engagement properly, then act on it. A score you do not act on erodes trust. Start with a clear baseline using an employee engagement survey, and close the loop visibly. Small, well-led actions, including better feedback and practical ways to motivate a team, compound over time.

3. Resolve the wellbeing and flexibility tension deliberately. Your most engaged people may also be your most isolated. Design for connection as carefully as you design for flexibility.

How Primeast helps

For nearly 40 years, Primeast has helped organizations in more than 40 countries develop leaders, teams, and cultures that thrive. The manager engagement crisis is exactly the kind of challenge our work is built for: practical, experiential development that equips managers to lead well under pressure and turns engagement data into sustained behavior change.

If your engagement numbers are telling you something, start with your managers. Explore our leadership development programs or start a conversation with our team.

Methodology and sources

This report compiles the most recent, publicly available employee engagement statistics as of June 2026, drawn from primary sources and verified against each organization’s original release. We update it annually so the figures stay current. Where a widely quoted figure has been superseded (for example the previous “23% engaged” and “US$8.9 trillion” numbers), we use the latest published data and note the change.

Primary sources used in this report:

• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025 and Global Employee Engagement Continues to Decline, 2026
• Gallup, US Employee Engagement Sinks to a 10-Year Low, The Remote Work Paradox, The Great Detachment, and Worker Thriving Declines, 2026
• Gallup, Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition
• CIPD, Good Work Index 2025
• Engage for Success, UK Employee Engagement Survey
• Korn Ferry, Workforce 2025 and Workplace Flexibility research
• Microsoft, 2025 Work Trend Index
• LinkedIn, Workplace Learning Report 2024
• McKinsey, Superagency in the Workplace, 2025
• ONS, Measures of National Well-being, June 2026