According to a September 21, 2026 analysis by Gallup titled “How Can Leaders Improve Employee Engagement and Company Culture?”, the fastest way to rebuild a disengaged workforce runs through a single role: the manager.

Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, and Gallup’s research finds that declines in manager engagement account for much of the recent downturn. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, manager engagement fell 9 percentage points globally between 2022 and 2025, from 31% to 22%. Over the same period, engagement among individual contributors slipped by just 1 point, from 20% to 19%.

The stakes are high because managers carry outsized influence. Gallup research finds that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, and its 2024 Q12 meta-analysis of more than 180,000 manager-led teams shows that more highly engaged managers have more engaged teams.

Three reasons engagement is falling

Gallup identifies three factors that may be behind low engagement.

Employees lack connection to the culture. As of 2026, just 2 in 10 U.S. employees feel connected to their company’s culture. Those who strongly agree they feel connected are 4.3 times as likely to be engaged, 5.3 times as likely to recommend their organization as a great workplace, 62% less likely to feel burned out very often or always, and 47% less likely to be looking for another job. As of May 2025, 32% of U.S. employees described their workplace as isolated or impersonal.

Managers aren’t meeting employees’ engagement needs. According to Gallup’s May 2026 research, only 34% of U.S. employees strongly agree they have the opportunity to do what they do best every day, 32% that they have had opportunities to learn and grow in the last year, 31% that someone at work encourages their development, and 29% that they received recognition or praise for good work in the last seven days.

Managers need development as coaches. Drawing on data from more than 60 million employees published in its 2019 book It’s the Manager, Gallup notes that employees who receive daily feedback from their manager are 3 times more likely to be engaged than those who receive it once a year or less. Employees whose manager involved them in goal setting were nearly 4 times more likely to be engaged.

Five ways leaders can develop their managers

Gallup recommends that leaders:

• Prioritize development over training, investing in ongoing, individualized development rather than one-time sessions that provide information without changing behavior.
• Define what great coaching looks like, including the frequency, format and focus of coaching conversations.
• Measure manager effectiveness using team-level engagement and culture data, and use the results to guide development.
• Model the behaviors they expect, by investing in their own development and actively coaching the managers who report to them.
• Invest in strengths-based development, so managers can coach each employee as an individual rather than using the same approach with everyone.

Why it matters

Gallup’s 2024 Q12 meta-analysis, its 11th edition, compares business units in the top and bottom quartiles of engagement. The top quartile shows median differences of 23% in profitability, 18% in productivity (sales) and 10% in customer loyalty, along with 78% lower absenteeism, 63% fewer safety incidents and 51% lower turnover in low-turnover organizations.

Gallup defines engaged employees as “psychological owners of their work” who bring energy, commitment and purpose to their work every day. Not engaged employees, by contrast, are present but psychologically detached.

As the analysis concludes, leaders who want to improve engagement over time should build a culture employees can connect to and develop managers who reinforce that culture at the team level.

Source: Gallup, “How Can Leaders Improve Employee Engagement and Company Culture?”, September 21, 2026. gallup.com

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