Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025 — down from 21% the year before, and the lowest it has been since 2020. Gallup puts the cost of that disengagement at around $10 trillion in lost productivity, roughly 9% of global GDP. That’s a difficult backdrop for anyone about to invest in employee engagement training.

Big numbers tend to bounce off. So here’s the one from the same research that I’d actually put in front of a leadership team: manager engagement has fallen from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. Individual contributors have stayed broadly flat over the same period, ending at 19%.

Read that again. The gap between managers and their teams has almost closed — not because teams have caught up, but because managers have fallen back.

Why that matters more than the headline

Managers are the transmission mechanism for almost everything an organisation wants to change. Strategy, culture, safety, service, inclusion: all of it arrives at the frontline through a line manager, or it doesn’t arrive at all.

For years, the assumption was that managers ran slightly ahead of their teams on engagement — closer to the decisions, more informed about the reasons, more invested in the outcome. That premium is what made them useful as a conduit.

It’s gone. And a disengaged manager doesn’t block communication dramatically. They just relay it flatly. The message arrives technically intact and carrying no conviction whatsoever, and everyone in the room can tell.

Hybrid didn’t cause this, but it exposed it

Something changed in how managers do the job, and it happened without much comment.

The informal channel that used to carry most of the real work of management — the walk to the car park, the aside after a meeting, the noticing that someone was quiet today — largely disappeared, and was replaced by scheduled calls. Scheduled calls are excellent for status updates and nearly useless for everything else. Nobody books a thirty-minute Teams slot to mention that they’re struggling.

So managers lost their diagnostic tools and kept all of their responsibilities. Meanwhile their own upward communication thinned in exactly the same way, so they’re now supporting their teams through change they themselves only half understand.

And for the very large proportion of the workforce who never sat at a desk in the first place — drivers, engineers, retail and care staff, warehouse teams — none of this was ever solved. It was simply less visible, because they weren’t in the meetings where it would have been noticed.

What we’re not measuring

Most engagement surveys ask people how they feel. Very few ask what they know.

The questions that would actually tell you something: Can you explain, in your own words, what your organisation is trying to achieve this year? When did you last hear something significant from your own manager rather than from a company-wide email? If you raised a concern last quarter, do you know what happened to it? Do you know how your work connects to anything beyond your own targets?

You can score highly on engagement and badly on all four. That combination — people who feel positively about the organisation but have no idea what’s going on in it — is far more common than the survey data suggests, and it’s fragile. It holds until the first difficult announcement.

Where employee engagement training should focus

Re-engage the managers first. There is no route to an engaged workforce that runs through a demoralised management layer. Give them the information before their teams get it, the reasoning behind decisions, and somewhere honest to take their own doubts.

Rebuild the informal channel deliberately. What used to happen by accident now has to be designed. Shorter and more frequent beats longer and scheduled. Walking the floor, the depot, the site is not nostalgia; it’s data collection.

Design for how people actually work. If your people don’t have a company email address, an intranet post is not communication. It’s an audit trail.

Make listening visibly consequential. One change made and publicly attributed to something a team raised does more for engagement than a year of surveys.

The uncomfortable version

Engagement isn’t a mood to be improved with recognition schemes, away days and a round of employee engagement training. It’s a fairly accurate assessment people are making about whether their contribution registers anywhere.

Twenty per cent of the world’s workforce currently thinks it does. The rest aren’t wrong to wonder — and the managers who’d normally reassure them are, right now, wondering the same thing themselves.

If your managers are relaying messages rather than leading them, let’s talk about employee engagement training and leadership communication. Explore our website, read our blog, and follow us on LinkedIn to learn more and discover ways to grow a more successful business.