North America remains the most engaged region
Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020 and the second consecutive year of decline, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report released Wednesday. The figure is down three percentage points from a peak of 23% in 2022.
The research firm estimates that disengagement costs the global economy more than $10 trillion in lost productivity in 2024, or roughly 9% of global GDP. South Asia recorded the steepest regional drop, falling five percentage points year over year. No region of the world increased engagement in 2025.
Gallup CEO Jon Clifton identified management – not technology – as the central issue.
“This report establishes a global baseline for management effectiveness in the AI era,” Clifton said. “Businesses are investing heavily in AI, but the results are not showing up in the bottom line. Gallup’s data points to an answer the corporate world has largely ignored: the manager.”
The firm found that manager engagement dropped nine points since 2022, with the sharpest single-year decline occurring between 2024 and 2025, when it fell five points from 27% to 22%. By contrast, engagement among individual contributors has remained largely stable. Gallup noted that in best-practice organisations, 79% of managers were engaged – nearly four times the global average.
The report also points to AI adoption as a compounding challenge. Among US workers in organisations that have implemented AI, 65% reported a positive impact on their personal productivity, yet only 12% strongly agreed that AI had transformed how work gets done at the organisational level. A separate survey of executives in the US, UK, Germany, and Australia found that 89% reported no measurable impact of AI on their company’s labour productivity in the past three years.
North America leads, but cracks are showing
The US and Canada continued to report the highest employee engagement of any region, at 31%. US workers led at 32%, compared with 21% in Canada.
Yet both countries showed deteriorating confidence in the labour market. The region’s job market optimism fell 10 percentage points to 47%, placing it second-last globally among the 10 regions surveyed – behind only the Middle East and North Africa. Since 2019, the region has shed 23 points, down from 70%. By comparison, 52% of employees globally said it was a good time to find a job.
Employee well-being also continued to slide. Just 51% of workers in the US and Canada were classified as thriving – a new regional low. Globally, the thriving rate edged up one point to 34%, the first improvement in three years, led by gains in Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe, which each rose two points.
Despite the modest global improvement in well-being, the report found that daily stress, anger, and sadness among workers worldwide remained above pre-pandemic levels. Leaders fared particularly poorly on daily experience: compared with individual contributors, senior leaders were substantially more likely to report experiencing stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness the previous day.
Concerns about AI-related job displacement are also rising. In the first quarter of 2026, 18% of US employees said it was very or somewhat likely their job would be eliminated within five years due to automation or AI – a figure that rose to 23% among workers in organisations where AI has already been implemented.
Gallup conducted the survey across more than 160 countries and territories, drawing on data from 263,810 respondents – 141,444 of them employed – collected between January and December 2025.
