27% to 22%: The Manager Engagement Cliff
Global engagement just hit a five-year low, and the people we keep asking to fix it are checking out too.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 put global employee engagement at 20% for 2025, the lowest since 2020, with a claimed $10 trillion in lost productivity attached to it. Jenni and I spent a good chunk of Episode 63 on that number, but the figure that caused the most conversation was a different one.
Managers used to carry an engagement premium. They were reliably more engaged than the people they led. That premium is gone. Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022, and the steepest fall came between 2024 and 2025, sliding from 27% to 22%. Managers are now only about as engaged as their teams, which matters because Gallup's whole argument is that engagement ladders down from the top.
Here is the part that nags at me. If it ladders down, and managers are flat, then the honest question is how engaged the people above them are. Nobody is engaging the leaders. We pile expectation on the manager layer while quietly stripping it out, cutting spans, removing whole tiers, and handing what is left to whoever survives the reorg. Then we act surprised when the survivors run on empty.
Jenni and I also kept circling the same doubt: what is the number supposed to be? Peak engagement was 23% in 2022. If the high-water mark is 23% and the floor is 20%, and the gap between them is worth trillions, then either the measure is broken or the target is a fantasy. No organisation I have ever worked with reports engagement in the twenties. Internally the figure is always 70, 80, 90. Same concept, wildly different maths, and we keep treating the Gallup version as gospel.
So the practitioner takeaway is not "do more engagement." It is to stop treating engagement as a dial you crank and start asking what people are actually being asked to be engaged in, and who is responsible for the manager tier that everything supposedly depends on. Jenni has a fuller argument on this coming in a piece for Forbes, and it is worth your time when it lands.
Also in this episode:
We opened on the resignation of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, where the BBC's coverage singled out his communication, calling him stiff and wooden in an era that rewards authenticity. Jenni argued the skill can be taught. I pushed from the American side: the UK has had four prime ministers in five years, while the US has had five presidents since the early nineties. When you swap leaders that fast, nobody sticks around long enough to build the credibility that good communication is meant to carry. If you want Jenni's deeper work on leadership credibility, it is on her site.
Then the remote-versus-hybrid muddle. A New York Times Opinion post claimed remote work explains a third of the deterioration in American mental health over 15 years, drawing a sharp correction from Adam Grant, who pointed to 108 studies showing hybrid is healthier than full-time office. They are both right, and that is the problem. The post is about fully remote work, Grant's reply is about hybrid, and the two get jammed into the same pot. If you are communicating about ways of working inside an organisation, that sloppiness costs you. Name the thing you actually mean.
We closed the main run on Dorie Clark's The Long Game, which Jenni brought in. Her line that stuck with me is that most of life is spent in a deception phase, the long stretch where the work shows no results and you start doubting yourself. That is most comms and culture work, and it is most of building something like Frequency from zero. Short-term pressure is the default in the leadership teams Jenni works with. The book is a decent argument for holding a longer line, as long as you are honest that the long game asks you to endure the boring, invisible middle.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
Real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience.
Chuck Gose and Jenni Field skip the buzzwords and get straight to what matters. New episodes every week.
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