The scale of disengagement.
Engagement has fallen to its lowest level since the pandemic. The 2026 Gallup data shows a workforce that is, on the whole, switched off — and managers are taking the hardest hit.
20%
of employees globally were engaged at work in 2025 — down from a peak of 23% in 2022–23, the first time Gallup has recorded two consecutive years of decline.Gallup — State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report
64% / 16%
are not engaged / actively disengaged respectively — the large middle that shows up but has checked out, plus a vocal minority working against the organisation.Gallup — State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report
Managers
have been hit hardest: manager engagement fell, and manager wellbeing dropped most among older and female managers — the people expected to hold teams together.Gallup, 2026
Lowest
engagement is in Europe (12%), well below the global average — a structural drag on productivity across the region.Gallup — State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report
What it costs.
Disengagement is not a soft metric. Gallup puts a hard number on it, and at the organisation level it converts directly into lost productivity, turnover and absence.
~$8.8tn
is the estimated annual cost of low engagement to the global economy — roughly 9% of global GDP.Gallup estimate
$9.6tn
is the productivity Gallup estimates the world could add if engagement reached best-practice levels — the size of the opportunity, not just the cost.Gallup, 2026
0.5–2×
annual salary to replace an employee — and disengaged, burned-out employees are the most likely to leave, making disengagement a leading driver of turnover cost.SHRM; Gallup, 2026
Presenteeism
— disengaged employees who stay produce less while still on payroll — is widely estimated to cost more in aggregate than absenteeism.Occupational-health literature
Put a number on it
Our cost-of-burnout calculator estimates the turnover, productivity and absence cost for your own headcount, salary and sector — with every assumption shown.
What drives it.
Disengagement is rarely about effort or attitude. The data points to structural causes — and to depletion as a leading one.
Managers
account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement, yet fewer than half report having had any formal management training.Gallup
Burnout
and disengagement are linked: depleted employees disengage. Chronic workload, poor recovery and low autonomy erode both at once.Maslach & Leiter; Gallup
Capacity
— the physical and cognitive headroom to do the work — is the layer engagement surveys miss entirely, and a leading early indicator of disengagement risk.Thrive at Work
The capacity signal.
Engagement tells you whether people are switched on. It can't tell you whether they have the capacity to stay that way. Our four-market validation study (n=5,922) quantifies the gap.
up to 5.2×
more return on an engagement initiative when it's aimed at low-capacity teams rather than already-resourced ones — capacity tells you where to spend.Thrive at Work — four-market validation, n=5,922, 2026
up to 37%
of eNPS variance is explained by capacity beyond what engagement captures — the signal an engagement-only tool can't recover.Thrive at Work — four-market validation, n=5,922, 2026
52% → 88%
Employee-NPS rises across the Thrive range — the higher the capacity, the more people stay and the less disengagement costs.Thrive at Work — within-instrument validation, 2026
Method & sources.
This page curates published engagement statistics alongside Thrive at Work's own validation data. External figures are summarised directionally with the source and year given; the global cost and engagement figures are Gallup's. Figures attributed to Thrive at Work come from our four-market validation study (n=5,922, 2025–26) and are labelled as such.
We review this page quarterly and refresh figures as new editions of the underlying reports are published. Last reviewed June 2026.
- Gallup — State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report (published April 2026, data collected 2025). Global engagement (20%), the not-engaged (64%) / actively-disengaged (16%) split, daily stress (40%), Europe (12%) and manager engagement. The ~$8.8tn / ~9%-of-GDP cost of low engagement is Gallup's flagship estimate from the report narrative.
- SHRM — Cost of replacing an employee. Replacement cost commonly estimated at one-half to two times annual salary.
- Maslach & Leiter — Areas of Worklife. The framework linking workload, control and recovery to disengagement and burnout.
- Thrive at Work — four-market validation study, n=5,922, 2025–26. Capacity's unique predictive variance, the engagement-return multiplier, and the retention gradient.