Find more insights on employee engagement and internal comms in the March issue of Strategies & Tactics.
After peaking at 23% in 2022 and 2023, employee engagement has declined to 20% in 2025, according to Gallup research. Each percentage-point drop represents roughly 21 million fewer engaged employees, potentially undermining business revenue and economic growth.
For context, employee engagement was just 12% in 2009, climbed to 22% by 2019, then fell to 20% in 2020.
Declining engagement among managers is driving much of the downturn since 2023, Gallup finds. Managers are typically more engaged in their work than individual contributors. Increasingly, however, managers’ engagement levels are converging with those of the people they lead.
Companies need engaged managers to adopt artificial intelligence successfully. A separate Gallup survey found that, aside from workplace integration, the strongest predictor of whether employees will use AI is whether a direct manager champions the technology.
In a first-quarter workforce survey, 18% of U.S. employees said it is “somewhat” or “very” likely their job will be eliminated within five years due to technological innovations such as automation or artificial intelligence. That share is up from 15% who said the same in the past two years.
In countries around the world, employee perceptions of the job market improved in 2025. The increase came entirely from fully on-site workers, whose perception of the job market rose two points. However, counter to the global trend, the U.S. and Canada saw 10-point drops in job-market optimism in 2025 — down 23 points since 2019.
Illustration: Andrii Yalanskyi
