State of the Global Workplace 2025

What Is the State of the Global Workplace?

Last year global employee engagement fell, costing the world economy US$438 billion in lost productivity.

The primary cause was a drop in manager engagement.

Since the pandemic, managers have been asked to square the circle of new executive demands and employee expectations. We are starting to see the toll.

But it is not going to stop with managers.

Manager engagement affects team engagement, which affects productivity. Business performance — and ultimately GDP growth — is at risk if executive leaders do not address manager breakdown.

The State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report examines the recent decline in worker engagement and wellbeing, its likely causes and the most promising solutions.

Disengagement cost the world economy $438 billion in 2024.

Global employee engagement fell two points to 21% last year, with lost productivity costing the global economy $438 billion.

Engaged employees produce better business outcomes than disengaged employees — and engaged teams have a measurable impact on organizational performance.

27% of managers globally are engaged at work.

Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% in 2024. Young managers and female managers experienced the largest declines.

If managers are disengaged, their teams are too. Seventy percent of team engagement is attributable to the manager. It's time to rethink the role of manager.

33% of the world's employees say they are thriving in their lives overall.

Employee wellbeing has been declining since its peak at 35% in 2022. Older managers and female managers experienced the biggest decreases in the past year.

$9.6 trillion in productivity could be added to the economy if the global workforce was fully engaged.

That would represent a 9% increase in global GDP.

But if leaders seize the moment, a productivity opportunity awaits. In fact, some organizations are already enjoying the benefits of a highly engaged workforce.

Manager engagement is the key to reversing declining productivity, improving employee wellbeing and unlocking trillions in economic potential.

Part Two: How’s Your Life Going?

Every year, Gallup asks the world’s workers how their lives are going. After several years of steady improvement, global employee life evaluations fell to 33% in the last two years.

Which employees experienced the largest decrease in wellbeing?

Managers. Older managers saw a five-percentage-point decline in wellbeing in the past year, and female managers saw a seven-percentage-point drop. At the same time, individual contributor life evaluations improved slightly.

Why did manager wellbeing decline?

Employee life evaluations measure how workers feel about their lives overall, which includes everything outside the workplace.

For example, employees in the United States/Canada and Australia/New Zealand regions have seen historic drops in wellbeing in recent years. While still high by global standards, both regions are now performing far below their historical averages.

Based on respondents’ dissatisfaction with their quality of life and income in both regions, it’s likely that housing costs and inflation are playing a significant role in their life evaluations.

However, since employees spend most of their lives working, it’s not surprising that work plays a major role in how they evaluate their lives.

• Half of employees who are engaged at work are thriving in life overall, compared with only a third of employees who are not engaged.

• Engaged employees are also less likely to report experiencing daily negative emotions, including stress.

When we consider the decline in both manager life evaluations and employee engagement, a deteriorating workplace environment is the common denominator.

As with engagement, the consequences are existential for a business.

Manager burnout eventually leads to declining performance, increased absenteeism and increased turnover — impacting the people they lead and the organization itself.

Global Workplace Data

The State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report includes a global summary of eight indicators of organizational resilience and performance:

• Employee Engagement
• Employee Life Evaluation
• Daily Emotions: Stress
• Daily Emotions: Anger
• Daily Emotions: Sadness
• Daily Emotions: Loneliness
• Employee Job Climate
• Employee Intent to Leave Job

How Gallup Measures the State of the Global Workplace

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement reflects the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace. Employees can become engaged when their basic needs are met, and they have a chance to contribute, a sense of belonging, and opportunities to learn and grow.

Gallup categorizes employees as engaged, not engaged or actively disengaged.

• Engaged employees are thriving at work. They are highly involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace. They are psychological “owners,” drive performance and innovation, and move the organization forward.
• Not engaged employees are quietly quitting. They are psychologically unattached to their work and company. Because their engagement needs are not being fully met, they are putting time but not energy or passion into their work.
• Actively disengaged employees are loudly quitting. They aren’t just unhappy at work. They are resentful that their needs are not being met and are acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers potentially undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

How Gallup Measures Employee Engagement

To determine the percentage of engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged employees, Gallup uses a proprietary formula founded on extensive research about how the engagement elements, as measured by the Gallup Q^12®, relate to various workplace outcomes. For this reason, employee engagement is a much higher bar than merely satisfaction or metrics that combine “strongly agree” and “agree” responses into a “percent favorable” engagement index.

The current standard is to ask each employee to rate the Q¹² statements using six response options, from 5 = strongly agree to 1 = strongly disagree, and the sixth response option — don’t know/does not apply — is unscored. Gallup’s proprietary formula does not require perfect agreement with all Q¹² elements for employees to be classified as engaged.

Gallup Q¹² Items:

12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.
13. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
14. I have a best friend at work.
15. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
16. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
17. At work, my opinions seem to count.
18. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
19. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
20. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
21. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
22. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
23. I know what is expected of me at work.

How Gallup Measures Wellbeing

Gallup’s Life Evaluation Index, which is included as part of the standard set of core questions on the Gallup World Poll, measures respondents’ perceptions of where they stand now and in the future.

Building on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, Gallup measures life satisfaction by quantifying the difference between the best possible life and the worst possible life using a simple two-part question. Gallup asks respondents to place the status of their current and future lives on a “ladder” scale with steps numbered from zero to 10, where zero indicates the worst possible life and 10 the best possible life.

Two-Part Life Evaluation Question

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.

On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (0-10)

Just your best guess, on which step do you think you will stand in the future, say about five years from now? (0-10)

How Gallup Defines Thriving, Struggling and Suffering

Gallup classifies respondents into one of three categories of wellbeing — thriving, struggling or suffering — and determines the percentage of respondents in each category.

Individuals who rate their current life at a “7” or higher AND their future life at an “8” or higher are “thriving.” Individuals are “suffering” if they rate their current AND future lives at “4” or below. All other individuals are “struggling.”

• Thriving:

  These respondents have positive views of their present life situation (7 or higher rating on best life present) and have positive views of the next five years (8 or higher rating on best life future). They report significantly fewer health problems and less worry, stress, sadness, loneliness, depression and anger. They report more hope, happiness, energy, interest and respect.

• Struggling

  These respondents struggle in their present life situation and have uncertain or negative views about their future. They report more daily stress and worry about money than thriving respondents do.

• Suffering:

  These respondents report that their lives are miserable (4 and below rating on best life present) and have negative views of the next five years (4 and below on best life future). They are more likely to report that they lack the basics of food and shelter and more likely to have physical pain and a lot of stress, worry, sadness and anger. They have less access to health insurance and care and more than double the disease burden compared with thriving respondents.

How Gallup Measures Employee Daily Negative Emotions

Gallup annually surveys around the world to determine people’s day-to-day experiences of emotions by asking if they experienced certain feelings during a lot of the previous day. This report focuses on the emotional experiences of employed adults.

More on Gallup Job Market Trends

As leaders seek to attract and retain talent, understanding more about employee perceptions of the job climate and why employees choose to join or leave an organization is critical. Employers can evaluate how these topics relate to their own organizational culture to create strategies for attracting top talent and keeping their star employees from being wooed away.

Age, Gender and Work Location in the State of the Global Workplace

Global and regional data are cut by age and gender to provide additional insights into the reported data. Global data are also cut by work location, which is only provided for those employees working full time (30 hours or more per week).

How Gallup Calculates the Cost of Not Engaged and Actively Disengaged Employees

Gallup estimates the annual cost of “not engaged” and “actively disengaged” employees in a three‑step process.

First, Gallup applies a proprietary formula to the Q¹² survey results to calculate the percentage of engaged, not engaged and actively disengaged employees. Assigning employees into these three categories is based on historical data from Gallup’s global employee database — guided by the relationship between a composite of the Q¹² engagement elements and performance outcomes.

Gallup and industry experts in academia have published numerous technical reports, including many iterations of meta‑analysis, substantiating the relationship between employee engagement and a variety of performance outcomes (Judge et al., 2001; Harter et al., 2002; Harrison et al., 2006; Whitman et al., 2010; Harter et al., 2010; Edmons, 2012; Mackay et al., 2017; Harter et al., 2020a-2020b). These published meta-analytic estimates are combined to estimate the true score correlation of employee engagement and productivity.

Next, widely used published statistical guides (standard utility analysis methods) are applied to the annual average salary (Hunter & Schmidt, 1983; Casio, 1996). This yields a per-person cost, spread across all workers, which, multiplied by the total number of workers who are 18 years old or older, produces the first estimate.

Standard utility analysis estimates include three general inputs:

The second estimate is based on a different economic measure — the country’s gross domestic product. The GDP figure is divided by the total number of workers to yield an estimated per-person worth of goods or services per worker.

Again, applying standard utility analysis methods, Gallup researchers calculate the percent increase in output per worker attributable to not engaged or actively disengaged workers becoming engaged (Hunter & Schmidt, 1996).

The percent increase in output is a function of the relationship between engagement and productivity and the assumed increase in standard score units in engagement. This increase in output per worker, applied against the average per-person GDP output figure, results in a per-person gain which, multiplied by the number of workers, results in the second estimate.

The two methods of estimating the economic value of lost productivity have resulted in similar figures in the past two decades. These cost estimates do not completely account for all other worker outcomes that are related to the engagement of workers, including safety, turnover, theft and healthcare costs.