Employee engagement has sunk to its lowest rate in a decade. For businesses, the cost of disengagement in 2024 was almost US$438 billion in lost productivity (Gallup 2025).

But here’s what many missed:

📉 The drop in engagement was driven almost entirely by managers.

And with generational turnover accelerating, that group is about to become a majority of your management layer.

If engagement doesn’t improve, in five years, companies will be facing:

👉 So the real question is: What is going on in management?

 And more importantly: What can HR actually do to fix it?

🗞️ In case you missed it: The Employee Experience and Business Performance Summit is starting in three weeks! Learn more here.

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Now let’s zoom in on what’s happening at the manager level, where culture, clarity, and performance collide.

Managers sit at the intersection of culture, performance, communication, and trust.

When companies look at declining engagement, they often treat it as a cultural issue or a generational shift. But the data tells a different story.

Across three primary sources (Gallup, Culture Amp, Emtrain), we discovered a disturbing pattern.

Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%. The steepest declines were among young managers and women in leadership roles, with a 5 to 7-point drop. This collapse in the middle layer of the organization explains the global stall in engagement. Gallup found that contributor engagement stayed flat at 18%, which means the drop came from those expected to model, guide, and support.

Managers are still showing up. They’re praised for being supportive, but they’re running out of energy. Their ability to coach and give quality feedback weakens over time. After two years in the role, manager effectiveness begins to plateau. Senior managers in particular who give shorter, less actionable feedback are 33% less likely to hold regular one-on-ones (the sign of a quiet disengagement that hurts team alignment and decision-making).

In our own correlation analysis across ten regions, stress showed a moderate positive relationship with disengagement, meaning the more stress employees report, the more likely they are to disconnect from work. And managers are no exception. They’re absorbing pressure from both above and below, often without resources or permission to reset expectations. When stress becomes constant, the first thing that disappears is relationship quality, and that’s what team performance depends on.

What employees are feeling shows up in the Emtrain Workplace Culture Outlook. The steepest year-over-year declines were in trust, integrity, authenticity, and allyship. These are relational dynamics, and in most companies, they live or die based on how managers behave. As Emtrain puts it, “There’s a disconnect between what employers believe they’re doing and how employees experience it.”

Managers, those who carry the emotional load of your company, are burning out, disengaging, and disconnecting from their teams. They have not been equipped with the tools nor rely on support to lead people through complex realities. The whole system is failing.

So what now? We need more than individual training or tools. It’s time to fix the system managers operate in — and that starts with leadership.

Employee engagement is unraveling at the management layer. But solving it can't fall on HR alone. Senior leadership must step in because leadership behavior shapes the environment where managers operate.

Our Manager and Leadership Development Summit earlier this year added more evidence: the gap between what executives expect and what managers are equipped to do keeps growing.

Here are some practical strategies HR can implement together with senior leadership to rebuild employee experience top down and middle out.

Leadership development often starts too late, after a title is granted. But capability doesn’t begin with promotion. Influence, clarity, and team trust need to be built far earlier in someone’s career.

Managers are under pressure, and most aren’t equipped to handle it. Gallup data shows high daily stress among managers under 35. Culture Amp shows that emotional agility, the ability to name, regulate, and redirect complicated feelings, is a key differentiator for high-performing teams.

One-off trainings don’t change behavior. And check-the-box programs rarely stick. Instead, managers need simple, ongoing tools that connect directly to their day-to-day work.

When values are abstract, they don’t translate. Most employees don’t feel confident that their company lives the culture it promotes. This disconnect shows up in trust, inclusion, and team dynamics.

Leadership isn’t measured by output alone. It shows up in how teams work, feel, and grow. Instead of relying on top-down ratings, use metrics that reflect team experience, feedback habits, and trust.

Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what hundreds of HR and business leaders told us when we asked why managers are burning out.

We ran a quick poll on LinkedIn asking: “What’s the biggest reason managers are disengaged or burned out?”

And the comments? Brutal honesty.

🗣️ “Most managers end up firefighting all day. That takes away the real joy of leading.”

🗣️ “It’s not just the workload, it’s the atmosphere.”

🗣️ “This isn’t an HR issue. It’s a leadership failure.”

🗣️ “All of the above. Plus, office politics. And trust issues. And… you get the point.”

🗣️ “Until CEOs take ownership, HR will keep playing whack-a-mole.”

And yes… the meme illustrates them.

Ready to take action? Download our new 15-page toolkit packed with diagnostics, checklists, and step-by-step ideas to fix the manager crisis.

This free 15-page toolkit brings together insights from Gallup, Culture Amp, and Emtrain to help you diagnose what's breaking, rebuild support systems, and track the right metrics.

It's packed with practical tools, including a human dynamics audit, team clarity checklist, and a blueprint for strategic manager enablement.

Want proof that this works? Here’s how one global talent provider turned recognition and trust into retention gains.

Wilson is a global talent solutions provider headquartered in Tampa, Florida. With 1,000+ employees across more than 65 countries, it helps organizations find and retain top talent. Their business is people, and that makes employee experience a core part of their success model.

As Wilson expanded globally, maintaining connection, culture, and retention across a borderless workforce became more difficult. The company needed a scalable way to create shared experiences of appreciation, especially in distributed teams. Instead of relying on top-down tactics, Wilson’s leaders embedded recognition into daily work. They trained managers, redesigned onboarding to include peer-to-peer appreciation, and ensured recognition was tied to company values. The system was built for participation — not just performance reviews.

Join us at the Employee Experience and Business Performance Summit (October 7-9, 07:00 am - 11:00 am Pacific Time), a three-day virtual event where more than 50 HR leaders will explore how EX design, manager enablement, people analytics, and cross-functional ownership will define the future of performance.

📅 When: October 7-9 | 07:00 - 11:00 am Pacific Time

💰 Online - Free to Attend

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