The office doors reopen and, as every year in September, the topic of “return syndrome” comes up again. Unfortunately, the malaise spreading among desks is not a temporary fatigue, but a structural condition of workers. This is certified by the “State of the Global Workplace 2026” report by Gallup, the US research company known for its political polls, which annually conducts the largest study in the world on employees’ experience.
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The 2026 edition reveals that global employee engagement dropped to 20% in 2025, down from the peak of 23% reached in 2022, hitting the lowest level since 2020. A decline that, according to analysts’ estimates, would directly result in a loss of productivity estimated at 10 trillion dollars for the global economy, equal to 9% of GDP. Gallup’s employee engagement measure indeed gauges the psychological connection workers have with their job, their team, and their employer. And analyses conducted over the years have consistently shown how disengaged or actively disengaged employees lead to less profitable organizations, which in turn translates into slower economic growth.
Italy also plays its part in this phenomenon, with an engagement rate standing at 11%, a value lower than the European average (12%), although it has remained substantially stable in recent years after a sharp four-point drop between 2014 and 2015.
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The driving factor
The surprise contained in the study is that the recent decline in employee engagement is particularly due to the low engagement of managers.
Since 2022, managerial engagement has decreased by nine percentage points. According to the report, just between 2024 and 2025 it dropped by five percentage points, going from 27% to 22 percent. “In short – the report reads – managers once enjoyed an ‘engagement premium’ at work, but their involvement is increasingly limited.” Unless they work for organizations that adopt best practices. In that case, Gallup notes, 79% of managers feel engaged in their work, almost four times the global average.
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