The Manager Effect: Leadership Disengagement Behind 2024’s Productivity Dip

• Engagement crash: Only 21 % of workers feel engaged (-2 pp), costing US $438 bn in output. ​
• Epicentre = managers: Engagement among managers fell 30 % → 27 %; biggest drops in young (-5 pp) and female (-7 pp) leaders. Individual contributors stayed at 18 %.
• Why it bites: Managers account for 70 % of team engagement variance—their disengagement cascades to teams, squeezing GDP. ​
• Pressure cocktail: post-pandemic churn, budget cuts, hybrid-work tensions, and rush-to-AI leave managers “doing more with less.”

Well-Being Warning Lights: Manager Burnout Deflates Global Thriving

• Global stall: The share of employees who say they are thriving in life has flattened at 33 %, ending a decade-long climb. ​
• Manager dip: Well-being dropped most for older managers (-5 pp) and female managers (-7 pp), while individual contributors inched up. ​
• Regional red flags:
  • U.S./Canada thriving slid to 52 % — down from the high-60s a few years ago.
  • Australia/NZ fell to 56 % after hovering near 70 %.
    Rising housing costs and inflation top employees’ quality-of-life complaints. ​
• Work–life link:
  • 50 % of engaged workers are thriving vs. 33 % of the not engaged.
  • Engaged employees report far lower daily stress, anger, and sadness. ​
• Business risk: Declining manager well-being fuels burnout, absenteeism and turnover, eroding team performance, and widening the engagement gap they are already struggling to close. ​

From Data to Action: Three Moves that Flip the Engagement Curve

Gallup’s analysis shows the global slump isn’t inevitable—companies that treat science-based management as a core business strategy, not an HR side-project, consistently reverse it. Their evidence-backed playbook has three moves:

1. Start with universal role training. Fewer than half of managers worldwide have ever been formally taught how to lead. Even a basic course that clarifies expectations, metrics and people-leadership fundamentals cuts the share of actively disengaged managers by about 50 %.
2. Upgrade managers into coaches. Heavy, recurring investment in manager selection, strengths-based coaching, and frequent recognition lifts manager performance 20-28 % and pushes team engagement up to 18 %—gains that stick a year later.
3. Sustain growth with ongoing development. Training is the spark; continuous support is the fuel. Pairing role training with a career sponsor or mentor—and tying goals to clear outcomes—raises manager “thriving” from 34 % to 50 %. The result is a resilient, high-performing culture where managers model the behaviours they expect from their people, creating a flywheel of engagement and productivity.

World at a Glance: Key Signals From the 2024 Global Dashboard

• Engagement & well-being dip together
  • Engaged: 21 % of workers (-2 pp vs 2023).
  • Thriving: 33 % (-1 pp). ​
• Emotion index still elevated​
  Stress 40%, anger 21%, sadness 23%, loneliness 22%—little movement year-on-year, showing the pandemic-era emotional baseline has not reset. ​
• A restless labour market​
  While 51 % call it a “good time” to find work (-3 pp), 50 % are already scanning or actively hunting—evidence of pent-up churn if engagement stays low. ​
• Regional stand-outs
  • United States & Canada: Highest engagement worldwide (31 %) but also the world’s highest daily stress (50 %).
  • Latin America & Caribbean: Matches North America for top engagement (31 %) and records very low daily anger (14 %).
  • Europe: Lowest engagement on the planet (13 %) and the lowest anger (14 %), yet 57 % still say it’s a good time to find a job.
  • Post-Soviet Eurasia: World’s lowest daily stress (21 %) and the lowest intent to leave (35 %).
  • Middle East & North Africa: Second-lowest engagement (14 %) with very high stress (48 %) and anger (31 %).
  • Sub-Saharan Africa: Lowest share of workers “thriving” (18 %) and highest loneliness (30 %); also the world’s highest intent to leave (72 %).
  • East Asia: Low engagement (18 %) and high stress (48 %), but the lowest daily anger globally (17 %).
  • South Asia: Engagement sits at 26 %, yet thriving is the lowest (15 %), and daily anger is the highest (34 %).
  • Southeast Asia: Mid-range engagement (26 %), world-lowest stress (25 %), and strong job optimism (63 % say it’s a good time to find work).
  • Australia & New Zealand: World leader in thriving (56 %) and the best-rated job climate (72 %), but the second-highest daily stress (49 %).

Take-home: The global pulse shows marginal declines but stubbornly high negative emotions and a workforce poised to move, making the manager-focused fixes even more urgent.

Bottom line

“Employee wellbeing at work is dropping fast, engagement is headed down — and it’s all about burned-out managers.” — Brian Elliott, commenting on Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace findings

Global engagement and well-being have slipped back to their pandemic-era lows, costing an estimated billions in lost productivity last year alone. The data pinpoint a single leverage point: managers. When their own engagement and life satisfaction collapse, team motivation, retention, and output follow—yet the reverse is also true. Organizations that adopt science-based management, heavy manager training, and coaching-centric cultures routinely sustain engagement near 70 %, a level Gallup estimates could unleash US $9.6 trillion (≈ 9 % of global GDP). In short, the fastest way to revive growth, cut stress, and keep talent everywhere—from Europe’s listless teams to Africa’s flight-risk workforce—is to equip every manager to thrive and to lead like a coach.

FROM OUR EXPERTS 🎙️

I keep a close eye on what our Future Work Experts are thinking, saying, and questioning. I break down the key conversations and brainstorm practical steps we can take to move forward.

This week:

DIGITAL DNA AND DISTRIBUTED WORKS

​Harvard to Hollywood: Flexibility Is the Future of Work​

• ​Sophie Wade explores how leaders can navigate modern work challenges by focusing on people-first strategies, flexible structures, and continuous adaptation.
• She highlights insights from Harvard’s Prithwiraj Choudhury, who emphasizes the potential of AI-enabled digital twins to create workplace flexibility and enhance talent strategies.
• On the other end of the spectrum, Hollywood’s phased production model—as explained by producer Steven Puri—offers a practical blueprint for combining remote, hybrid, and onsite work to match the needs of different project phases.
• Together, these models reveal how intentional design, not one-size-fits-all policies, is key to scaling effectively in today’s fast-evolving landscape.

⚒️ Prompt: (1) Subscribe to Work in Progress and (2) Choose one fixed-role team in your organization. Ask: How could digital twin technology or phased hybrid models give them more flexibility without sacrificing performance? Pilot one change and measure its impact.

WORKPLACE EXPERIENCE

​When Work Follows the Vibe​

• ​Phil Kirschner introduces the term vibe officing to describe a shift in how people choose when and where to work—based on mood, purpose, and autonomy rather than mandates. Drawing on trends like vibe coding, he distinguishes between vibes (emotional feel), vibrancy (intentional design), and vibe officing (behavioral flexibility).
• Backed by data from CBRE, he notes that office vibrancy peaks when two-thirds of space is occupied, while 53% of employee time still goes to busywork—a gap AI could help close. He cautions against chasing “vibe revenue” without sustainable value, and urges leaders to treat work as a verb, supporting movement, choice, and AI-powered flow across physical and digital spaces.

⚒️ Prompt: Ask your team: “Are we working… or just vibing?” Then use their answers to kill one boring meeting, free up time for real work, and find the sunlight + WiFi combo that actually gets things done.

FUTURE OF WORK

​Designing the Future of Work with Intention​

• ​Emma Crockett, Head of People Insights at Atlassian, and Molly Sands, Head of the Teamwork Lab, emphasize that the future of work must be designed, not defaulted.
• Atlassian’s data shows that a few days of Intentional Team Gatherings—focused on doing, planning or learning the work—refresh connection and performance for months. They treat AI as a collaborative teammate, using an internal agent to craft agendas, run sentiment checks, and surface real-time insights, freeing humans for higher-order problems.
• Team effectiveness is the north-star metric, continuously monitored and linked to both engagement and output.
• Offices, rituals, and even culture itself are rebuilt from usage data, while every people-analytic project is framed “in service of” a defined business goal.

⚒️ Prompt: Map your core business goals, pick a single “team effectiveness” metric, and redesign one collaboration ritual—using AI to strip away admin—to prove that intentional, data-driven tweaks beat blanket mandates every time.

🔥 Quick Hits

(Leadership & Culture) Protect Your Organization’s Canaries // By Gustavo Razzetti​

• The employees who notice weak signals first—the “modern canaries”—are being stifled by toxic cultures and inattentive leaders.
• He outlines five safeguards: build trusted speak-up systems (e.g., Telia’s whistle-blowing line, Zappos’ Voice of the Employee), convert weak hunches into actionable intelligence through rapid huddles and tools like the Ambiguity Canvas, reward and even pay truth-tellers (DOJ payouts, HCL’s public feedback platform), codify dissent via values and rituals (NVIDIA’s intellectual honesty, Netflix’s “farm for dissent,” rotating “Devil’s Canary”), and foster a culture of courage that embraces vulnerability (Pixar’s “ugly babies,” Supercell’s “kill your own project”).
• ⚒️ Prompt: Spot your team’s truth-teller. Give them cover, celebrate their voice, and make speaking up a shared norm.

​

(AI & Change Management) Getting AI Right at Work // Featuring Rebecca Hinds, Asana​

• On Deloitte’s Capital H podcast, Rebecca Hinds unpacks why most AI rollouts fail: they’re flashy but shallow, missing the deep workflow fixes that truly move the needle. Leaders must identify AI skeptics, avoid “productivity theater,” and focus on solving real coordination issues, not just layering bots on broken systems. Crucially, success hinges on overlooked internal “bridgers”—those who span teams, build trust, and help AI feel practical. And when managers are “in the loop,” it fundamentally changes how employees engage with AI, for better or worse.
• ⚒️ Prompt: Map your internal bridgers—the trusted connectors across teams—and involve them early in your AI strategy. They're your secret to real adoption.

​

(AI & Real Estate) The AI Diffusion Dilemma: What Happens to Offices? // By Antony Slumbers​

• Antony Slumbers explores two conflicting views of AI’s trajectory—and what each means for the future of office space.
• One school, led by Princeton researchers, sees AI as a slow-burning general-purpose technology, requiring decades for broad adoption due to regulation, workflow redesign, and human inertia. The other, AI 2027, predicts a rapid cognitive automation revolution, where AGI and recursive self-improvement enable AI to replace vast swaths of knowledge work within years, not decades.
• The stakes? If augmentation wins, offices evolve; if automation dominates, demand could crash. Antony warns that the 2030–2035 window is a strategic danger zone, where even without full AGI, specialized AI could reduce headcount, restructure jobs, and bifurcate talent demand, placing massive risk on outdated office assets.
• ⚒️ Prompt: Planning for the future? Assume AI moves faster than expected. Rethink your office investments: Are you building for inertia, or for intelligent, agile superteams that won’t need the same space at all?

FUTURE WORK ROUNDUP 📰

I track what’s worth your attention—bringing you the news and updates that matter most to how we work, lead, and grow.

This week:

AI AT WORK

​AI at Work: Risk or Renewal?​

As AI advances, up to 60% of jobs in advanced economies may be at risk, according to the IMF, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs. But unchecked automation could destabilize society and shrink demand—because machines don’t buy products, people do. Many “growth” roles are already automatable, and tech hiring is declining despite rosy projections.

To ease AI anxiety, John Deere and Procter & Gamble are using automation to enhance, not replace human work. Deere cut warranty review time from 15 to 2 hours with large language models, and builds team buy-in through cultural touches like naming robots (hello, Cranky). At P&G, a four-day workweek was made possible by “lights-out” shifts running autonomously at night. Leaders agree: culture and mindset are the real drivers of successful AI adoption.

⚒️ Prompt: What’s one repetitive task in your team’s workflow that could be automated to unlock time for more creative, high-value work—and how will you frame that shift to build trust instead of fear?

LEADERSHIP MINDSET

​From Playing Not to Lose to Playing to Win​

Intel's failure to disrupt its own x86 dominance—while NVIDIA surged ahead—shows the cost of "playing not to lose." Defensive leadership is marked by fear of failure, tight control, and threat-biased decisions, limiting innovation and long-term value.

In contrast, bold leaders define success as value creation, delegate with guardrails, and foster psychological safety. Signals of a "play to win" culture include ring-fenced innovation budgets, rapid feedback loops, and leadership modeling of intelligent risk-taking.

Personal mastery—through white space, micro-breaks, and whole-self routines—is the inner edge leaders need to stay creative, courageous, and clear.

⚒️ Prompt: Ask yourself: What % of your leadership decisions last month were driven by fear of failure vs. ambition for impact?

→ Then, choose one recurring meeting where you’ll intentionally flip that ratio next week.

🔥 QUICK HITS:

• ​(Sustainable Office Innovation) Offices Turn Green with Vertical Farms:​
  As hybrid work leaves offices vacant, some companies are transforming these spaces into year-round urban farms growing greens and berries. These projects tackle food security, cut water use by up to 90%, and offer a surprising new layer of meaning to the future workplace.
• ​(Productivity + Digital Overload) 275 Interruptions a Day, Really:​
  Microsoft’s global report reveals workers are now facing up to 275 daily interruptions, driven by non-stop chats, unscheduled meetings, and late-night pings. Despite 53% of leaders demanding more productivity, 80% of employees say they don’t have the energy to do their jobs well, highlighting a growing mismatch between business demands and human capacity.
• ​(Resilient Leadership) ​Real Leaders Don’t Perform, They Align: In turbulent times, inside-out leadership helps leaders align purpose with action—grounding decisions in self-awareness, values, and trust. From reframing resistance to running “Intentional Action Workshops,” this approach boosts clarity, cohesion, and credibility across teams and stakeholders.
• ​(Politics + Finance) Trump vs. Fed: Power Struggle Resurfaces: Despite saying he won’t fire Jerome Powell, Trump is again pressuring the Fed to cut rates, igniting fresh concerns over the central bank’s independence. With tariffs likely to fuel inflation and stall growth, the Fed faces a “difficult judgment”: support the economy or defend price stability—while navigating a legal and political minefield.