287: Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026

Dear friends

The month’s writing break is done, and we are back. Apologies if you joined this community whilst I was away. I should have set up an “out-of-office doing deep writing” message, but didn’t. Next time.

For those of you who reached out to say you were missing the letter, thank you. I also had a birthday whilst I was gone: lunch at Buitenverwachting’s Beyond, followed by margaritas at Kalk Bay’s Salt and the obligatory book purchases from Kalk Bay Books. Thank you also for all the birthday messages; I appreciated them.

/strategy
Whilst we were apart, Gallup released the State of the Global Workplace 2026, a study of workplace engagement worldwide.

They measure engagement using 12 questions spanning the range from basic clarity to personal growth:

1. I know what is expected of me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work (Connie Hadley’s work is great on this topic).
11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

The report landed with its customary exclamatory headline takeaways.

This time, “the global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity”.

Here’s the thing: Gallup started measuring employee engagement in 2009, it has never, not once, been higher than 23% (best-in-class organisations average above 70%).

The rest of us, Gallup says, are either not engaged or actively disengaged.

They described not engaged as: quietly quitting, psychologically unattached to work and company, people whose engagement needs are not being fully met, are putting time but not energy or passion into their work.

Actively disengaged? Loudly quitting, resentful that our needs are not being met and acting out our unhappiness. Every day, these people potentially undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish (In Sub-Saharan Africa, 18% of employees fall into this category. 1% less than those actively engaged). 

You might protest, work is not and should not be everything. You are right. Friends, family, hobbies, good food, good wine (for me at least), sleep, daydreaming – these are all integral parts of life. And still, most of us are going to spend about 35 years at work and, for the most part, at least a quarter of our weeks during those years. It’s a long time to be in environments that leave us feeling meh.

There is much in the world that horrifies us and seems beyond our control, but this, in our places of influence, is doable. And if we made work a place where people thrive, not just survive, who knows what might be unlocked?

It may seem impossibly complex to do, but a recent publication in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, with the compelling title –  A meta-analytic review of 60 years of role stressor research – concluded, after drawing on 515 studies, 588 samples, and 787,959 participants, that “role ambiguity emerges as the most consistently detrimental stressor”.

In other words, if you want to increase engagement, and therefore performance, help people know what needs to be done, by whom, with what, in order to achieve what outcomes.

No, this does not means KPIs, OKRs, or whatever your favourite three-letters are. It means actively engaging with the people around you, helping them (and you) make sense of complexity, explore what is possible and agree action. This is not a once-a-year review thing; it is a lived leadership practice. Do it, and you’ll make a difference to more or less the biggest part of people’s adult lives.

You don’t need to launch a global non-profit to change lives, you just need to help the people you lead to explore, understand, agree and be enabled to do what needs to be done. 

//self
Most of you occupy leadership roles. This is where Gallup gets interesting.

On the one hand, higher levels of leadership report higher levels of engagement and well-being.
On the other hand, leaders are substantially more likely to report experiencing a lot of stress (+7 points), anger (+12), sadness (+11) and loneliness (+10).

What a bind. On the one hand, you’re likely to see more possibilities than others around you. On the other hand, your own emotional experience reduces your capacity to see that their experience is likely different to yours.

Add to this extensive research that says leadership inevitably removes us from, at least some aspects of, reality and you can see that if you’re not self-aware, if you’re not intentional, if you don’t have clear and well-established leadership and connection rituals, you may well be a vector driving employee disengagement.

You can’t eradicate this tension. It is a consequence of being human, navigating complexity.  You can act with awareness.  

///soul
At the end of March, Red Hot Chilli Pepper bassist, Flea released a new album, Honora. I loved the LA Times headline, “At 63, Flea finally becomes the jazz musician he always dreamed of being”. It’s the age at which many corporate policies say “Retire”.

On Honora he is not in funk-punk mode but occupies instead a jazzier sound, still playing the bass as well as the trumpet. Whether it’s a jazz album is not important. How Flea describes it to the New York Times is.

“To me, it all goes together so well, ’cause it’s all so me. I never had a conversation with myself about ‘Oh, this fits,’ or, ‘This doesn’t fit.’ It was just, ‘I like this feeling, I like this feeling, I like this feeling,’ create a loose structure for what it could be, get together with musicians who are sensitive and caring, and go for it.”
This is someone who is engaged, and the way he is engaged is telling: he is being himself, ‘it all goes together so well, ’cause it’s all so me’. This truth is at the heart of high-performing teams. If you work in ways that leverage you at your best, if you create the space for the others to do the same, you get engagement, you get performance.

That is it for today. It is good to be back. See you next week.

All the best

Karl

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