The Human Performance Gap

Every year, Gallup publishes what has become the most comprehensive picture of the global employee experience. The 2026 edition, ‘The Human Side of the AI Revolution’, carries a message that those of us working in organisational wellbeing have been sounding for years: engagement is getting worse, and it’s quietly undermining the transformations organisations are counting on.

I want to take you through the key findings and share what I think they mean for organisational leaders today.

Workforce engagement has hit its lowest point since 2020

Globally, only 20% of employees are engaged at work – down from a peak of 23% in 2022. This is the first time in Gallup’s history that engagement has declined for two consecutive years.

These numbers are staggering. They reflect a workforce that has lost connection to the organisations they work for. That kind of disconnection doesn’t stay contained. It shapes how people show up, how teams function, and how organisations weather change.

For HR leaders, the implication is direct: if your organisation is planning significant transformation — whether AI adoption, restructuring or culture change — a disengaged workforce is an active risk.

Managers are disengaged more than anyone

The most striking finding in this year’s report concerns managers specifically. Since 2022, manager engagement has fallen by nine percentage points, far outpacing the decline seen among individual contributors. In 2025 alone, it dropped five points in a single year.

For decades, managers enjoyed what Gallup calls an ‘engagement premium’ – they were more engaged than the people they led. That premium has now disappeared. Managers are, on average, no more engaged than their teams.

This matters enormously. Managers are the primary interface between organisational strategy and team performance. They shape culture, model behaviour, and determine whether people feel seen and supported at work. When managers are struggling, everything downstream is affected.

The hidden cost of leadership

The data on senior leaders tells a different but equally important story. In one sense, leaders are doing well. They report higher levels of engagement and overall life satisfaction than those they manage. But zoom in to how they actually experience their days, and the picture changes sharply.

Compared to individual contributors, leaders are substantially more likely to have experienced stress, anger, sadness and loneliness. Leadership also offers little upside in positive emotion: leaders are less likely than individual contributors to report having smiled or laughed a lot.

Gallup points to why. Leadership brings greater social distance and, with it, the responsibility for making difficult choices that affect many people’s lives. That combination, borne largely in private, is a significant emotional load.

This is a cost that most organisations neither measure nor acknowledge. And it matters – not just for the wellbeing of individual leaders, but for how effectively they lead.

What this means for your organisation

The Gallup 2026 report is, at its core, a call to take the human side of performance seriously – not instead of productivity, but as its foundation. The organisations achieving world-class engagement share one thing: they treat employee experience as a long-term strategic priority, not a reactive intervention.

Based on both the data in this report and our work at The Wellbeing Project, there are two areas I’d encourage organisational leaders to prioritise right now.

________________________________________

1. Identify the causes of disengagement

The most common mistake organisations make is reaching for a solution before they understand the problem The starting point is identifying the root causes of disengagement. From our experience, the causes tend to sit across three areas:

1. The macro environment – restructuring, new technology, AI adoption, organisational change
2. The leadership environment – how leaders and managers interact with their people
3. The team environment – the day-to-day experience of work, relationships and psychological safety.

When you understand which of these is driving disengagement in your organisation, you can then shape a targeted response.

________________________________________

2. Build capability

Capability building means equipping people with the skills they need to navigate the demands of their role. Depending on the causes of disengagement, this might include helping people manage change, handle pressure or give and receive feedback.

________________________________________

3. Build capacity

Capacity building means creating the mental and emotional resources to carry out a role effectively. While capability addresses what people know and can do, capacity determines whether they have the internal resource to do it — particularly under sustained pressure. The focus here is individual resilience: developing the ability to absorb, adapt and recover from the demands of work overtime.

_______________________________________

A Final Thought

Gallup’s report confirms what we at The Wellbeing Project have long believed: wellbeing and performance are not in tension. Organisations that invest in one tend to see returns in the other. The human performance gap is real – and it is closable.

Author Bio: Sandra Ordel is a Senior Business Psychologist at The Wellbeing Project, specialising in workforce resilience and neuropsychology. She works with organisations worldwide to measure and strengthen resilience, helping leaders build high-performing teams and cultures of healthy performance.