📉 The real reason your engagement scores won't budge

Hi all!

Hope this week is off to a great start! Anyone else on their third cup of coffee?

Today we're looking at something that's been sitting in your engagement data for a while, but Gallup's latest numbers make it impossible to sidestep anymore.

Global employee engagement just hit a five-year low. And when you dig into why, the answer keeps pointing to the same place: managers.

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IN TODAY’S EDITION

😶 Let’s Unpick: Your engagement strategy has a manager problem

🛋️ The HR Break Room: Where does your organization stand on manager engagement right now?

📚 Additional Reading: NY bans credit checks in hiring, Meta's AI salary floors go public, and workers losing hours to broken systems every week.

OPENING THOUGHTS

😶 Your engagement strategy has a manager problem

Gallup just dropped their latest engagement numbers and global engagement is sitting at 20%. One in five employees. Engaged. Worldwide.

The other four? Physically present. Spiritually... elsewhere. 👀

But what makes this data different from the usual "engagement is declining" headline: this time, Gallup points squarely at managers as the primary driver. 😬 And when you look at the numbers behind that, the picture gets uncomfortable, fast.

Only 27% of managers are themselves engaged.

The people your entire engagement strategy runs through are three times more likely to be disengaged than engaged.

LET’S UNPICK

Right, so…

You have built a very thoughtful engagement strategy. You have surveys. You have pulse checks. You have action plans from those pulse checks. You have follow-up sessions about the action plans. You have possibly a dashboard.

And you have handed all of it to your managers to deliver.

Gallup's research shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement scores. Seventy percent. That means everything else you're investing in, your culture initiatives, your benefits, your wellbeing programs, your all-hands, is competing for influence over the remaining 30%.

So what happens when the 70% lever is broken?

🔵 Managers skip development conversations, not because they don't care, but because nobody is having those conversations with them.

🔵 They set unclear expectations because they themselves aren't clear on what's expected of them.

🔵 They offer little recognition because, well, when did someone last recognize them for something?

🔵 Their teams disengage. HR notices the falling scores. Designs a new engagement program. Hands it to the managers.

You see where this is going. 🔄

The uncomfortable truth is that most engagement interventions are designed for individual contributors and delivered through managers, without anyone stopping to ask whether the delivery mechanism is actually okay.

• ✅ We survey employees about their managers.

• ✅ We train managers on how to engage their teams.

• ❓️ But the question is "what does a disengaged manager actually need, and who is responsible for giving it to them?"

Gallup's data suggests manager disengagement looks almost identical to employee disengagement: unclear expectations, not enough development, not feeling heard, too much on their plate. Which makes sense. Managers are employees too. They just also happen to be the single biggest influence on everyone else's experience.

HR's job here isn't to add another initiative to an already overloaded manager's plate. Rather look at the conditions managers are actually working in and ask honestly: have we made engagement even possible for them?

🔗 Vibe Check: Global Employee Engagement Drops to 5-Year Low (The HR Digest)

🔗 U.S. Employee Engagement Declines From 2020 Peak (Gallup)

TAKEAWAY AND TRY

1. 🔍 Run a manager-specific pulse, separate from your employee survey. Ask managers directly about their own clarity, workload, development, and support. You genuinely cannot fix what you are not measuring at the right level.

2. 📊 Bring the 70/27 data to your leadership team and make the case plainly. Your engagement ROI depends almost entirely on the state of your manager population.

3. 🛑 Audit your current engagement program and ask: are managers the audience here, or just the delivery mechanism?

4. 🧑‍💼 Build a support structure specifically for managers. Peer cohorts, skip-level check-ins, protected development time. Managers need someone in their corner. Most of them currently don't have that.

5. 📋 Make manager wellbeing part of their own performance conversations. If managers aren't being asked about their engagement and development, you're holding them accountable for something they themselves aren't receiving. That's not a great look. 😬

TLDR;

Global engagement is at a 5-year low of 20%, and disengaged managers are the primary driver. With only 27% of managers engaged themselves, HR needs to stop routing engagement programs through a population that's running on empty, and start fixing the conditions managers are actually operating in.

THE HR BREAK ROOM

PRESENTED BY SELECTSOFTWARE REVIEWS

Attend live for a chance to win a $100 gift card!

Join this session to unpack Deputy’s Big Shift workforce data, with labor economist Dr. Shashi Karunanethy. The data reveals a surprising divide in frontline worker sentiment, with stress rising in some sectors while engagement improves in others.

For HR leaders navigating tighter labor markets, the central challenge is shifting from constant recruitment to sustainable retention — and learning how to keep the people you already have.

ADDITIONAL READING

1. 📋 NY Bans Credit Checks in Hiring (Yonkers Times) — Most New York employers can no longer factor credit history into hiring, pay, or promotion decisions as of April 18. If your screening process hasn't been updated, now would be the time.

2. 💸 Meta's AI Salary Floors Go Public Via Visa Filings (HR Executive) — Base pay up to $650k for an AI VP. That's the legally disclosed floor, not the ceiling. Your employees can see this too, by the way.

3. 🔔 Workers Losing 5+ Hours a Week to Broken Systems (HR Dive) — Nearly half of US employees lose more than 5 hours every week to inefficient tools and notification overload. 21% lose more than 10. It's not quiet quitting. It's just exhaustion wearing a productivity costume.

That’s It For Today!

Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠

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