Employee Engagement Statistics 2026: 61 Verified Numbers on Disengagement, Burnout, Loneliness and Retention

Employee engagement fell again in 2025, and most of the reasons are about connection, not perks. Only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged, manager engagement has collapsed to 22%, more than one in five workers is lonely on any given day, and the individual wellbeing programs companies bought in response appear, in a study of 46,336 UK workers, to leave participants no better off. That is the story these 61 employee engagement statistics tell — and every one of them links to the organization that produced it, verified against the source page on 31 August 2026.

This is for HR professionals, senior leaders and internal communications teams who need current numbers with the edition named. Gallup alone has published three different “cost of disengagement” figures in three years, and most articles still quote the 2016 meta-analysis. We cite the 2024 edition, the 2026 State of the Global Workplace, and the U.S. data for the first half of 2026 (published July 2026), and we say which is which.

We run team building workshops for companies, so we have a stake in engagement being taken seriously. None of the data below is ours, and where the research complicates the sales pitch — remote employees are the most engaged group, for instance — we have kept it in.

Employee engagement statistics: 10 numbers to know in 2026

• Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the lowest since 2020 (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026).
• Low engagement cost the world economy about $10 trillion, 9% of global GDP (Gallup, 2026).
• 31% of U.S. employees were engaged in the first half of 2026, flat since 2024 and down from 36% in 2020 (Gallup, July 2026).
• Manager engagement dropped from 30% to 27% to 22% across 2023–2025 (Gallup, 2026).
• Top-quartile business units on engagement are 23% more profitable and have 78% lower absenteeism (Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis, 2024).
• 22% of employees worldwide felt lonely a lot of the previous day, up from 20% two years earlier (Gallup, 2026).
• Well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to have left two years later (Gallup–Workhuman, 2024).
• 42% of voluntary leavers say their manager or organization could have prevented it (Gallup, 2024).
• Only 44% of employees say they are thriving at work, down from 66% in 2024 (Mercer, Global Talent Trends 2026).
• Participants in individual wellbeing programs were no better off than non-participants across 46,336 UK workers (Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, 2024).

Global employee engagement fell again: the 2026 numbers

State of the global workplace

1. Only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025 — the lowest level since 2020, down from 23% in 2022–23 and 21% in 2024. Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026
2. 64% of employees globally were not engaged and 16% were actively disengaged in 2025. Gallup, 2026
3. Low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of GDP. Gallup, 2026
4. The 2024 decline from 23% to 21% alone cost $438 billion and was only the second decline in 12 years. Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2025
5. ADP's separate global measure finds fewer than 1 in 5 workers (19%) fully engaged in 2025, unchanged from 2024. ADP Research, 2026

U.S. employees

6. U.S. engagement fell to a 10-year low of 31% in 2024 (17% actively disengaged), down from a 36% peak in 2020 — about 8 million fewer engaged employees. Gallup, 2025
7. In the first half of 2026, 31% of U.S. employees were engaged and 18% actively disengaged; younger workers, hybrid workers and managers have declined most since 2020. Gallup, July 2026
8. The share of U.S. employees who clearly know what is expected of them fell from 56% to 46% between March 2020 and 2024; “someone at work cares about me” fell from 47% to 39%, and “someone encourages my development” from 36% to 30%. Gallup, 2025
9. “Quiet quitters” make up at least 50% of the U.S. workforce; in mid-2022 the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees fell to 1.8 to 1, the lowest in almost a decade. Gallup, 2022
10. 51% of U.S. employees are watching for or actively seeking a new job, while only 28% think it is a good time to find a quality one — and for the first time more workers are struggling (49%) than thriving (46%). Gallup, 2026

Engagement by year

Source: Gallup Global Indicator: Employee Engagement, updated May 2026.

11. Exclusively remote employees are the most engaged group worldwide (30%), ahead of hybrid (25%), on-site remote-capable (24%) and on-site non-remote-capable employees (17%); the U.S. and Canada region leads at 31%. Gallup, 2026

Highly engaged teams: the business case

The figures below are median differences between top- and bottom-quartile business units in Gallup's 11th meta-analysis — 183,806 units, 3.35 million employees, 347 organizations, 90 countries. They are not company-level comparisons, and they replace the 21%/41%/17% figures from the 2016 edition that still circulate.

12. Top-quartile business units are 23% more profitable than bottom-quartile units. Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition, 2024
13. Engaged teams show 18% higher productivity in sales and 14% higher productivity on production records and evaluations. Gallup, 2024
14. Absenteeism is 78% lower in top-quartile units. Gallup, 2024
15. Turnover is 21% lower in high-turnover organizations and 51% lower in low-turnover organizations. Gallup, 2024
16. Top-quartile units record 63% fewer safety incidents, 32% fewer quality defects, 10% higher customer loyalty and 70% more thriving employees. Gallup, 2024
17. Workers are 13% more productive when happy, making more calls per hour and converting more of them, in a six-month study of BT contact-center staff. Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, 2019
18. Disengagement and attrition could cost a median-size S&P 500 company $228–355 million a year in lost productivity. McKinsey Quarterly, 2023

Burnout and stress statistics

The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon — “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” — with three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism and reduced efficacy (WHO, ICD-11). The numbers suggest all three are common.

19. 76% of employees experience burnout at least sometimes, and 28% “very often” or “always”; the frequently burned-out are 63% more likely to take a sick day and 2.6 times as likely to be job hunting. Gallup, 2020
20. 40% of employees worldwide experienced a lot of stress the previous day in 2025. Gallup, 2026
21. 44% of U.S. workers feel burned out, 45% emotionally drained and 51% “used up” at the end of the day; burned-out workers are nearly three times as likely to be job hunting (45% vs 16%). SHRM, Employee Mental Health in 2024
22. Workers with a strong sense of belonging are 2.5 times less likely to feel burned out, and 40% of managers say their mental health declined when they took a leadership role. SHRM, 2024 / SHRM press release, 2024
23. Only 44% of employees say they are thriving at work, down sharply from 66% in 2024; concern about losing their job to AI rose from 28% in 2024 to 40%. Mercer, Global Talent Trends 2026
24. 72% of U.S. employees face moderate to very high stress at work; Gen Z is now the most burned-out generation (74% at least moderate burnout vs 66% of millennials), and only 48% are confident their employer cares about their mental health, down from 54%. Aflac WorkForces Report, 2025–26

The infinite workday

25. Employees are interrupted every two minutes during core hours — 275 times a day — and receive 117 emails and 153 Teams messages daily; 40% of people online at 6 am are already reading email. Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2025
26. Meetings after 8 pm are up 16% year over year, 29% of active workers are back in their inbox by 10 pm, and half of all meetings land in the 9–11 am and 1–3 pm focus windows. Microsoft, 2025
27. 80% of the global workforce say they lack the time or energy to do their work, and 48% of employees say work feels chaotic and fragmented. Microsoft, 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report
28. 37% of desk workers log on outside standard hours at least weekly; those who do so because they feel pressured score 20% lower on productivity and report twice the burnout. Slack Workforce Index, 2023

Loneliness and connection at work

Loneliness is where engagement statistics and mental health statistics meet, and it is the clearest signal that disengagement is partly a relationship problem.

29. 22% of employees worldwide felt lonely a lot of the previous day in 2025 — unchanged from 2024 and up from 20% in 2023. Gallup, 2026
30. Fully remote employees report far more loneliness (25%) than fully on-site employees (16%), hybrid in between at 21%, in Gallup's 2023 data; the 2024 data put it at 27%, 23% and 20%. Gallup, 2024 / Gallup, 2025
31. Loneliness tracks disengagement: in the U.S., 17% of engaged employees are lonely versus 31% of the actively disengaged, and worldwide, leaders report 10 points more daily loneliness than individual contributors. Gallup, 2024 / Gallup, 2026

What loneliness costs employers

32. Loneliness affects about 1 in 6 people worldwide and is linked to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year — around 100 every hour. WHO Commission on Social Connection, 2025
33. Stress-related absenteeism attributed to loneliness costs U.S. employers an estimated $154 billion a year; lonely workers miss more than five extra days and are nearly twice as likely to intend to quit within 12 months. Cigna, 2020 (2019 survey)
34. More than half of American workers now classify as lonely; non-lonely workers are more willing to work harder for their company (74% vs 63%), and lonely workers who feel understood by their manager are more than twice as likely to report high vitality (19% vs 8%). The Cigna Group, Loneliness in America 2025
35. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. employees strongly agree they have a best friend at work; women who do are more than twice as likely to be engaged (63% vs 29%). Gallup, 2018 / Gallup, 2022

We collect the wider evidence on connection — including what employees say they would trade for it — in our team building statistics.

Employee retention and turnover statistics

36. 42% of employees who voluntarily left say their manager or organization could have done something to keep them; 36% talked to no one before deciding to resign, and 45% say no leader ever proactively discussed their satisfaction or future. Gallup, 2024
37. Replacing a leader or manager costs about 200% of salary, a technical professional 80% and a frontline employee 40%; voluntary turnover costs U.S. businesses about $1 trillion a year. Gallup, 2024 / Gallup, 2019
38. 75% of employee departures were preventable, according to Work Institute's 2025 Retention Report, based on more than 120,000 exit interviews; its conservative estimate puts turnover cost at around 33% of base pay. Work Institute, 2025 Retention Report / Work Institute, December 2025

Why employees leave

39. Among Americans who quit in 2021, 63% cited low pay, 63% no advancement, 57% feeling disrespected and 45% a lack of flexibility. Pew Research Center, 2022
40. A toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting attrition. MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022
41. 3.2 million Americans quit their jobs in June 2026, a quits rate of 2.0%. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS, August 2026
42. Glassdoor reviews mentioning “distrust” rose 26% and “misaligned” 149% from 2024 to 2025, and career-opportunity ratings for remote and hybrid workers fell from 4.1 in 2020 to 3.5 in 2025. Glassdoor, Worklife Trends 2026

If you are trying to put a number on your own attrition, our guide to calculating employee turnover rate walks through the formula.

The world's managers: engagement, recognition and feedback

If one variable explains the decline, it is the manager. Gallup's data puts 70% of the variance in team engagement on the manager, and managers themselves are disengaging faster than anyone else.

43. Manager engagement fell from 30% in 2023 to 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025, with under-35 managers down five points and female managers down seven in 2024 — while best-practice organizations keep 79% of managers engaged. Gallup, 2026 / Gallup, 2025
44. The manager accounts for 70% of the variance in team engagement; employees of well-enabled managers are 50% engaged versus 36%, and 54% versus 39% plan to still be there in two years. Gallup, 2024

Recognition and feedback

45. Employees who receive high-quality recognition are 45% less likely to have left their organization two years later. Gallup–Workhuman, 2024
46. Only 22% of employees say they get the right amount of recognition; those whose recognition meets four or more of Gallup's five pillars are 65% less likely to be job hunting and up to nine times as likely to be engaged. Gallup–Workhuman, 2024
47. 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged, yet only 16% say their last manager conversation was extremely meaningful; 15–30 minutes a week is enough if it happens regularly. Gallup, 2023
48. Managers who took part in best-practice training showed up to 22% higher engagement than non-participants. Gallup, 2025

Belonging, wellbeing and internal communications

49. Employees who strongly agree their employer cares about their wellbeing are 69% less likely to be job hunting, 71% less likely to report a lot of burnout, three times as likely to be engaged and five times as likely to strongly advocate for their company. Gallup, 2022
50. The share of U.S. employees who strongly agree their organization cares about their wellbeing collapsed from 49% in May 2020 to fewer than one in four by early 2022 and has stayed near that level since; where a supervisor keeps people informed, 78% strongly agree their organization cares. Gallup, 2022 / Gallup Wellbeing Indicator, 2026
51. 75% of workers have felt excluded at work and 56% can't or are reluctant to share parts of their identity; the top builder of belonging is “checking in on how someone is doing” (32%). EY Belonging Barometer 3.0, 2023
52. 85% of leaders say building adaptive capacity is critical but only 7% say they are leading in helping their workforce grow and adapt; one-third of workers went through 15 major changes in the last year. Deloitte, 2026 Global Human Capital Trends
53. Only 34% of employees worldwide are thriving in life (56% struggling, 9% suffering), up one point on 2024. Gallup, 2026

Remote employees, hybrid work and meeting load

54. As of May 2026, 26% of remote-capable U.S. employees work fully remotely, 52% hybrid and 22% on-site; six in 10 fully remote workers say they are extremely likely to look elsewhere if flexibility is taken away. Gallup Hybrid Work Indicator, 2026
55. About 25% of paid days in the U.S. were work-from-home days in May 2026; 12% of full-time employees were fully remote, 26% hybrid and 62% on-site. WFH Research, June 2026
56. 46% of full-time office workers report feeling disengaged versus 30% of remote employees; 40% would start job hunting if forced back full-time, and workers would give up 9% of salary for flexible hours. Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2025 (full report)
57. Ineffective collaboration costs the Fortune 500 an estimated 25 billion work hours a year; 65% of knowledge workers prioritize fast replies over their top priorities and 55% find it hard to track down information. Atlassian, State of Teams 2024

What actually moves engagement — and what doesn't

This is the section we would want a senior leader to read if they read nothing else. The evidence is that individual-level fixes underperform, and that relational ones — managers, recognition, belonging — carry the weight.

58. Participants in individual-level wellbeing interventions — resilience training, mindfulness, wellbeing apps — appear no better off than non-participants across 46,336 workers in 233 UK organizations. Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre (Fleming), 2024
59. Poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year, yet every £1 spent on workforce mental health returns about £4.70; 63% of workers show at least one sign of burnout, up from 51%. Deloitte UK, 2024
60. Depression and anxiety cost the global economy $1 trillion a year in lost productivity, and every $1 invested in treatment returns $4. World Health Organization, 2016
61. 50% of U.S. workers don't feel comfortable using or asking for mental-health resources, and 52% feel pressured to prioritize the organization's wellbeing over their own. SHRM, 2024

Read together with the manager and recognition data above, the pattern is hard to miss: engagement moves when someone at work notices you. That is a cheaper intervention than most, and it is the reason we design our workshops around small groups and a shared task rather than a stage and an audience — see our practical list for lifting team morale.

Employee engagement statistics we refused to include

These appear in most 2026 listicles and in AI-generated answers. We traced each one and either found no primary source or found the figure superseded.

How we verified these employee engagement statistics

Every figure was checked against the producing organization's own page or own press release — Gallup, SHRM, Pew, Microsoft, WHO, BLS, Mercer, Deloitte, university research centers — on 31 August 2026, with the edition named. We excluded aggregators entirely and dropped anything we could not open, including the American Psychological Association's Work in America survey, whose pages blocked our checks. We will re-verify when the 2027 editions are published.

To cite this page: KraftStories (2026). Employee Engagement Statistics 2026: 61 Verified Numbers. https://kraftstories.com/blogs/team-building/employee-engagement-statistics. Please link to the primary source alongside us.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of employees are engaged in 2026?

Globally, 20% (2025 data, Gallup's 2026 report), with 64% not engaged and 16% actively disengaged. In the U.S., 31% were engaged in the first half of 2026 and 18% actively disengaged.

How much does employee disengagement cost?

Gallup estimates about $10 trillion in lost productivity worldwide in 2025, or 9% of global GDP. The single-year decline in 2024 cost an estimated $438 billion.

Are remote employees less engaged?

No. Exclusively remote employees are the most engaged group worldwide (30%), and the U.S. and Canada is the most engaged region (31%) — but remote employees are also the loneliest (25% report daily loneliness versus 16% on-site in Gallup's 2023 data). Engagement and connection are separate problems.

What is the biggest driver of employee engagement?

The manager. Gallup attributes 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager alone, and manager engagement has fallen from 30% to 22% in two years.

Do wellbeing programs improve engagement?

Individual-level programs — apps, mindfulness, resilience training — showed no benefit for participants across 46,336 UK workers. Recognition, meaningful weekly feedback and belonging show large, measurable associations with engagement and retention.

How many employees are burned out?

76% experience burnout at least sometimes and 28% very often or always (Gallup). SHRM finds 44% of U.S. workers feel burned out, and Aflac reports 72% face moderate to very high stress at work.

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