Managers have been squeezed between new executive priorities and employee expectations. Many organizations experienced workforce changes after the pandemic, characterized by high turnover, rapid expansions and layoffs in some sectors. At the same time, employees have new demands for flexibility and remote work based on their pandemic experiences, but some companies have rolled back this flexibility. 

“Gallup research suggests leaders should rethink managerial roles entirely,” the report said. “By redesigning role responsibilities around performance coaching, organizations can improve team performance for the new workplace, not the old one.”

Global employee wellbeing fell for the second consecutive year. After five years of steady improvement, global employee life evaluations fell in 2023 and again in 2024, declining to 33%. Again, managers experienced the largest decrease in the percentage who rate their lives positively enough to be considered thriving, while individual contributors saw their life evaluations improve slightly.

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“Many factors influence how people feel about their life overall, including satisfaction with their income and the cost of living,” according to the report. “Nevertheless, many employees spend most of their lives working, and their work experiences influence their life evaluations. Half of employees who are engaged at work are thriving in life overall, compared with only a third of employees who are not engaged.”

Full engagement could add $9.6 trillion in productivity to the world economy. This is the equivalent of 9% of global GDP. Although the world’s workplace is trending in the wrong direction, science-based management practices show a promising way out. When organizations build their growth strategy around great management, the result is better customer service and higher productivity, sales and profits. These outcomes are reproducible across industries and cultures.

The best organizations Gallup has studied put manager training and development at the center of their strategy. Although even rudimentary training shows benefits, managers who receive best-practice training have seen their own engagement and their team’s engagement improve substantially. Management performance metrics improved by 20% to 28%.

“The future of global productivity depends on an engaged and thriving workforce,” the report concluded. “Gallup estimates that improving employee engagement through science-based management could unlock trillions in economic potential.”