Is The Global Workplace At A Breaking Point?
Gallup recently published their “State Of The Global Workplace – 2025 Report“ (1). The opening page begins with the question, “Is The Global Workplace At A Breaking Point?”
Gallup highlight the alarming decline in global employee engagement, which fell in 2024 from 23% to 21%. In 12 years of workplace engagement being measured by Gallup the only other year that it has fallen was during the Covid lockdowns in 2020, when it also fell by 2%. We all remember the difficulties of those times and it puts into perspective the scale of challenge that is needed to cause a 2% drop in the engagement of the global workforce.
Europe, where I live and do much of my work, has the lowest regional level globally of engaged employees at a mere 13%. 73% report being not engaged and 15% are actively disengaged.
Europe Employee Engagement 2025
And An Even Larger Decrease In Manager Engagement
Gallup’s report is direct in identifying the cause of this drop in employee engagement. “The primary cause was a drop in manager engagement.”
“Since the pandemic, managers have been asked to square the circle of new executive demands and employee expectations. We are starting to see the toll…. Manager engagement affects team engagement, which affects productivity. Business performance — and ultimately GDP growth — is at risk if executive leaders do not address manager breakdown.”
Manager engagement in 2024 fell from 30% to 27%, the highest of any group.
Engagement of managers aged under 35 fell even more, by 5%.
Female managers reported an even larger 7% fall in engagement.
Older managers, which would include senior and C suite leaders, additionally reported a 5% decline in well being during 2024.
The implications of continuing on this trajectory are serious. Gallup concludes, “If manager engagement continues to decline, it won’t stop with managers, and it won’t stop with engagement. The productivity of the world’s workplace is at risk.”
Stress Has Also Increased
A pattern of increasing collective stress can also been seen through our physiology.
Firstbeat are the world’s leading provider to businesses and professional sports of physiological analytics to measure wellbeing, stress and recovery. They have 20 years of experience in developing their technology and provide the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analytics for Garmin sportswatches.
Firstbeat have seen a pattern of increasing stress in the workplace. Looking at 100,000 working age people over 2020 – 2024 they saw the proportion of people reporting feeling stressed rise from 44% to 49% (2). The proportion reporting feeling very stressed doubled, from 7% to 14%.
Firstbeat’s sample population will be primarily organisational employees. Like the Gallup data there are likely to be a multitude of reasons for this increase in reported stress, many of which do not involve the workplace. However, people will still bring these worries, this allostatic load, to their workplace whatever is causing it.
Organisational Wellbeing Is The Single Most Important Driver Of Organisational Performance
Workwell Leaders is a Singapore based initiative that brings C Suite leaders together across sectors to build healthier organisations. They recently published a white paper, the Workwell Leaders Impact Measure (3), that was the first comprehensive and large-scale study to pinpoint the most influential drivers of both organisational wellbeing and performance. They explored the effect of 200 different factors affecting organisational well being.
“Of over 200 factors explored, organisational wellbeing emerged as the single most important driver of organisational performance.”
Workwell Leaders define organisational wellbeing as, “the collective state that emerges from the interconnected wellbeing of its core components: individuals, teams and leaders”.
Organisational wellbeing describes what it feels like when your team or business unit is working really well. A state of flow.
And The Most Influential Driver Of Organisational Well Being?
Leader wellbeing is the most influential driver of organisational well being.
“Leader wellbeing is 56 times more effective in shaping organisational wellbeing than stress management and resilience programmes, and 50 times more effective than wellbeing apps. It is also 11 times more effective in shaping organisational performance than employee participation in stress management or resilience programmes.” (3)
The Well Being Of Leaders
The hypothesis being presented by these three separate surveys is a simple one.
The wellbeing of leaders is the most important influence on organisational wellbeing.
And organisational wellbeing drives organisational performance.
If you want to improve organisational performance you need to start with the well being of your leaders. I prefer to use health rather than wellbeing. More specifically:
Your cognitive, emotional and physical health.
For example, even one night’s sleep deficit fundamentally shifts your metabolism. You hunger for junk food and your blood glucose level fluctuates, affecting your mood, cognition and energy levels. Your higher executive functions become harder to access – focus, judgement, decision making. The Amygdala in your emotional reptile brain becomes even more sensitive to negative inputs and sets off the the fire alarm in your nervous system that triggers unexpected emotional responses. Your emotional intelligence recedes and you fail to attune to the simple non verbal clues of the emotional dynamics around you. After several days you start to become insulin resistant.
And that is just sleep.
Imagine the impact of that on the people you are leading. The effect of a leader’s negative mood on his or her followers is well researched. For example, an increase in a leader’s negative emotions causes their followers to become silent (4).
It then becomes easier to understand the fundamental cause and effect chain that a leader’s wellbeing drives organisational performance.
Proper Selfishness
The British management writer, Charles Handy, called this Proper Selfishness (5). If you are a leader, then your wellbeing, your physical, emotional and cognitive health, is not just a nice to have, it is an essential requirement for your organisation’s performance.
The first step as a leader, and as an organisation, is to recognise this and make it a priority.
“Leader wellbeing is 56 times more effective in shaping organisational wellbeing than stress management and resilience programmes.”
The core ingredients are your nutrition, sleep, physical activity and self regulation. The Gallup report stresses the importance of training and development in core behaviours and skills, as well as mentoring and performance management. You can then work outwards and include the other essential dimensions that make up your personal performance environment, like your relationships. This journey also involves going inwards to what Dr Aki Hintsa called your Core (6).
You Are Not Alone
Whether you are a CEO of a multi-national business or a front line humanitarian leader in a war zone, prioritising your health and wellbeing will have a transformational effect on your organisation’s performance. As a coach I have seen both these examples first hand and can assure you of this.
Prioritising your wellbeing as a leader will require you to make changes to your workstyle and your lifestyle. In a busy worklife this is not always easy.
When working with organisational leaders I find most know instinctively the importance of sleep. But how is your emotional health? And how is your nutrition impacting your energy and performance? Are you the best version of yourself?
As a Master Executive coach and a human performance coach I work with organisational leaders to optimise their performance. This can involve everything from some advice over coffee to an extended health and performance coaching programme that includes metabolic health analysis, Firstbeat’s world class physiology monitoring and a qualitative 360′ analysis of your leadership behaviours.
It can also involve working with you as a team coach to build a performance culture for your team or business unit. Resilience and mental toughness are now recognised to be social, and relational. Cohesive teams and flourishing relationships enable individual performance. Resilience is a team skill and teams are where the magic happens.
You are not alone.
Ben Clayton-Jolly
23 May 2025
1. “State Of The Global Workplace 2025 Report”, Gallup Inc, 2025
2. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGKv0bAN-0s/?locale=zh-hans
3. “Workwell Leaders Impact Measure v1.0”, Workwell Leaders, 2025
4. “Reading the Wind: Impacts of Leader Negative Emotional Expression on Employee Silence”, Shen et al, Frontiers in Psychology, 2022, June
5. “The Hungry Spirit”, Charles Handy, Random House, 1997
6. “The Core”, Aki Hintsa, WSOY, 2015