Employee engagement starts with manager capacity

What does Gallup say about engagement, and who is driving the decline?

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report finds that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, down from a peak of 23% in 2022 and its lowest level since 2020. Gallup estimates the cost to the world economy at $10 trillion in lost productivity.

Gallup attributes most of the recent downturn to managers. Since 2022, manager engagement has dropped by nine points, to 22% worldwide in 2025. In the organizations Gallup classes as best practice, 79% of managers were engaged at work.

The numbers do not say why managers are less engaged. They say where to look. Gallup also notes that engagement occurs at the team level, which is where a manager's week meets an employee's. OHA's reading is narrow: when most of a decline sits with managers, their working conditions come before employees' attitudes on the list of things to examine.

Do managers have the room to support their teams?

That depends on what the week leaves them. In Statistics Canada's Canadian Survey on Working Conditions, 2024-2025, a majority of employees said their colleagues (79.5%) and their manager (73.6%) were usually supportive. The support is there for most employees. The open question is what it costs the people who give it.

The same release describes the managers' side. In 2024-2025, half (50.2%) of workers in management reported frequently working to tight deadlines, and 34.6% of managers reported unpaid work in their free time several times a month or more to meet work demands.

Quebec's public health institute, the INSPQ, lists work organization and management practices among the sources of psychosocial risk, and says the workload a person feels matters as much as the workload requested. For an executive, a manager's felt load is therefore data, in the same way a calendar is. For how that load builds without noise, see why manager burnout compounds quietly.

How does manager capacity connect to engagement?

Through what a manager can do with the week. In OHA's framework, relational load is the number and complexity of relationships a manager must actively maintain: direct reports, peers, executives, clients and cross-functional partners. It is one of the Five Loads OHA measures.

Take recognition. The INSPQ says it should be about the work (what was done) and not about the person (who they are). Recognizing the work means knowing what was done, by whom and at what cost, which takes attention. When one-on-ones shrink to status updates, or a whole team waits on one manager's input, attention is the first thing to go. That reading is OHA's, not the INSPQ's.

The check below takes about a minute. It uses five of the ten statements in OHA's capacity self-portrait, one for each load, relational first. Answer for yourself, or ask a manager on your team to answer.

Is training managers enough to engage a team?

Training matters, and in OHA's view it works alongside room to apply it. A 2018 meta-analysis in Occupational and Environmental Medicine pooled ten controlled trials of training managers to support employees' mental health. Training improved managers' knowledge (standardized effect of 0.73), their attitudes (0.36) and their self-reported supportive behaviour (0.59).

The same review found no significant pooled effect on employees' psychological symptoms, and its authors call the employee findings preliminary because few studies measured employees. The research is about mental health, not engagement. The study does not test this, but executives will recognize the gap: what a manager knows how to do and what the week lets them do are two separate questions. In OHA's view, training gives managers the means, and a measure of their load shows whether the week has room to use them.

What can an executive team do this quarter?

Measure before you launch an engagement programme. Have your managers answer the same five statements and read the result by function. The load that ranks highest tells you what to change first. In the same session, ask each manager one more question: which decisions, approvals or requests reach you only because nobody else owns them? The answers give the executive team a list of structural changes, not a list of people to coach.

Then pick one load and one structural change. For relational load, list the decisions, approvals and inputs that run through a single manager and move one of them. Keep one-on-ones for the person and the work, not status. Cut a recurring coordination meeting that ends without a decision.

Fix the date. OHA measures again after 90 days with the same statements, the length of a Capacity Circle™, so the comparison is like for like. A flat score is also information: the change was not the one using up capacity. For what the full diagnostic measures load by load, see what the Capacity Diagnostic measures.