Managers are going through it. They’re dealing with more responsibilities than ever, including making sure that employees comply with hybrid work, handling the aftermath of layoffs, and balancing demands from both workers and company leadership.
But when managers are going through it, that means their staff is as well. A manager’s experience has a significant impact on their subordinates’ engagement, according to Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report published today.
Currently, only 30% of managers say they are engaged at work, and only 40% of managers say they are thriving in life overall. That’s bad news for everyone else, because managers are the “linchpin” of fixing overall issues with employee engagement, Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being, tells Fortune. Manager disengagement is likely a factor playing into why that same problem is even more widespread among the rank and file. Just 18% of non-managers report feeling engaged at work, and 30% of non-managers say they’re thriving in life overall.
“The job of managing is really difficult right now. [They’re] feeling negative emotions, [and are] a lot more likely to be looking for a new job than the people they manage,” Harter says. “We’ve got to streamline managers’ jobs in a way that they can have inspiring work themselves, and that leads to them inspiring the people that work with them.”
To fix widespread engagement issues in the workplace, organizations should start by choosing the right managers in the first place, and develop a more simplified process for developing and selecting leaders, according to the report. This includes creating a leadership development curriculum that helps identify strong candidates for managerial positions well in advance.
Managers should also start holding more frequent, quick check-in conversations with employees. When managers have at least one of these meaningful conversations per week, Harter says, worker engagement increases, and employees report getting more recognition for their work, and more constructive conversations around their goals and priorities.
“Some people might hear that and say, ‘Well, you’re just adding another thing onto my plate,’ but actually it’s just the opposite,” Harter says. “If managers have these regular meaningful conversations, they get ahead of issues before they escalate and backtrack.”
At organizations following “best practices” for employee engagement, more than 75% of managers are engaged at work, as well as 70% of non-managers.
But managers cannot force a change in worker engagement on their own. Company leaders also have to commit to creating cultural change within the organization. Most executives’ primary concerns are meeting customer needs and making sure the work gets done, Harter says. If their managers get the tools needed to do that, then it will happen.
“For some reason, we’ve overcomplicated the role” of the manager, Harter says. “Instead of filling out forms, they [managers] need to be in touch with the people and listening to what’s going on in the field [so] they can make better decisions and their work actually feels better. But if they’re taking orders from leadership, and they’ve got this group of employees that are asking for their way or else they’ll leave—it’s very easy for managers to feel burnout.”
