For the first time since Gallup began tracking workforce wellbeing in 2009, more U.S. workers say they are struggling than thriving. 49% struggling, 46% thriving. Enough to flip a 16-year trend.
On top of that, Gallup’s latest report shows employee engagement just hit its lowest point in a decade. These two numbers together describe a workforce that is quietly checking out, and the cost to organizations is very real. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, low employee engagement costs the global economy $8.9 trillion every year. For a single company, that translates to more missed work, higher turnover costs, and a team that’s showing up but not fully there.
The good news: engagement is one of the few things leaders can actually move right now. Here’s what the data shows, and where your leverage is.
For the first time on record
More American workers are struggling than thriving
U.S. worker thriving vs. struggling rate, 2022–2025. Thriving rate declined from 53% in 2022 to 46% in 2025, while struggling rose from 40% to 49%, crossing for the first time in Gallup’s 16-year tracking history. Source: Gallup, 2026.
The slide has been slow and steady, with no back-to-back quarters of improvement since early 2024. This isn’t one bad quarter. It’s a trend that moved in one direction for three years, and in Q4 2025, it crossed a line Gallup had never recorded before.
And underneath that wellbeing story is the engagement number, which is where it gets really important for leaders.
Employee engagement, 2015–2025
Only 31% of workers are engaged at work. The lowest in 10 years.
U.S. employee engagement rate, 2015–2025. Engagement peaked at 36% in 2020–2021 before declining to 31% in 2025, the lowest recorded level in Gallup’s decade of tracking. Source: Gallup, 2026.
That 31% figure means roughly 7 in 10 employees are doing their jobs but not truly invested in them. They’re meeting their requirements, but they’re not bringing the extra energy and commitment that actually moves a team forward. And according to Gallup, employees who aren’t thriving miss significantly more work due to illness and are far more likely to be watching for the exit, even when leaving feels impossible.
That last part is the strangest thing about where we are right now.
% who say it’s a good time to find a quality job
Job market confidence collapsed 42 points in three years. Workers want to leave. They just can’t.
Percentage of U.S. workers who say it is a good time to find a quality job, mid-2022 through Q4 2025. The 42-point decline is the largest Gallup has recorded in four years of tracking. Source: Gallup, 2026.
51% of workers are either actively looking for a new job or watching for opportunities. But only 28% think the job market is good enough to actually make a move. Gallup described it directly: this is a workforce that is “restless but largely immobile.”
In a healthy labor market, unhappy employees leave. That turnover is painful, but it sends leaders a clear signal. In a tight market, that signal disappears. Discontent doesn’t go away, it just builds up quietly inside your organization. Gallup calls it “a quieter but more persistent drag on productivity, morale, and culture.” That’s almost certainly what’s happening inside a lot of companies right now, whether leadership can see it or not.
Table of Contents
Which employees are most disengaged in 2026
Two groups that have historically been the most optimistic about the job market reversed course sharply in 2025: college-educated workers and younger workers.
Workers with college degrees used to be the most confident about their job prospects. Through 2024, they consistently outpaced peers without degrees. That flipped in 2025. Only 19% of college-educated workers say now is a good time to find a quality job, compared to 35% of workers without a degree. White-collar hiring has slowed across software, advertising, customer service, and professional services, and the degree that was supposed to be a safety net isn’t holding the way it once did.
% who say it’s a good time to find a quality job — by group
College-educated workers
Workers without a college degree
Gen Z workers (18–34)
Baby boomers (55+)
Source: Gallup, Q4 2025
Younger workers are even more pessimistic. Just 1 in 5 workers aged 18-34 believe the job market is good right now. More than 60% of Gen Z workers are either actively searching or watching for opportunities, and yet more than half of those who applied for a job in the past 30 days hadn’t gotten a single interview. (For more on how generational differences play out at work, this piece is worth a read.)
These aren’t niche groups. Ambitious, credentialed, younger employees make up a large share of most companies’ workforces. They came in with high expectations, and they’re recalibrating quietly. If you’re not paying attention to them specifically, you’re probably missing where your engagement problem is most acute.
How to improve employee engagement during an uncertain job market
The forces driving this data are mostly outside any single leader’s control. You can’t fix the job market or undo three years of external pressure overnight. But the business case for investing in engagement right now is actually stronger, not weaker, because of that pressure.
Here’s why: Gallup’s data on thriving employees is specific. They miss 53% fewer days of work due to health problems and are 32% less likely to be actively job searching. And at the business unit level, Gallup finds that highly engaged teams see 23% higher profitability than their disengaged counterparts. In a world where your people are stuck but disengaged, those numbers represent a real, measurable risk. They also represent a real opportunity. Companies that protect and grow their culture now will come out of this period with intact teams, retained institutional knowledge, and a performance advantage over the competitors who treated engagement as a soft priority.
Gallup’s decades of engagement research keep pointing to the same things: people engage when their work is recognized, when they have real connections at work, and when they feel like someone in leadership genuinely cares about them. None of that requires a new budget. It requires consistency.
Most organizations have culture programs. Many have values on the wall and a survey on the calendar. The gap isn’t intention, it’s activation: the everyday moments that add up over time to either make people feel like they belong, or confirm they’re invisible. A quarterly all-hands won’t close that gap. A team offsite won’t sustain it. The organizations that come through this period with strong cultures are the ones building something that runs between the big moments, not just at them.
3 ways to boost employee engagement right now
Here’s a shortlist of things specific enough to act on this week.
01
Audit your recognition cadence, not your recognition program. Most companies have a recognition tool. The real question is whether recognition is actually happening consistently week to week. Research shows that peer-to-peer recognition is 35% more likely to have a positive impact on financial results than recognition that only flows from managers. One specific, sincere callout per week per team beats a quarterly award ceremony every time. A quick gut check: ask each manager to name one thing a team member did well in the past seven days. If they can’t answer quickly, that’s the gap.
02
Build low-stakes connection moments into the calendar on a recurring basis. Engagement lives in small interactions: a conversation that goes slightly off-script, finding out your coworker shares a random hobby, a question that makes people think differently about each other. In a distributed or hybrid team, those moments don’t happen by accident. A weekly prompt in Slack, a rotating coffee chat pairing, a Friday wins channel, these aren’t “fun extras.” They’re the infrastructure that makes people feel like they work with humans, not just alongside them.
03
Pay specific attention to your younger and newer employees. Gen Z workers are the most restless and the most likely to feel invisible inside an existing culture. They also respond most strongly to being genuinely seen. Practical moves: make sure new hires are in informal channels, not just project channels. Pair them with someone outside their direct team early. Recognize their contributions publicly and specifically, not just in a 90-day review. The effort is lower than most leaders assume, and the return on it is outsized.
CultureBot helps close the activation gap.
It runs inside Slack and Microsoft Teams to automate the moments that matter between the big ones: weekly conversation prompts that build genuine connection, peer recognition that shows up in channels people actually use, and milestone celebrations that don’t fall through the cracks. Culture doesn’t fail because organizations stop caring. It fails because the day-to-day activation never happens consistently. CultureBot is the infrastructure that makes sure it does, and the ROI shows up in the numbers that matter: retention, absenteeism, and team performance.
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Data sources: Gallup, U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows (2026); Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report (2023) for $8.9 trillion and 23% profitability figures. All thriving/struggling/engagement statistics reflect Q4 2025 survey data unless otherwise noted. Engagement trend data approximate based on Gallup’s published annual averages.
