We are spending more on tools to make work faster than at any point in history. And work has rarely felt worse to the people doing it.
I want to sit with that contradiction, because it describes the season a lot of leaders are living through. The technology is arriving on schedule. The energy of the people using it is not. And most organizations are studying the first problem while ignoring the second.
I have spent forty years inside organizations watching what happens to a business when its people feel valued, and what happens when they stop. So when a number moves this decisively, I pay attention. And this year, a number moved.
Twenty percent, and falling
In its State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, Gallup found that global employee engagement fell to roughly 20% — its lowest level in five years, down from a peak of about 23% in 2022. It is the first time global engagement has dropped for two consecutive years. No region of the world improved. In the United States, engagement sat flat at around 31%, which sounds better only until you remember that means roughly two of every three American workers are not engaged in the work they do daily.
Gallup put a price on the drift: low engagement now costs the global economy an estimated $10 trillion a year in lost productivity.
All of this is happening during the largest workplace technology rollout of our lifetimes. If tools alone lifted the human experience at work, this chart would be climbing. It is not. Which tells us the lever we keep reaching for is not the lever that moves people.
So what does?
The manager is the multiplier
Gallup's 2026 data indicate, with unusual clarity, there is one answer. The success driver is the person who stands between the software and the one asked to use it.
When Gallup looked at employees who frequently use AI at work, it found that engagement rose sharply, but only under a specific condition. Employees whose managers actively supported their team's AI use reported an engagement rate of 48%, compared with just 30% for those who did not. And when three things came together: 1) frequent AI use, 2) a clear plan for how it fit the work, and 3) active manager support, engagement climbed to 53%.
The same technology, dropped into two teams, produces wildly different human outcomes depending entirely on whether a manager stood beside people while they learned it.
That is what I have come to call the Manager Multiplier. The manager is the factor that decides whether any investment you make in your people pays off or evaporates. The tool isn’t the variable. The person who introduces it, frames it, and stays present while people struggle with it, is the variable.
And here is the warning inside the same report. Managers themselves are running low. Gallup has manager engagement falling from about 31% in 2022 to roughly 22% in 2025 — nearly a third of the group gone in three years, even as we pile more change onto their desks. We are asking the exact people who multiply everyone else's experience to do it while running on empty. You cannot multiply through a depleted manager. A tired multiplier just spreads the fatigue.
Why the tool keeps disappointing us
There is a comfortable story leaders tell themselves. It’s buy the better platform, and engagement will follow. It rarely does, and the reason is not mysterious once we name it.
A tool changes what people can do. A manager changes how people feel about doing it. Managers determine whether their people feel equipped or exposed, trusted or surveilled, invested in or quietly replaced. Those feelings are not a soft byproduct of the rollout. They are the rollout, as far as engagement is concerned. When a new system lands with no plan and no one to help make sense of it, people do not experience innovation. They experience one more thing being done to them.
I’ve watched this in business for years. Real lift comes from managers who turn a corporate initiative into a human conversation, sitting next to someone and saying, in effect, I will help you be great at this.
What IKEA did with 8,500 people
If you want to see the Manager Multiplier show up on a balance sheet, look at what IKEA did.
Starting around 2021, IKEA leaned into a customer-service chatbot named Billie. By 2023, Billie was fielding roughly 47% of customer inquiries. That represents millions of routine conversations about products and orders. On most spreadsheets, this level of tech productivity is the cue to cut the call center.
IKEA did the opposite. Rather than treat automation as a headcount event, it retrained about 8,500 call-center workers into interior-design advisors. Those team members now help customers plan rooms and solve real problems, work that requires exactly the judgment and warmth a machine can’t supply. Reported by Fortune and others, those remote-advisory services became one of IKEA's fastest-growing sales channels.
Notice what happened there. Leadership made a deliberate choice about who the technology was for, and then managers did the work of walking people into new, more human roles. The machine took the routine. The people were freed for the moments that carry weight, and the business grew. That is not luck. That is the Manager Multiplier, operating on purpose.
Three moves for the week
First, stop measuring your rollout by adoption and start measuring it by support. Most dashboards track whether people are using the tool. Ask a different question: do people say their manager actively helped them use it well? Gallup's gap between 48% and 30% lives in that question, and it is the one almost no one is tracking.
Second, resource your managers before you resource the next platform. If your managers are the multiplier and your managers are depleted, no software will rescue the number. Give them time, coaching, and permission to be present with their people. A supported manager is the highest-return investment on your roadmap, and it rarely shows up as a line item.
Third, decide what your automation is for before you deploy it. IKEA's win came from answering one question early: when the machine takes the routine, what more human work do we free our people to do? If your only answer is "we cut cost," you will save the cost, and pay for it in disengagement.
Every competitor is buying the same tools. What none of them can buy is a manager with the time and the backing to turn a rollout into something their people feel good about. Give yours that, and you get the whole person back at work.
So here is the question I would leave on the table at your next leadership meeting. You have almost certainly budgeted for the technology. Have you budgeted for the people who decide whether it ever works?
If you want to build managers who can carry that weight of rapid change, I hope you will consider purchasing my new book, Get Me a Person: Winning Human Connection and Loyalty in the Age of AI (December 8 — signed copies are available now). Also, if your leaders are wrestling with how to keep people engaged as the tools keep arriving, let’s talk.
Sources & references
- Global engagement ~20% (five-year low; down from ~23% peak in 2022); first two-year decline; no region improved; ~$10T annual cost — Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026. gallup.com
- U.S. engagement ~31% (flat vs. 2025) — Gallup, Employee Engagement Remains Flat as AI Adoption Accelerates (2026). gallup.com
- 48% engaged (frequent AI use + active manager support) vs. 30% without; 53% when frequent use + clear plan + active manager support combine; managers the strongest predictor of AI-adoption success — Gallup, Employee Engagement Remains Flat as AI Adoption Accelerates (2026). gallup.com
- Manager engagement fell from ~31% (2022) to ~22% (2025) — Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026 and related Gallup manager-engagement reporting. gallup.com
- IKEA "Billie" bot handling ~47% of inquiries; ~8,500 call-center staff retrained into interior-design advisors; remote advisory a top-growing channel; no AI-driven headcount cut — Fortune, Inside IKEA's big bet on humans in the age of AI (July 30, 2026), fortune.com; corroborated by CX Today, IKEA's Contact Center Agents Become Interior Design Advisors (cxtoday.com).
