Every year, Gallup surveys more than 150,000 employed adults across 160 countries and territories to produce the State of the Global Workplace report, the most comprehensive ongoing study of employee engagement, wellbeing, and job market perceptions. The survey uses Gallup's Q12 employee engagement instrument, a twelve-item assessment developed from decades of workplace research, which classifies employees into three groups: engaged (psychologically committed and contributing at full capacity), not engaged (present but psychologically absent), and actively disengaged (working, in Gallup's framing, against the aims of the organisation). The 2025 edition draws on data collected throughout 2024 and marks the seventeenth consecutive year of this global tracking. The  2026 edition, released this April, extends the dataset to 2025 and introduces a new analytical focus: the intersection of engagement with enterprise AI adoption. Both reports are referenced throughout, with data attributed to the year of publication rather than the year of collection.

Global employee engagement has fallen for two consecutive years. Enterprise AI investment has reached $40 billion with negligible returns on productivity. The Gallup 2025 and 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports trace back to the same cause: organisations have consistently underinvested in supporting and developing their managers.

For retail and department store organisations, these reports carry a direct operational message. 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager, a finding from Gallup's own longitudinal research confirmed across both reports. In a department store, that figure describes whether floor teams build customer relationships or merely complete transactions, whether a new technology reaches the team or stalls at the briefing room door, whether new colleagues develop or leave quietly within 90 days.

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