5 Ways to Improve Engagement

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Leadership  

I recently stumbled across Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report. One statistic jumped out to me: Global manager engagement has been consistently dropping from 31 percent in 2022, 30 percent in 2023, 27 percent in 2024, to 22 percent in 2025.

In plain English, this means in 2025, only 22 percent of managers surveyed were genuinely enthusiastic and invested in their work. The other 73 percent were coasting or entirely checked out. Individual contributor (IC) engagement has been roughly flat—20 percent in 2022, 18 percent in 2023 and 2024, and 19 percent in 2025.

Think about this for a minute. Less than 25 percent of managers and ICs jump out of bed each day fired up about their job. It’s also interesting to note that the engagement gap between managers and ICs has narrowed from a 10-percentage point difference in 2022 to just a three-percentage point difference in 2025.

On the bright side, among U.S. organizations, the 2025 manager engagement number is 36 percent, and in best practice organizations the number jumps to 79 percent. While these numbers are encouraging, it doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. Managers (including project managers) are responsible for translating an exec’s why and what into how. If managers aren’t engaged, then driving the how becomes more risky.

Taking the position that a professional, …

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