The annual Gallup survey released on Wednesday studied the mood and well-being of employees across 160 countries and found that employee engagement dipped for the second year in a row, with the South Asia region registering the sharpest drop in employee engagement over the past year, driven by India. The region also recorded the least number of employees who identified as thriving, and the highest number of those who reported daily sadness.
Among the Indian respondents, the data revealed sharp changes in employee engagement across two categories — actively disengaged and engaged — over a 15-year period, with the former decreasing, and the latter increasing by several points. However, the survey recorded a continued dip in engaged employees, first seen in the three-year rolling data analysed between 2022 and 2024, indicating that the trend of quiet quitting has well and truly hit Indian workplaces. What’s more, the report also showed a dip in engagement in the same time frame among managers.
Data from all the surveys, including the current one, showed that compared to 2010-12, the number of actively disengaged employees in India reduced sharply from 31% to 18.47% in 2023-25, the number of not engaged employees decreased marginally from 59.98% to 59.02%, and the number of engaged employees increased from 9.03% to 22.51%. However, the number of engaged employees was highest in 2020-22 at 33.17%. Similarly, while 39% of managers were recorded as engaged in the workplace, as per the three-year rolling data analysed between 2022-24, the number dipped to 30% in 2023-25, figures shared by a Gallup representative revealed.
“The big question is whether Indian workplaces have enough great managers who can deliver an engaging experience to their direct team members. This is something that the whole world is struggling with — lack of talented managers and an increased span,” Puneet Singh, Gallup’s Regional Director (Research and Analytics) for Asia-Pacific region, said.
The State of the Global Workplace 2026 report defines workplace engagement as the psychological attachment workers have to their work, their team and their employer, and measures it based on a set of 12 statements posed to the respondents. These include: “There is someone at work who encourages my development”, “In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work,” and “This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow”. Based on their responses, the survey found them to either be engaged, not engaged or actively disengaged. This is the same set of statements the survey has posed since its first iteration in 2009.
The decline in workplace engagement has less to do with active disengagement, and more to do with the middle lot — those who are not engaged, but not actively disengaged either, a.k.a the quiet quitters, Singh explained.
“Quiet quitting implies that workers work for themselves, do not offer any discretionary effort at work, and have no connection to the mission or purpose of the organisation. Loud quitting or actively disengaged employees are those who are disgruntled or working actively against the organisation — they are angry, unhappy and insist on sharing it with others,” Singh said.
“While engagement occurs at the team level, employees who are not engaged or actively disengaged lead to less profitable organisations, which, in turn, translates into lower economic growth,” the report stated.
Managers once enjoyed an “engagement premium” at work, but are increasingly only as engaged as those they lead, the report pointed out. The largest year-over-year drop in manager engagement globally occurred between 2024 and 2025 (a decline of five points from 27% to 22%) with South Asia (primarily India) experiencing an eight-point decline in manager engagement, the largest decline of any region that year.
The respondents were also asked to answer a two-part Life Evaluation question to ascertain their state of well being — thriving, struggling and suffering. Those who were thriving had positive views of their present life situation as well as of the next five years. They also reported significantly fewer health problems as well as less daily negative emotions, which the global survey also collected data on. Respondents were asked, “Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? Stress, worry, anger, sadness, loneliness?”
The South Asia region recorded the lowest number of respondents who said they were thriving (16% as compared to the 34% globally), and ranked the highest worldwide in respondents who felt daily sadness (36% versus the global figure of 23%). Compared to the global figure of 22% who admitted to feeling daily anger, South Asia tracked at 31%.
In India, employee anger trends show an upward increase from 28% in data collected between 2008-10 to 34% in the respondents surveyed between 2022 and 2024. The number of respondents varied between 2,480 and 2,839, but were weighted before assessing the percentage. Similarly, the sadness trends also rose from 24% (unweighted count of 2,477 respondents) to 39% (unweighted count of 2835 respondents) in 2022-24. In 2025, these figures stood at 31% and 36% of the respondents surveyed in a three-year rolling period, respectively.
The primary data used in this report was collected by Gallup’s surveys of the world’s adult population, using randomly selected samples, since 2005. The 2025 data used in the report was collected from 141,444 employed respondents above the age of 15 employed by any employer for any number of hours. The number of India respondents for the three year rolling period from 2023 to 2025 was 3,095. All figures of Indian employee engagement quoted above are based on unweighted counts of survey respondents over the years.
