23% of the World Felt Sad Yesterday.

Normally I’d be cranking out another impassioned campaign for corporations to pay more attention to employee engagement, because when it is low, it costs us all.

I’d remind you that it is actually the managers in our organizations who need our intervention. Specifically, I’d plea for paying attention to managers because just like a hinge on a door, they are essential to an organization’s ability to function. Managers drive engagement.

When a manager is disengaged, the employees follow suit.

The state of manager engagement has been dismal for a while. In the 2025 Gallup State of the Workforce Report, we learned that manager engagement “fell for the first time in years” to 27%.   

Y’all, 27% isn’t anything to write home about, but it fell from only 30%!

Who wants to count 30% engagement as an achievement? It’s embarrassing. It’s like noticing a 3-degree change in temperature instead of realizing the house is on fire.

Still, the new 2026 Gallup State of the Global Workforce report paints another dismal picture. [Source reports available at gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx]

• Employee engagement declined for a 2^nd year, to its lowest level since 2020.
• Manager engagement now rests at 22%.

Gallup says, “Lower engagement among managers accounts for most of the recent downturn in employee engagement. Since 2022, manager engagement has dropped by nine points.”

If it helps, Gallup says there are “best-practice” organizations where 78% of managers are engaged.  So, if you were tossing your hands in the air and saying, that’s just the way it goes or we can’t expect better than that, then there’s a little proof for you that much better engagement is possible.

But I said… normally, I’d talk about this.

Today I’m derailed. I am struck by another statistic in this report that is blowing my mind.

Global sadness is reported at 23% (measured as employed adults who experienced the emotion a lot of the previous day).

Why didn’t I notice this in prior years?  Gallup’s data reflects overall life experience, not just work, capturing how people felt yesterday across all aspects of life. They’ve apparently been reporting it since 2006, where the global sadness percentage started out at 18%.

Gallup says they consider “common elements of well-being that transcend countries and cultures.” They are measuring “universal elements of well-being that differentiate a thriving life from one spent suffering” including career, social, financial, physical, and community well-being. (Gallup.com) To be fair, the report provides much greater detail about life evaluation and thriving. It is the “negative daily emotions” that I’m focused on here today.

In particular, I’m feeling shocked about the percentages reported for loneliness and sadness, findings that I somehow glossed over before.

This year I read this report on my phone.  Between age related vision changes and the small print, I found myself zooming in and out and flipping the screen to properly read the text and graphs. Maybe that’s why sadness grabbed my attention?

Globally “Daily Sadness” peaked in 2020 and then has been between 21-23% since. Loneliness is holding steady at around 22% in the last two years, up from 20% in 2023.

A LOT OF SADNESS, y’all.

The survey question is “Did you experience the following feeling A LOT OF THE DAY yesterday?”

I mean I can sort of get loneliness. We’re increasingly disconnected in life and at work despite being more technologically connected than ever.  And many of the highest percentages of loneliness are in geographies that struggle economically and politically.

The Sadness thing. That is breaking my brain.

Some call sadness a negative emotion.  That always felt wrong to me. As compared to rage or apathy, sadness seemed like a gentler feeling incurred situationally. I certainly did not realize that so many people globally would claim to feel a lot of sadness.

When I first dug into this data, I made an erroneous assumption that Gallup was reporting that workers were sad because of the workplace.  My mistake.  A bit closer attention to detail, reading a few more reports and with the help of a good AI engine, I now better understand this is reporting on global well-being and includes things like economic stability, daily living conditions, and social support.

Where would you imagine the highest sadness results would be in the world? The lowest?  

Acknowledging my personal biases are reflected in this, I’d have assumed that geopolitical conflicts would significantly influence this sadness finding. I’d have put Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and neighboring territories, some African countries, or the Ukraine & Russia as the most likely candidates for reporting sadness.  Heck, I’d have thrown the USA in there because it’s been a real mess lately. 

Nevertheless, according to Gallup:

• Post Soviet Eurasia (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Republic of Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan) reported 19% sadness and 16% loneliness.
  • In fact, upon drill down, the Russian Federation stayed exactly the same the last two years, reporting 18% sadness, and the Ukraine hovered around 30%. They’re both reporting lower total percentages than South Asian countries.
• Let’s take Palestine. They showed a 6-percentage point increase between the 2024 and 2025 report, raising to 28% reporting sadness.
• Israel reported 32% sadness in 2025, higher than the geographies listed above.
• The USA held steady at 22% sadness.

None of those reported the highest rate of sadness. It was, instead, South Asia (Gallup says that includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) that reported 36% of the respondents felt sadness A LOT.

Here is my simple rendition of these data:

 Gallup briefly says, “…negative emotions remain elevated compared to before 2020, suggesting either lasting psychological impacts or a new, more challenging status quo.”

If we use my earlier comparative about a house on fire, I’d say we again should be rather concerned if the best-case scenario is 17% of a geography’s respondents saying they feel sadness a lot, and then worst case at 36%. To me that means we have so much work to do as global citizens to find more ways to lift each other up collectively.

And at work, as shareholders, investors, stakeholders, owners, executives, leaders, managers and employees: we’ve got to start taking the depth of these emotions into consideration. With so many employees experiencing sadness and loneliness, we are not going to successfully manage performance without paying heed to emotions, too.

Leadership then isn’t only about communication and problem solving, credit attribution and accountability. Boss at the Helm has been focused on helping all of us create greater self-awareness and intentional leadership with a big emphasis on traits and skills like these. We also address emotions and self-regulation quite a bit in our courses.

But, maybe not enough.

As we lean into AI taking on our work tasks, we know we have to emphasize people skills and people management in our organizations.  Because the skills that matter most are the ones the machines can’t learn. Then we add in this reflection on sadness and loneliness. What all that tells me is that our focus on management and on leadership has to now turn into a focus on peopleship.

Peopleship is the practice of leading humans by shaping how people experience work and life. It drives better performance because it improves how we show up for ourselves and for each other.

At Boss at the Helm, we’re fostering peopleship by vibe coding humans. We are intentionally shaping how people experience work and each other by teaching humanity skills like judgment, communication, presence, and awareness & emotional regulation.

And, now that includes support for sadness and loneliness, too.