2026 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report<\/u><\/span><\/a> records just 14 per cent of Singapore\u2019s employees as genuinely engaged \u2013 well below the South-east Asian average (25 per cent) and the global average (20 per cent). These numbers have remained stubbornly low for three consecutive years.<\/p>\nDisengagement is easy to miss. Disengaged workers do everything that most professionals do. They attend meetings, hit deadlines, and satisfy performance reviews.<\/p>\n
What they do not do is extend themselves beyond the formal minimum. They do not flag systemic problems outside their remit, mentor junior colleagues without a mandate, or volunteer for ambiguous initiatives. When it comes to enterprise AI adoption, they use tools when required by their employers. But they rarely invest in experimenting, exploring how workflows can be redesigned, or sharing with teammates how to level up with AI \u2013 not without structural incentives or deliberate prodding.<\/p>\n
Gallup\u2019s US data captures the consequence: 65 per cent of workers in AI-implementing organisations say the technology has improved their personal productivity, but only 12 per cent strongly agree it has transformed how their organisation works. AI deployed onto a disengaged workforce produces pilots, not transformation \u2013 because enterprise-level integration sits in the hands of those same disengaged employees at every level.<\/p>\n
What is lost is hard to quantify in dollars or cents. But Gallup estimates low engagement costs the global economy US$10 trillion (S$12.9 trillion) annually, or roughly 9 per cent of gross domestic product. Singapore too pays an invisible productivity tax every quarter \u2013 the process improvement left unproposed, the client insight never surfaced, the collaboration abandoned because the effort does not feel worth it. In an economy where every scarce unit of manpower must pull its weight, this tax rarely shows up on a balance sheet but does show up in output.<\/p>\n
To some extent, this apathy is predictable. Remuneration and promotion frameworks in most large firms do not meaningfully reward initiative or risk-taking; they select against it. So why would professionals who run the same cost-benefit calculation their employers do reach a different conclusion?<\/p>\n
Fixing AI-era disengagement requires changing the underlying payoff structure \u2013 demonstrating that the person who improves the workflow becomes more valuable after the improvement, not more replaceable.<\/p>\n
That is not a common response, judging by the number of companies announcing AI-attributed layoffs without first engaging honestly with current employees about how their roles can evolve and their value be retained through upskilling.<\/p>\n
On a more consequential level, disengagement at work is ultimately a manager-subordinate problem. Gallup\u2019s long-running meta-analyses find that managers account for as much as 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement. But before we default to the familiar conclusion that Singapore needs better manager training, it is worth asking whether managers themselves are still in the game.<\/p>\n
Globally, they are not. Manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points since 2022, with the steepest fall between 2024 and 2025 \u2013 from 27 per cent to 22 per cent. Managers used to enjoy an \u201cengagement premium\u201d over the people they led. That premium is gone.<\/p>\n
Disengaged managers do not just underperform, they reproduce disengagement downward through their tone, their lack of follow-up, and the feedback loops they let decay. We cannot expect managers to champion a transformation they are not motivated to lead themselves.<\/p>\n
The AI data amplifies the point. Within US organisations investing in AI, employees whose managers actively support the team\u2019s AI use are nearly nine times more likely to say AI has transformed how work gets done \u2013 but fewer than a third report that kind of managerial backing. Whatever the Singapore-specific equivalent proves to be, the directional argument holds: AI adoption follows manager engagement, and manager engagement is in retreat.<\/p>\n
Singapore\u2019s problem of management quality is partly a selection problem masquerading as a training one. We promote for individual performance and technical excellence, then try to coach those promotees into people managers with strong relational skills \u2013 inside structures that still reward the original single-contributor behaviour. Then when managers fail, we diagnose it as a training gap. We are running in circles.<\/p>\n
The harder question is not how to develop better managers, but whether Singapore organisations have designed manager roles that capable people can actually succeed in. Widening spans of control, absent upward feedback, and rewards decoupled from team outcomes are governance decisions, not training gaps. No coaching programme will repair a role that is structurally set up to fail.<\/p>\n
I cannot emphasise enough how important it is for organisations to address the problem of low levels of engagement at work, especially after a period of consistent decline worldwide. Gallup has recorded two consecutive years of global engagement decline. No region of the world improved engagement in 2025. And Singapore has been flat for three years running.<\/p>\n
Organisations that close this gap now will build the psychological safety, manager quality, and culture of workforce investment that successful AI adoption actually requires. Those that defer will run better technology on the same disengaged human substrate and wonder why the returns are modest.<\/p>\n
We built this city-state on structure, discipline, and top-down strategy. What comes next requires something harder to mandate: people who are genuinely invested in the outcomes of their work. The human qualities AI cannot replicate \u2013 judgment, relational intelligence, creative risk-taking, moral courage \u2013 are becoming the only durable source of competitive advantage.<\/p>\n
Right now, disengagement is driving those qualities underground. And in a manpower-lean economy with no room for the productivity it is leaving on the table, that is a challenge Singapore can no longer afford to defer.<\/p>\n
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Ruchi Sinha is associate professor of Practice at the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n