Only 14 percent of Singapore’s workforce felt genuinely engaged at work in 2025. That’s the headline finding from Gallup’s inaugural Singapore Workplace Report 2026, released jointly with the Singapore Institute of Directors on 22 June — and it puts the city-state well behind the Southeast Asian average of 25 percent and the global average of 20 percent.
Buried inside that number, though, is a more specific and more actionable finding: engagement in Singapore isn’t primarily a policy problem or a compensation problem. It’s a manager problem, and the report’s own data backs that framing up with unusual clarity.
The report also noted that the underlying trend isn’t new. Singapore’s engagement level has essentially stagnated at this range since 2019, which suggests the current wave of workplace initiatives — wellbeing programmes, engagement surveys, values statements — hasn’t meaningfully moved the number in half a decade.
Leaders interviewed for the report offered a range of explanations for the stagnation, from global market forces and challenging economic conditions to the sheer number of family-owned SMEs operating in a highly competitive business environment. None of those explanations, notably, pointed to individual employee attitude as the root cause — a framing shift that runs counter to how disengagement is often discussed informally.
The report drew on Gallup’s World Poll data collected between 2023 and 2025, with a sample of 998 employees under 35 and 1,286 aged 35 and above — a large enough base that the generational split isn’t easily dismissed as statistical noise, even by leaders inclined to view younger colleagues through a more skeptical lens.
The Generational Split Nobody Predicted
The report’s most striking data point wasn’t the overall engagement figure — it was the age gap underneath it. Only 10 percent of employees under 35 reported feeling engaged, compared to 16 percent of workers 35 and older.
That six-point gap is three times wider than the two-point difference Gallup finds between age groups globally. Younger workers in Singapore also reported significantly higher daily stress — 53 percent compared to 37 percent among older colleagues, alongside elevated worry, anger, and sadness relative to their older peers.
Sixteen senior leaders interviewed for the report pushed back on the idea that younger employees are simply less resilient. The report concluded they are, instead, “working in conditions that foster lower engagement and wellbeing” relative to their older peers, and called for employers to respond specifically to the unique needs of this generational cohort rather than treating engagement as a one-size-fits-all problem.
Where the Manager Effect Comes In
The report’s most consequential finding for anyone running a leadership programme is a statistic that’s easy to skim past: managers account for 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement.
That figure reframes the entire disengagement conversation. Strategic plans, town halls, and annual surveys — the tools most organisations reach for first — explain a small fraction of why some teams stay motivated and others don’t. The relationship between an employee and their direct manager explains most of it.
One leader interviewed for the report put it plainly: when managers handle direction-setting, coaching, and recognition well, employees tend to stay engaged even under heavy workload. The inverse, unsurprisingly, holds too — and the report suggested this dynamic matters more in Singapore’s family-owned SME sector, where management structures are often less formalised than at larger multinationals.
Why Wellbeing Programmes Alone Aren’t Fixing It
Singapore performs comparatively well on overall wellbeing — 40 percent of employees rated their lives highly enough to be considered “thriving,” ahead of both regional and global averages, though this figure dropped two points from the previous year. But the report found a disconnect between that baseline wellbeing and day-to-day engagement.
Most leaders interviewed admitted their organisation’s wellbeing programmes don’t meaningfully change how employees experience their actual workday. Programmes address the downstream consequences of disengagement, the report noted, rather than its root causes in how people are managed day to day.
Minister of State for Manpower Dinesh Vasu Dash, speaking at the report’s launch, framed engagement as a foundation for both economic growth and social cohesion — language that puts the manager-effect finding squarely on the national agenda rather than treating it as an internal HR metric. He also pointed to ongoing tripartite work on fair and inclusive workplaces as part of the broader policy response.
For organisations trying to move the needle, the report’s implication is uncomfortable but clear: fixing engagement means investing in employee mindset training singapore programmes that shape how managers think and lead, not just what perks sit on top of the org chart.
The 70 percent figure also has a practical upside for training budgets: it means engagement interventions aimed squarely at frontline and mid-level managers are likely to produce a far larger organisational return than the same spend distributed across broader, less targeted wellbeing initiatives.
