Complice.ro: Companies invest in experiences for teams and board members. Middle management remains left out.

The Gallup report “State of the Global Workplace 2026”, published in April, shows the largest decline in manager engagement in recent years: from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, a drop of 9 percentage points. Just between 2024 and 2025, manager engagement fell by 5 points, from 27% to 22%.

This means that the people responsible for teams are, at this moment, almost as disengaged as those they manage. European data confirms the decline: only 16% of managers are engaged, compared to 10% of individual contributors. The gap between the two categories, traditionally significant, has now reduced to a minimum. In Romania, high engagement and almost equally high stress With a score of 31%, Romania has the second highest level of engagement in Europe, after Albania (32%), in a region where the average is only 12%. Romanian employees’ involvement in their work exceeds the global average of 20%. Also in Romania, the thriving level, meaning the percentage of employees who positively evaluate their overall life and their outlook for the next five years, reaches 55%, compared to 49% in Europe and 34% globally. But these figures do not tell the full story. Daily stress reported by employees in Romania is 38%, almost identical to the European average (39%) and the global one (40%). Loneliness at work stands at 14%, and daily sadness at 15%, levels comparable to the rest of the continent. In other words, employees in Romania are more engaged than almost anywhere in Europe, but just as stressed. High engagement coexisting with persistent stress raises questions about the sustainability of the model, especially if managers, who support this level of engagement, do not benefit from their own decompression mechanisms. Managers have harder days than their teams The Gallup report shows that, although leaders and managers have a better overall life evaluation, their working days are more difficult. Compared to individual contributors, they report more stress (+7 percentage points), anger (+12), sadness (+11), and loneliness (+10). Previous Gallup studies show that around 70% of the variation in a team’s engagement is driven by the direct manager. And when managers are disengaged, the impact spreads across the entire organization. Manager burnout is not an HR topic. It is a business risk. Gallup estimates that global disengagement costs the economy approximately 10 trillion dollars annually, equivalent to 9% of global GDP. Organizations that systematically invest in managers achieve different results: in companies considered benchmarks by Gallup, 79% of managers are engaged, almost four times the global average. The report also shows that when managers are engaged, they report negative emotions at lower rates than individual contributors. Engagement acts, in other words, as a buffer against the pressure that comes with a leadership role. What