Gallup, a global performance-management consulting company, recently published its “2025 State of the Global Workplace” report in which it examines how employees feel about their work and their lives to predict organizational resilience and performance in a better way. Gallup’s surveys are conducted annually either face to face or by telephone and cover more than 160 countries and target 1,000 adults in each country, noting that surveys conducted in large countries target more than 1,000 adults and vice-versa for small countries. In details, the report focuses on four key metrics namely “Employee Engagement”, “Daily Negative Emotions”, “Job Market” and “Life Evaluation”. Employee engagement reflects the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace, while the daily negative emotions aspect aims to determine if employed adults are stressed and/or angry, the job market parameter seeks to highlight employees’ perceptions of the job climate and why employees opt to join or leave an organization and the life evaluation metric measures the extent to which respondents are satisfied with their lives and how they perceive their current and future life situation. According to Gallup, 21% of the surveyed employees around the world were “Engaged” (employees that are thriving at work) at work in 2024, while 62% are “Not Engaged” (employees that are putting time at work without any passion) and 17% are “Actively Disengaged” (employees that are unhappy at work and they potentially undermine the accomplishment of their engaged coworkers). In this regard, the report noted that over the last twelve years, employee engagement has dropped on two occasions only, in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdowns and in 2024 due to a drop in manager engagement. According to the report, younger managers under 35 years of age saw a 5-percentage point drop in engagement, while the engagement of female managers fell by 7-percentage points. The report added that a drop in manager’s engagement affects their teams, which in turn affects productivity. More specifically, the drop in global employee engagement in 2024 costed the world’s economy $438 billion in lost productivity. On the other hand, the report revealed that 40% of the global workplace is experiencing daily stress, 21% suffers from anger, 23% feels sad and 22% experiences loneliness. In parallel, the report divulged that 51% of employees in 2024 felt that now is a good time to search for a job in close proximity to where they live, while 50% were looking for a new job. The report also revealed that 33% of respondents are thriving in their current life setting and have positive views about their future, 58% are currently struggling and have uncertain or negative views about their future, and 9% are suffering and feeling miserable and have negative views about their future.

Regionally, the report revealed that employees in the MENA region are second to last with regards to employee engagement, third to last among the ten covered regions concerning their life evaluation, fourth among the covered regions regarding daily stress levels, second highest in terms of daily anger levels, third highest with regards to daily sadness levels, third highest concerning daily loneliness levels, tenth in the job climate category, and sixth with regards to their intent to leave their current jobs. In figures, the report revealed that 14% of employees in the MENA region are engaged at work, while 62% are not engaged and 24% are actively disengaged. In addition, 48% of surveyed MENA employees feel stressed on a daily basis, while 31% experience anger, 26% feel sad and 24% are lonely. Furthermore, 34% of MENA employees are considering finding a new job and 46% are actively seeking a new job. The report added that 25% of MENA respondents are thriving in life, while 61% are struggling and 14% are suffering.

Locally, the report noted that Lebanon ranked last among 17 MENA countries regarding the employee engagement metric (5% engagement). The report added that Lebanese citizens are second to last concerning the life evaluation metric with only 5% of Lebanese thriving in life. The report further noted that Lebanese employees are the second most stressed in the MENA region, with Lebanon appearing as the third most sad country among covered MENA countries with 64% of Lebanese employees suffering from daily stress and 32% reporting daily sadness. Similarly, Lebanon’s data for daily anger levels places the country in the eighth place with 34% of employees experiencing anger. The report also uncovered that Lebanon bottomed the list of covered MENA countries about the job climate, with only 6% of surveyed employees affirming that now is a good time to search for a new job. Finally, the report revealed that Lebanon ranks seventh in the MENA region concerning employees’ intent to leave their jobs, with 50% of employees reporting that they are actively searching for a new job.