Manager Engagement in India Fell 9 Points in a Year: What HR Should Do Before FY27

Short answer: manager engagement in India fell from 39% in 2024 to 30% in 2025, a nine-point drop in a single year, according to Gallup. Managers fell faster than the people they manage. Because the manager drives most of a team's engagement, this is the number HR leaders should plan around before FY27 budgets are set.

What the 2025 data says about manager engagement in India

Gallup's Rebuilding Indian Workplaces for the Future (2026) is the clearest public read on how Indian workplaces are doing. Four numbers stand out.

• Overall engagement hit a four-year low. Only 23% of employees in India were engaged at work in 2025, down from 33% in 2022.
• Managers fell hardest. Engagement among Indian managers dropped from 39% to 30% between 2024 and 2025. Individual contributors fell from 24% to 19%.
• The middle went quiet. 59% of employees in India are "not engaged", up from 46% in 2022. They turn up and do the job, but they are not invested in it.
• The cost is large. In Quiet Quitting Is on the Rise in India (May 2026), Gallup estimates that disengagement costs India about USD 351 billion a year in lost productivity, roughly 9% of GDP.

Read together, the picture is uncomfortable. The group organisations rely on to hold teams together lost energy faster than anyone else.

Why managers are disengaging faster than their teams

Gallup's data tells us that managers fell, not every reason why. But the same research points to a pattern any HR leader in India will recognise.

Most managers were never prepared for the job

Globally, only 44% of managers say they have received any management training (Gallup, 2026, global figures). Most people become managers because they were good at the work, not because anyone taught them to lead the people doing it. The skill that earned the promotion is rarely the one the new role needs.

They carry pressure from both directions

A manager absorbs targets from above and problems from below. When teams are less engaged, the manager is the one filling the gap, and that load accumulates.

Their own wellbeing is under strain

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: India data shows only 17% of employees in India rate their lives as thriving, against 34% globally. 31% report daily anger and 36% daily sadness, against 22% and 23% globally. Managers are not exempt from any of this.

Their growth is invisible

Most manager development in Indian organisations is measured by attendance: who completed the workshop, who finished the module. Very little tells a manager whether they are actually getting better at the one thing their team needs from them. Growth you cannot see is growth people stop working on.

Why this matters more than the overall engagement number

Gallup attributes 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager (global figure). It also reports that managers who received training are half as likely to be actively disengaged as those who did not.

That makes the manager the highest-leverage point in the system. If you move one manager, you move a team. If a manager goes quiet, a team follows. A nine-point fall in manager engagement is not one statistic among many. It is an early signal for everything below it.

It also changes where HR should look first. An engagement survey tells you how teams feel. It rarely tells you how the person leading each team is coping, or which manager skill is the weak link. Starting with the managers, rather than the whole workforce, is both cheaper and more likely to move the overall number.

How to improve manager engagement in India: a practical checklist

None of these need a new budget line. They need a clearer brief.

1. Find out where managers actually are. Assess a small group of managers on the skills the role needs, not on personality alone. What it tells you: A baseline you can compare against in six months.
2. Choose by need, not visibility. Build development cohorts around named gaps, not around who was just promoted or who asked. What it tells you: Whether your programme reaches the managers who need it.
3. Name one skill per manager. One skill, described as something the person does in a meeting, not a theme like "executive presence". What it tells you: A focus every session can anchor to.
4. Make progress visible. Re-measure the same skill mid-way and at the end. What it tells you: Evidence of change, not attendance.
5. Protect the manager's view. Show HR aggregated results for cohorts of five or more; keep individual answers private. What it tells you: Honest answers, because managers are not performing for an audience.
6. Plan it into FY27. Indian budgets run April to March, with planning from January. Bring the baseline into that conversation. What it tells you: A funded programme with something to measure it against.

What this looks like on Walnut

Walnut Coach is a coaching platform built for India: ICF-credentialed coaches (ACC, PCC and MCC) plus a measurable growth system. Before a manager meets their coach, they complete a story-based personality assessment (OCEAN, DISC and Enneagram), so the coach starts with insight rather than a blank page.

Each manager picks one skill from a 137-skill tree. Short scenario assessments score that skill on six Core Principles at three points: Baseline, Mid-Skill Check and Mastery. The coach signs a skill off only when it has genuinely been mastered. HR sees enrolment, sessions, skill completion and an aggregated principle heatmap per cohort, with a minimum cohort of five, and never sees individual answers.

That is the point of the checklist above: a baseline, a named skill, visible progress, and a private space for the manager to be honest.

Frequently asked questions

What is the manager engagement rate in India?

According to Gallup, 30% of managers in India were engaged at work in 2025, down from 39% in 2024. Across all employees in India, engagement was 23% in 2025.

Why are managers disengaged?

Gallup's data shows the fall but does not attribute it to a single cause. Contributing factors the research points to include a lack of management training (only 44% of managers globally say they have received any), pressure from both leadership and teams, and low wellbeing: only 17% of employees in India rate their lives as thriving.

How can HR improve manager engagement in India?

Start with a baseline of where managers actually are, build cohorts around named gaps, give each manager one skill to work on, re-measure it, and keep individual results private while HR sees the aggregate. Bring that baseline into FY27 budget planning between January and March.

Does manager training actually make a difference?

Gallup reports that managers who received training are half as likely to be actively disengaged as those who did not (global figure). Training works best when it is tied to a specific skill and progress is measured over time.

Get the early look at the India Manager Report

We are building The India Manager Report: the public research above, plus, in Edition 1, Walnut's own anonymised and aggregated data on where Indian managers stand on the six Core Principles. If you lead L&D or HR, we can also run a free Manager Diagnostic: five of your managers take the Walnut assessment, and we walk you through the cohort results in 30 minutes.

Ask for the early look or a free Manager Diagnostic →