The current U.S. job market is said to be an environment with “few jobs and few layoffs,” and is relatively stable despite rising unemployment and stagnant wage growth. But there’s another kind of lowness that workers express: their level of engagement.
Gallup’s quarterly Engaged Workforce Survey, which tracks workers’ focus, motivation, and enthusiasm for work, fell to its lowest level since 2011 in the third quarter of 2026.
Gallup said the decline was concentrated among remote and hybrid employees across the U.S., particularly “employees in organizations that have implemented artificial intelligence.”
Polling, which Gallup has conducted since 2000, requires quarterly data to be put into long-term context. Back in 2000, that first poll found that 26% of U.S. employees were engaged, and the data remained in a relatively narrow range between 26% and 30% until 2013. The all-time high of 36% occurred during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
But the latest data is nevertheless noteworthy. The drop in employee engagement to 29% in Q3 2026 was 2 percentage points lower quarter-on-quarter and below the floor set by the first half of the year. After the peak in the year of COVID-19, engagement trended downward, dropping to 31% by 2024, then remaining at that level until the first half of 2026. This is not an all-time low, but it erases most of the increases in the years leading up to the coronavirus record.
And, according to Gallup’s approach, the survey results represent a significant number of workers, with each percentage point representing about 1.6 million U.S. employees, representing a decline of about 3.2 million engaged workers in the third quarter from the previous quarter.
Gallup conducted the poll of a random sample of 21,648 adults ages 18 and older from August 5 to 19, 2026. The poll’s margin of sampling error was ±1 percentage point at a 95% confidence level. Results for remote and hybrid workers were within the margin of error.
Opinion polls show that morale among all workers is declining. In the third quarter, 46% of those surveyed said they strongly agreed that they knew what was expected of them, down from 49% in the first half. Thirty-seven percent said they strongly agreed that their boss or someone at work cared about them, down from 40% in the first half of this year and well below the 47% in March 2020, at the peak of COVID-19 infections. A Gallup poll found that by 2025, these two indicators had already recorded their largest declines in five years.
Gallup notes that while data is important in terms of its relevance to many core business objectives such as productivity, customer service, quality, safety, and profitability, “people who are not engaged or actively engaged are psychologically disconnected from their jobs and employers.”
A recent study by the polling organization found that employee concerns about expectations for their roles decreased by about two times between hybrid and fully remote employees. “The third quarter survey results further raise concerns about how organizations communicate expectations and keep employees connected across different work arrangements,” Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and benefits practices, said in a survey analysis.
“Since 2020, hybrid and fully remote employees have experienced a significantly lower clarity of expectations than field employees in remote-enabled jobs. These findings raise the possibility that physical distance contributes to psychological distance between employees and their organizations, especially as companies navigate the use of AI in the workplace,” Harter wrote.
Gallup noted a sharp decline in engagement among remote and hybrid employees in organizations that have adopted AI as a monitoring element. In Q3, the so-called “engagement advantage” associated with employees in AI-integrated organizations shrank across cohorts from 5 points for remote employees and 8 points for hybrid employees to 2 points and 3 points, respectively.
A quarter of the data cannot indicate whether a new downward trend in the country’s labor force has begun. Additionally, Gallup’s data cannot show that AI is the specific cause of lower employee sentiment. Additionally, other recent findings on the U.S. workforce paint a mixed picture.
The Conference Board’s annual job satisfaction index in June rose to 68.9%, the highest level in the organization’s 39-year history, but it noted that the increase was concentrated among “higher-income workers, men, and workers who believe AI will impact their careers.”
The American Psychological Association’s annual workplace survey, conducted in May and June, found that while workers’ responses to questions about whether their workplace is “healthy” and whether they feel valued at work have declined from the previous year, reports of tension and stress at work will increase in 2026.
ADP Research’s Employee Motivation and Commitment Index rose for the second straight month in October, but remains well below where it was a year ago and has mostly declined since August 2025.
Admittedly, these surveys don’t ask exactly what Gallup is asking. And with employee engagement at its lowest level in 15 years, hybrid and remote employees leading the decline, and all employees showing signs of anxiety on the job, Gallup’s Harter concluded that this pattern, among other things, “suggests that the adoption of AI may be outpacing the communication and administrative support needed to make it effective.”
