Overview
- Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports just 14% of Singapore employees are genuinely engaged, a level that has been flat for three years and sits well below regional and global averages.
- Manager engagement has fallen sharply since 2022 and managers account for about 70% of the variation in team engagement, which undermines frontline support for change and new technologies.
- Gallup analysis of U.S. firms shows employees whose managers actively back AI are far more likely to say AI transformed work, yet fewer than a third report that kind of managerial support.
- Disengaged workers tend to meet basic duties but avoid discretionary actions such as experimenting, redesigning workflows, mentoring peers, or flagging systemic problems, so AI rollouts risk producing pilots instead of organization-wide change.
- Analysts and academics say Singapore must change promotion, reward and manager-role design to encourage initiative and stewardship; otherwise AI will not offset demographic and productivity pressures and the country will keep paying an invisible productivity tax estimated by Gallup at about US$10 trillion globally.