The People and Culture Imperative in Europe: What the Data Demands and What We Must Do About It

12% of employees in Europe are engaged at work.

That is not a rounding error. That is the lowest employee engagement of any region in the world — Europe ranks 10th out of 10 global regions in Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report, the world's largest ongoing study of the employee experience. 73% of European employees are not engaged. 15% are actively disengaged. And the managers leading them sit at 16% engagement — still well below the global manager average of 22%.

The people responsible for building and sustaining high-performing teams are themselves significantly disengaged. That is not a management problem in isolation. It is a people and culture imperative. And in a world navigating simultaneous economic volatility, geopolitical uncertainty, technological disruption, and organizational transformation, it is the imperative that cannot wait.

On May 5, the People and Culture Institute's International People and Culture Week brings this conversation to a global stage. I am honored to join as a Spotlight Speaker at the Europe Regional Caucus — alongside David Liddle, CEO of the TCM Group and PCI President, and a panel of senior practitioners committed to addressing exactly this.

What the Gallup Data Tells Us

Global employee engagement has fallen to 20% — its lowest level since 2020 and the second consecutive year of decline. Low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity last year — 9% of global GDP. In Europe, the picture is starker still. 12% engagement. Individual contributors at 10%. A region where 57% of employees say it is a good time to find a job — yet most choose to stay disengaged rather than thrive where they are.

People are not trapped. They are disconnected.

Gallup's 2026 report — subtitled The Human Side of the AI Revolution — makes a striking argument. Despite billions invested in AI, 95% of organizations have seen zero measurable impact on profits. The primary constraint is not model performance or tooling. It is organizational readiness and the quality of people leadership.

The technology is not the problem. The people strategy is.

What is the gap between your organization's engagement data and what you know is possible — and what deliberate choices would begin to close it?

Within best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged — nearly quadruple the global average. The gap between 16% and 79% is not inevitable. It is the result of deliberate choices about how people are led, how cultures are built, and how organizations invest in the human experience of work.

The Leadership Burden the Data Reveals

There is a dimension of this crisis that most engagement conversations miss — and it is one the Gallup data makes unmistakable.

Leaders report higher engagement than those they lead — 26% compared to 24% for managers, 19% for project managers, and 19% for individual contributors. But they are also carrying a significantly heavier emotional burden. Compared to individual contributors, leaders are 7 points more likely to experience stress, 12 points more likely to experience anger, 11 points more likely to experience sadness, and 10 points more likely to experience loneliness — all on any given day.

Leadership at the senior level is isolating. It is emotionally demanding. And it is frequently unsupported.

The data also reveals the antidote. When managers are engaged, they experience all negative emotions at lower rates than individual contributors — and are 14 points more likely to be thriving in their overall lives. Engagement does not simply improve performance. It reduces the emotional burden of leading others and sustains the people on whom organizational resilience depends.

Investing in leadership at every level is not a development priority. It is an organizational resilience strategy.

The Framework That Responds

David Liddle's People and Culture Operating Model offers a coherent and practical response to exactly this challenge. Built on five interconnected domains — People, Culture, Strategy, Justice, and Value — the model moves organizations from compliance-driven HR toward something more human, more connected, and more effective.

The People domain focuses on creating people-centered workplaces — engagement, proactive listening, servant leadership. The Culture domain involves co-creating culture with intentionality — not as a values statement but as a lived practice. The Strategy domain aligns corporate strategy with the people plan, making culture and people the top strategic priority. The Justice domain introduces transformative rather than retributive approaches to fairness, voice, and resolution. And the Value domain shifts the focus from traditional value chains to strategic, stakeholder, and social value.

As David Liddle writes in HR Magazine: "If culture becomes real when it is practised, the challenge for people leaders is therefore practical and ethical."

In a world navigating global volatility — where the ability to adapt, hold together, and perform under pressure is the defining organizational challenge — culture is not a soft consideration. It is the foundation of resilience. Organizations whose cultures are deliberately built across all five domains are the ones that hold when the pressure arrives. Those that treat culture as an output of good intentions discover, too late, that it was the infrastructure they never built.

What would it mean for your organization if culture became its primary source of resilience — and what would need to change to make that true?

The Conversation We Are Having on May 5

The sub-theme of the Europe Regional Caucus is precisely this: how can organizational culture help build resilience in light of global volatility? That question is not theoretical. It is the lived reality of every organization in Europe navigating disruption right now — and the practical challenge facing every people and culture professional, senior leader, and board member responsible for organizational performance and sustainability.

Join us live on LinkedIn and YouTube on May 5 — 10am to 11:30am BST. Free to attend. Click Attend on the PCI LinkedIn event page.

If this resonates — for yourself or for a leader you are developing — I would welcome the conversation.

If you are navigating this complexity right now — or preparing someone who is — let us talk. That is exactly where this work begins.

📩 info@thehrsavant.com