Managers are leading bigger teams while still carrying their own workloads. Employers can protect engagement by taking work off managers' plates and setting aside time for feedback.
Managers are leading more people than they were a year ago, and fewer of them are engaged in their work. According to Gallup, the average manager's team grew from 10.9 people in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. Over the same period, manager engagement worldwide fell from 27% to 22%.
When a manager is stretched that thin, time with their people is usually the first thing to slip. Implementing a few practical changes can win back that time.
Why an overloaded manager affects the whole team
For most employees, the manager is the person who notices when they're struggling, explains decisions that affect their work, and recognizes a job well done. A steady weekly relationship gives employees someone to go to before a frustration turns into a job search.
Gallup's Jim Harter and Ryan Pendell drew a direct line between the two in April 2026, writing that lower engagement among managers "accounts for much of the recent downturn in employee engagement since 2023."
Employees tend to see an overloaded manager in small, everyday ways:
- One-on-ones get pushed back or skipped
- Questions sit for days before anyone answers them
- Good work goes by without a word of recognition
These gaps are more pronounced on teams that rarely share an office. In Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 data, 24% of remote and hybrid workers said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day, compared with 18% of on-site employees in jobs that could be done remotely. For those employees, a manager's regular check-in may be one of their main connections to the team.
Managers' own work is crowding out their people
Gallup found that managers spend a median of 40% of their time on individual contributor work, meaning the tasks they'd do if no one reported to them.
That 40% mark separated two groups of managers in Gallup's analysis. Managers who spent less than 40% of their time on their own work tended to stay more engaged than the average, regardless of team size. Managers who spent more than 40% of their time were less engaged, and their engagement declined further as their teams grew.
Consider a hypothetical manager who carries her own client accounts. A colleague leaves; she picks up four more direct reports and also maintains all her accounts. The hours for those four people have to come from somewhere. One-on-ones usually go first because no one outside the team notices when they're skipped.
Weekly feedback keeps teams engaged at any size
Feedback held up across every team size Gallup studied. Across seven studies, about seven in 10 employees who strongly agreed they'd received meaningful feedback were highly engaged, whether their team was small or large.
Meaningful feedback can fit into a ten-minute conversation that covers three things:
- What went well on a recent project
- What to do differently next time
- What the employee wants to work toward
For the employee, a conversation like this shows that someone is paying attention to their work and cares how they're doing.
Three ways to free up managers' time
Each of these steps makes room for feedback without adding hours to a manager's week.
- Move recurring individual work. Review each manager's standing tasks, such as reports, client accounts, or approvals, and decide which ones someone else could own. If a task becomes a growth step for a team member, give that person the time and training to take it on.
- Drop what nobody uses. Ask each manager which recurring reports or meetings they'd stop if they could. Then check whether anyone still relies on them, and retire the ones nobody does. Weekly status meetings are a good place to start, since a shared written update can often replace them.
- Put feedback time on the calendar. Ask managers to hold a short weekly conversation with each direct report and keep it there. A manager with 12 reports and 15 minutes each needs three hours a week, so count that time when you set their workload.
Start with two questions for each manager
This month, ask each of your managers how many people report to them and roughly how much of their week goes to their own individual work.
For anyone well above Gallup's 40% median, take at least one recurring task off their list. Then tell them the hours it frees up are for conversations with their team. Ask the same two questions again next quarter to see how the change impacted their work and team.
Content provided by Q4intelligence
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