The Thirteenth Question
Do you know what's expected of you at work?
Do you have the materials and equipment to do your job right?
In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Do you have a best friend at work?
If you've ever filled out an employee engagement survey, you've answered some version of these. They come from Gallup's Q12, the twelve-question instrument behind the largest ongoing study of working life on earth. Millions of employees, more than 140 countries, decades of data. It is a serious tool built by serious people, and the companies I talk to trust it. They should.
Read the twelve questions again, though, and notice what's missing.
There is no question about what you carried through the door this morning.
What the 2026 report found
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 landed with numbers that should worry anyone who runs a company.
Global employee engagement fell to 20 per cent, its lowest level since 2020, and the first time it has declined two years in a row. Gallup puts the cost in the trillions. Underneath the engagement number sits a quieter one: the share of employees reporting significant stress, anger or sadness the previous day remains above pre-pandemic levels. Gallup's own interpretation offers two possibilities. Lasting psychological impacts, or a new and more difficult normal.
And here's the finding that got less attention than it deserved. Most of the global decline traces to one group. Managers. Manager engagement has fallen from 31 per cent to 22 per cent in three years. The layer every company depends on to notice things, support people and hold teams together is the layer going under fastest.
Every wellbeing vendor in the country is quoting these figures right now, and most will tell you the answer is another engagement initiative. I want to show you what the numbers can't see.
What actually walks through the door
Picture your Monday morning meeting. Ten people around the table.
One of them has a teenager in trouble, and spent last night rehearsing casual questions so they wouldn't sound like interrogations. One stepped out of the office twice last week to take calls from her father's care home, and will again this week. One is navigating a divorce, and the lawyer only returns calls during business hours. One is doing math on a line of credit that stopped adding up months ago. One buried a parent eighteen months ago, went back to work after the allotted days, and has not said the word grief out loud since.
That's five, and I've said nothing about the ones carrying two of these at once. Because these things don't take turns. The man managing his father's dementia is often the same man whose son stopped going to school. The woman in the divorce is the one whose finances just fell apart, because that's what divorce does. The load stacks.
The numbers say more than 40 per cent of your workforce is dealing with something significant outside of work. Everyone I say that to, in boardrooms and workshops, has the same reaction: that number is understated. They're right. Harvard Business School's Managing the Future of Work project found that 73 per cent of employees report having some kind of caregiving responsibility, for children, for aging parents, for partners, for relatives. Meanwhile, only about a quarter of employers recognize that caregiving affects productivity at all, and half don't track it in any way.
Sit with that gap. Nearly three-quarters of your people are carrying care for another human being, and the org chart has no idea.
Why don't they say anything? Harvard answered that too. Employees hide their caregiving loads because they believe admitting them will damage their careers. They're often not wrong. So the load stays invisible, the survey stays clean, and the engagement score quietly falls for reasons nobody can name.
The Q12 does its job. The problem lives outside its jurisdiction. You cannot survey your way to information your people are afraid to say out loud, and "I'm drowning at home" remains the most unsayable sentence in the working world.
The manager is standing in the middle of all of it
Go back to that manager number, the fall from 31 to 22 per cent, because it stops being surprising the moment you put the two datasets side by side.
The manager is the person we've quietly assigned to notice everything. Notice when performance dips. Notice when a reliable employee starts missing Tuesdays. Notice, support, retain, and hit the quarterly number while doing it. If 73 per cent of employees are carrying something, then a manager with eight direct reports is standing next to five or six invisible loads at any given time, guessing at all of them.
And they are guessing, because we've trained them for exactly none of this. Most managers I meet have had hours of instruction on performance reviews and not one minute on what to do when a team member's real answer to "how are you" would take the whole meeting. So they push harder, or they back away completely, and both guesses make things worse.
Add one more detail: the manager has a home too. Somewhere in that Monday meeting, the person running it is doing math on their own aging parents.
I wrote recently about the circle of people affected when one person struggles. The workplace version of that circle has a manager at the centre of overlapping ones, holding weight from every direction, with no training and no map. Gallup measured that person sinking. It couldn't measure why.
Why the usual fixes keep missing
Watch what happens after engagement scores drop. The action plan responds to the survey, so it inherits the survey's blind spot. More recognition. Better feedback training. A pulse check. Pizza.
None of it is bad. All of it assumes the problem was born inside the building.
Then there's the EAP, the standard answer whenever anything personal comes up. EAPs were built for the individual employee, they're chronically underused, and they can't reach a load the employee never admits to carrying. A phone number in a benefits booklet does nothing for the man who believes saying "my father has dementia" out loud will cost him the promotion.
I'll make one concession, because it's true. Gallup found that in best-practice organizations, manager engagement runs near 79 per cent, almost four times the global average. Culture work is real and it moves numbers. My argument is about what even the best culture work never sees. You can build an exceptional workplace and still have no idea that your operations lead cried in the parking lot before walking in this morning. Her engagement score will tell you something is wrong. It will never tell you where it lives.
Because it lives at home. And it commutes in every morning.
What asking actually looks like
This is the gap The MentorWell was built in, so let me be direct about what I think companies should do, and then get out of the way.
First, train managers for the first conversation. It’s not therapy, and never pretending to be. The moment an employee hints that something is wrong at home is a hinge point, whatever the something is. A struggling kid, a declining parent, a marriage ending, money, grief. Handled well, that moment builds the kind of loyalty no perk can buy. Handled badly, or missed entirely, it starts the quiet countdown to a resignation letter that will say "personal reasons." Managers need to know how to open a door and stand in it without flinching. That's a learnable skill, and it's what our First Conversation Coaching teaches.
Second, measure what the Q12 can't. The question that predicts whether your people bring their real lives forward is simple: do they believe those lives are speakable here? We built the Culture Signal Check and Manager Signal Check to take that reading, because you can't manage a silence you've never measured.
Third, where the load involves a struggling child, go deep instead of broad. That's the slice we know best. Our LifeLine Parent Workshops go into companies and equip working parents to notice earlier and act sooner at home, because the disruption doesn't start at the badge reader and support shouldn't stop there.
A sentence on why I'm the one saying this. I founded The MentorWell after losing my daughter Maddie in 2015, and I carried unresolved grief into every workday for years while looking, to everyone around me, entirely fine. I know exactly how much a person can be holding while nodding through the quarterly review. I was that person. Now I spend my weeks with families who are becoming him.
The question they're waiting for
Sometime in the next year, your organization will probably run another engagement survey. Your people will answer twelve careful questions, carefully.
The scores will come back, and somewhere in the data will be a manager at 22 per cent, a caregiver the org chart can't see, a divorce, a debt, a grief with no expiry date, and an instrument that was never designed to detect any of it.
Your engagement survey already knows something is wrong. It just can't tell you where it lives.
The thirteenth question is the one your people are waiting for someone to ask.
FAQ Section
What is the Q12 and why does it matter? The Q12 is Gallup's twelve-question employee engagement survey, used across millions of employees in more than 140 countries. It's a well-built, widely trusted instrument. The argument here isn't that it's flawed. It's that every one of its twelve questions points inward at the workplace, so it can't detect the pressures an employee brings in from home.
What did Gallup's 2026 report actually find? Global engagement fell to a record low, and for the first time declined two years running. The steepest drop was among managers, whose engagement fell from 31 per cent to 22 per cent in three years. Gallup also reported that daily stress, anger and sadness among workers remain above pre-pandemic levels.
How does what happens at home affect work performance? Directly and constantly. Harvard Business School research found that roughly 73 per cent of employees carry some caregiving responsibility, while only about a quarter of employers even track its impact on productivity. A struggling child, an aging parent, a divorce or a debt doesn't stay home. It shows up as distraction, absence, presenteeism, and quiet disengagement.
Isn't this what our EAP is for? An EAP helps, but it's built for the individual employee, it's chronically underused, and it can't reach a load the employee never admits to carrying. Many people won't call a benefits-booklet number because saying the problem out loud still feels like a professional risk.
What can employers actually do about it? Three things: train managers for the first conversation so they know what to say when someone hints something is wrong, measure whether people feel their real lives are speakable at work, and extend support to the family where the disruption often starts. None of these turns managers into therapists. They make struggle sayable before it becomes an exit interview.
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