2026 Gallup data confirms what BrightPlan has been tracking for years: the global workforce is increasingly disengaged, destabilized, and financially stressed. And most organizations are ignoring a key lever that could actually help.
This post articulates the thinking behind “Employee Financial Health and Workforce Stability,” a roundtable discussion at The Conference Board’s CHRO Summit: Turning Uncertainty into Growth on Wednesday, June 3 in Chicago.
Unexpected engagement decline has hidden costs
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report puts a staggering number on the impact of low employee engagement. Their data declares a price tag to the global economy of approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity annually. That’s about 9 percent of worldwide GDP.
Global workforce engagement has dropped to 20%, its lowest since 2020, according to Gallup’s data, marking a second consecutive year of decline. No region improved. In the U.S. and Canada alone, 69% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged. Half report significant daily stress.
The decline doesn’t appear to be coming from the ranks you might expect. Manager engagement has collapsed, down nine points since 2022, accounting for most of the overall downturn. These are the very people orchestrating workforce transformations, leading through layoffs, onboarding AI, and struggling to hold teams together through uncertainty. So, when they’re disengaged, the ripple effects hit everything: adoption of new technology, team cohesion, and the very change initiatives organizations are betting on wind up losing their most critical advocates.
These numbers land at a moment when CHROs are already navigating AI-driven restructuring, mass layoffs, tariff-driven relocations, rising healthcare costs, and benefit pullbacks. The workforce is in a near-constant state of change. The people who remain are absorbing the shocks at the economic, corporate, and personal levels simultaneously.
The financial stress underneath
BrightPlan has been tracking the underlying dynamics behind these macro trends. Our 2024 Wellness Barometer Survey of 1,400 knowledge workers at global enterprises surfaced findings that are proving relevant today.
That report found 91% of employees reported being financially stressed. They were losing an average of 7.3 hours of productivity per week to financial worry (essentially a full day for Gen Z and Millennials each week). In addition, 79% carry meaningful debt, 38% have little to no emergency savings, and only 18% could demonstrate basic financial literacy. The study also shows that 78% of leaders attribute financial stress on individuals directly to higher turnover.
Here’s the finding that should concern every CHRO most: 92% of leaders said their company provides employees the financial guidance they need, yet only 56% of employees agreed. Leaders estimated 30% of their workforce had an “excellent” financial situation. Only 12% of employees described it that way.
That perception gap is where engagement goes to die. Leaders believe the problem is under control, but employees know it isn’t — and they experience it at a deeply personal level. The distance between those two realities is where retention erodes, productivity leaks, and transformation efforts stall. The financial impact is enormous.
Shortcomings of the standard playbook
Most employers have done what they are accustomed to doing. They have reviewed and adjusted benefit offerings based on surveys and employee asks. Boxes checked.
Beneath the surface, though, employees are struggling because nobody is helping them connect the dots between their debt, their rent, dealing with inflation and spikes in costs of groceries and gasoline, a partner’s job loss, equity compensation they don’t understand, and the HSA they’ve never touched. Six out of ten want guidance tailored to their specific circumstances. What they really crave is someone walking alongside of them as opposed to having to access a faceless and nameless benefits portal.
As it stands today, the stakes of getting this wrong are compounding. In my conversations with CHROs, the same themes keep surfacing. Eighty to ninety percent of the people leaders at any given industry event are working through major disruptions, ranging from mass layoffs to establishing restructuring plans to address the grand unknown of AI to managing a retirement bubble. Every one of those transitions has financial consequences for the employees involved. And if those employees don’t understand how a transition maximizes or jeopardizes their financial position, they either disengage or leave. Beyond the hard costs, organizations are losing significant institutional knowledge.
Employers traditionally avoid addressing this head-on because financial advice is regulated territory. Too much risk. So the people they’re counting on to be resilient and productive are navigating financial complexity alone, and doing it badly, in many instances.
A different approach
Leading organizations are solving this critical challenge by bringing in a fiduciary partner that sits between employer and employee. They see the value in delivering personalized guidance at scale through AI-powered tools and real human advisors, without the organization carrying regulatory risk.
Here’s one common example we see among many companies – HR teams being tasked with offering an early retirement program to reduce the need for future layoffs. Predictably, they realize most of those employees aren’t even on track to retire on time, let alone early. The perceived lack of wellbeing among employees becomes a true lack of wellbeing. But with better tools in place to address those core issues earlier, the company and employees are better positioned when transitions occur. The opportunities to help employees with their wellbeing are essentially limitless. Expats relocating overseas get help translating their finances across borders. Gen Z employees entering the workforce get coached on building a foundation. Sandwich-generation managers get support navigating eldercare costs while still funding their own retirement. This list could go on for pages.
For the CHROs willing to tackle this challenge, data is essential. Real-time insight into where your workforce stands financially, where the gaps are, and which benefits are actually being used. The kind of intelligence that turns financial wellness from a feel-good line item into a measurable driver of engagement, retention, and workforce stability.
The conversation we need to have
The organizations that treat financial wellness as infrastructure, as opposed to a checkbox, will be much better positioned to close the engagement gap. The rest will be left wondering why their transformation initiatives aren’t delivering returns.
I will have the pleasure of hosting a roundtable on this very topic at the Conference Board’s CHRO Summit on Wednesday, June 3 from 2:50 to 3:30 PM in Chicago. The session, “Employee Financial Health and Workforce Stability,” is designed as a candid peer conversation, with CHROs sharing what they are seeing and how financial stress is affecting stability and engagement during a period of extraordinary workforce disruption.
I encourage anyone attending the Summit to join this discussion and I look forward to a spirited and important discussion in Chicago. The data makes the urgency clear, and this is a conversation that’s long overdue among HR leaders.
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About the Author
Joelle Vail is Chief Revenue Officer overseeing Customer Success at BrightPlan, a leader in Total Financial Wellness providing a comprehensive global solution that addresses all aspects of employees’ financial health at every stage of life. With a storied 30+ year career in Human Capital Management, Joelle is a leading authority on advanced tech- and AI-based support for HR leaders.
Connect with Joelle at linkedin.com/in/joelle-risolo-vail/
