Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world. So why are 9 in 10 workers checked out?

Worker engagement in Singapore has stagnated since 2019

Ever taken public transport during the weekday morning rush?

Packed buses and trains. Corporate uniforms. Eyes glued to phones or staring blankly ahead. Lanyards around necks, coffee in hand, everyone hurrying somewhere that seems incredibly important.

However, according to a new report released last week, most of them would rather be anywhere else.

The inaugural Singapore Workplace Report 2026, produced by workplace consulting firm Gallup and the Singapore Institute of Directors, found that only 14% of Singapore’s workforce is actually engaged at work.

In other words, 86 out of every 100 workers are either merely going through the motions or are actively disengaged from their jobs.

What’s even more staggering is that figure has barely moved since 2019.

For workers under 35, the figure is even lower: just 10%. This paints a stark contrast with Singapore’s broader economic success.

Singapore’s GDP per capita is projected to exceed US$107,000 in 2026, according to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) data. We consistently rank among the world’s most competitive economies, and this year, we rose to first place for being the most competitive.

We have world-class infrastructure, one of the best education systems on the planet, and 64.2% of our workforce that’s in professional, managerial, executive and technical roles, according to the Ministry of Manpower’s 2025 Labour Force report.

And yet, the Philippines (39%), Thailand (34%), Indonesia (27%), and Malaysia (25%) all have more engaged workers than us, according to the Gallup report.

The global average is 20%, while Southeast Asia’s regional average is 25%. Singapore sits at 14%—below both, and well below what you’d expect from a country of our economic standing.

It’s costing us billions

Employee disengagement isn’t just a human resource problem, but a serious economic one.

Globally, low engagement costs the world economy approximately US$10 trillion in lost productivity last year—roughly 9% of global GDP, per Gallup’s global report. 

For Singapore, with 86% of its workforce disengaged, that translates to an estimated US$73.6 billion in lost productivity annually.

That’s a figure that becomes harder to ignore when the Ministry of Trade and Industry is already forecasting GDP growth of just 2% to 4% in 2026—down from a robust 5% in 2025. The Singapore Workplace Report warns that chronically low engagement may increasingly become a “strategic liability,” rather than just a mere corporate culture issue. 

For years, strong institutions, a stable business environment, and geographic advantages have let Singapore punch above its weight economically. But those tailwinds are masking a ground-level reality that the data keeps surfacing.

Our workers are checked out, and the bill is subtly getting more expensive.

Corporate wellness programmes don’t solve anything

Over the years, companies in Singapore have been trying to improve employee well-being in various ways, from flexible work arrangements to wellness days, mental health workshops and even subsidised gym memberships.

While these look impressive on paper, they merely help workers deal with the stress of work afterwards, rather than providing relief for the day-to-day pressure employees feel at work.

The Singapore Workplace Report surveyed 16 senior leaders across Singapore’s corporate sector and found that most of them offer exactly these things. The majority of them also admitted that none of it is making a real difference, merely “treating symptoms, not causes.”

One executive said plainly: “Every company has a mile-long employee wellbeing programme. This is standard. I am not surprised that this is not at all a differentiator.”

Another described how wellness initiatives get adopted in Singapore: “A lot of programmes are not necessarily thought through strategically. It may be everybody’s doing X, so let’s do that as well.”

Moreover, the numbers don’t lie.

When leaders rated how well their organisations prevent chronic work overload, the average score was 2.93 out of 5—the only survey item that fell below 3.0. Meanwhile, their well-being programmes scored 3.46.

In other words, companies are spending money on yoga sessions while piling unsustainable workloads onto the same employees. The wellness day doesn’t fix the root cause of work overload, but just temporarily papers over it.

The real problem might actually be your boss

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report also found that 70% of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager.

This means managers affect virtually every aspect of a team’s performance and success. Not the CEO, not HR, or the annual town hall, but the person you report to daily.

And Singapore has a serious manager problem.

Leaders rated how effective their managers were at developing and engaging their teams at just 3.32 out of 5 in the Singapore Workplace Report. Bleakly, the pipeline for future leaders scored even lower at 3.05.

Leaders across industries described how their organisations invest heavily in technical skill development but provide little structured preparation to help employees transition to people manager roles. Then they get rewarded for their personal output rather than how well their team performs.

One roundtable participant captured it perfectly: “Managers are rewarded for performance, but they’re not rewarded for being good managers.”

To become a CFO, you go through years of technical training, professional qualifications, and structured development. In contrast, to become a people manager responsible for the engagement and productivity of an entire team? Most organisations hand you the title and wish you luck.

Moreover, Gallup’s research found that companies fail to choose manager candidates with the right talent 82% of the time. So, besides being a training problem, it also starts with a problem in the managerial selection process.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way.

A regional financial services company featured in the Singapore Workplace Report decided to do things differently.

They invested in a sustained, multi-year programme to build manager capability and deliberately reduced team sizes so managers had room to actually do their jobs well. This resulted in promising employee engagement of nearly four times the national average.

While it took years, it actually worked to raise employee engagement.

Debunking the narrative of Singapore’s strawberry generation

There’s a narrative in Singapore corporate circles that often circles around younger, late millennial and Gen Z workers. They’re labelled the “Strawberry Generation”: soft, fragile, and unwilling to put in the hours that previous generations did.

However, the Singapore Workplace Report pushes back on this pretty firmly.

Workers under 35 have an engagement rate of just 10%, compared to 16% for those 35 and older. They report more daily stress (53% vs 37%), are three times as angry, and have more daily negative emotions than their older colleagues.

As such, those workers under 35 are less engaged and slightly less likely to be “thriving” in their overall wellbeing than their older counterparts. 

But when senior leaders were asked why, the overwhelming answer did not involve workers’ attitudes, but external, structural conditions they face as a generation.

Younger workers in Singapore are navigating housing costs that are significantly higher than what previous generations faced, greater job and career uncertainty, and a labour market shaped by AI disruption that’s specifically hitting entry-level roles hardest.

They’re also more likely to speak openly about burnout and mental health, which older leaders sometimes misread as fragility rather than honesty.

One management consultancy leader rejected the premise that younger workers are the problem: “They’re just different, and they need to be engaged differently, but I see more gaps on our end.” “It’s not just work environment, it’s the economic environment. The challenges are very different to when we entered the workforce.”

AI is making things worse for junior employees, specifically

In most professional roles, your first few years are essentially an apprenticeship.

You do the repetitive, foundational work—the research, the drafting, the administrative work—and in doing so, you build the skills that eventually make you valuable at a higher level.

However, AI is inadvertently dismantling that essential on-the-job training pipeline.

Multiple leaders across industries told Gallup they believe generative AI will eliminate much of the entry-level work that junior employees have traditionally relied on to develop their craft. A 2024 study by MIT and Princeton found that generative AI disproportionately affects tasks performed by newer, less experienced workers.

Employers simply need fewer fresh graduates to do the baseline legwork when AI can handle it faster and cheaper.

The cruel irony is that AI makes experienced workers more productive while reducing the opportunities for less experienced ones to become experienced in the first place.  Organisations that automate junior-level work without redesigning development paths risk producing mid-career professionals who never had the opportunity to build the foundational skills their roles and organisations require. 

Meanwhile, 85% of leaders surveyed in the 2026 Singapore Workplace Report said they were confident in AI’s value to their organisation. However, only about a third were optimistic about Singapore’s overall workforce readiness.

Leaders rated their own organisation’s AI readiness at 4.11 out of 5, but dropped to just 3.18 when asked about Singapore’s workforce direction overall. This discrepancy suggests that confidence in AI at the company level isn’t translating into confidence about the bigger picture.

The Singapore government’s SkillsFuture programmes offer some pathways for workers to reskill and adapt to AI, but the report suggests that structured AI readiness programmes at the company level, where the problem actually lives, remain the exception rather than the rule.

So what actually works?

The report isn’t just a catalogue of problems. A few Singapore organisations featured in it have actually cracked the code on worker disengagement, and it’s not as impossible as it seems.

A government healthcare innovation unit improved engagement significantly over one to two years simply by running quarterly feedback surveys, meeting with employees in small groups, and making sure that every round of feedback produced a visible organisational response.

No fancy programme, but just listening and following through.

In addition, roundtable participants also coined a concept called “career bouldering”—the idea that career development doesn’t have to be a linear climb up the ladder.

Instead, organisations can keep high performers engaged by encouraging lateral moves across different functions and teams, creating intense, varied career journeys that develop people more broadly and keep them from stagnating in roles that no longer challenge them.

The four priorities leaders in the Singapore Workplace Report agreed on to ensure interdependent components that function together within a fully integrated performance infrastructure, in order of votes, are: building manager capability; aligning culture with actual employee experience; repositioning HR as a strategic function rather than a compliance team; and maximising talent density to develop every person in the organisation, not just those on a leadership track.

None of these is even a revolutionary idea. Companies are just not doing enough.

Singapore can afford to fix these distressing numbers. It just begs the question of whether companies will decide they want to.

For workers, especially younger ones, the report is a useful reality check. If you’re in that 90% who feel disengaged, you’re not alone, and you’re probably not imagining it. 

But it also means it’s worth asking harder questions about where you work. Does your manager actually invest in your development? Does the company follow through when you give feedback? Are there real career paths available, or just the illusion of them?

The Minister of State for Manpower Dinesh Vasu Dash, speaking at the report launch at Andaz Singapore on Jun 22, noted that an engaged workforce is a “powerful engine of sustained economic growth and social cohesion.”

So, can Singapore break free from the worker disengagement crisis hiding in plain sight since 2019?

Featured Image Credit: Shadow of light via Shutterstock