If you’re a CEO, CHRO, COO, or Head of Real Estate and you are not trying to unlock performance from your workplace strategy, you're passively destroying performance.”
In a continent where talent is young, mobile, and increasingly discerning, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report delivers a wake-up call to business leaders: engagement and wellbeing are no longer "nice-to-haves"; they’re performance multipliers.
Last year, I wrote about the worrying trends revealed in the 2024 report (read it here). Fast-forward 12 months, and while there are pockets of progress, the story remains largely the same, if not more urgent.
This isn’t just a “people problem”. It’s a profit and performance problem. And it’s costing African businesses millions in lost productivity, attrition, and unrealised potential.
Now, in 2025, we’re seeing the consequences.
According to the 2025 report:
Compare that to last year’s numbers and you’ll see that the needle hasn’t moved much. In fact, in some areas, it’s sliding in the wrong direction.
Let’s get brutally honest.
When 3 in 4 employees are job hunting, you don’t have a talent pipeline; you have a ticking time bomb.
This means:
Even worse? Most of this is happening under your radar, because in disengaged cultures, employees don't speak up... they just check out.
And for those managing workplaces across the continent, the stakes are even higher. The facilities and real estate strategy you implement today is the one that either retains your top talent or drives them to competitors who understand what a productive, connected workplace looks like in 2025.
Here’s the good news: companies that intentionally curate their workplace experience, physical, digital, and cultural, are winning.
South Africa, for example, bucks the trend with:
Gone are the days of reactive, cost-cutting FM. Today’s FM leaders are co-creating workplaces that:
Think beyond fit-outs. Organisations thriving in this space:
Gallup found that managers account for 70% of team engagement variance. Yet, only 44% globally have received formal leadership training.
In Africa, this gap is wider.
The solution? Equip your frontline leaders with the soft skills, communication tools, and hybrid management frameworks to lead well in a changing world.
If you’re a CEO, COO, CHRO or Head of Real Estate, here’s how to flip this script:
If you're reading this and wondering whether your organisation might be at risk... You’re already behind.
But you don’t have to stay there. At WorkplaceFundi, we help African-based companies redesign their workplace strategies to boost employee experience, reduce churn, and increase ROI, without expensive fit-outs or wasted effort
In a world of AI, hybrid work and shrinking attention spans, it’s not the best companies that win; it’s the best-designed experiences that do.