What Gallup’s 2025 Workplace Report Reveals And Why Executives Shouldn’t Ignore It

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.”

Africa's Workforce Is Talking. Are You Listening?

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.

• ‍Employee engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa has barely improved, stagnating at 20%.‍
• Job-hopping is rampant: 75% of workers are actively watching or seeking new opportunities.‍
• Wellbeing remains dangerously low: just 17% of African employees say they are thriving.‍
• Stress, loneliness, and emotional fatigue are worsening , especially among remote and hybrid employees.

CEOs... this isn’t just an HR issue. It’s a drag on organisational performance and a retention nightmare. And it’s going to hit you on your bottom line.

Africa's Talent is Disengaged, Stressed, and Ready to Leave

According to the 2025 report:

• Only 20% of African employees are engaged at work, 3% below the global average.
• A staggering 75% are actively looking for new roles.‍
• 28% reported loneliness “a lot of the day” before they were surveyed.
• And 48% experienced significant stress, 7% above the global figure.

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.

C-suite executives who fail to address this plateau are watching their talent strategy and productivity margins bleed slowly and silently.

Why This Should Terrify Every CEO, CHRO and COO

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:

• Increased recruitment and onboarding costs.
• Declining institutional knowledge.
• Lower team morale and productivity.
• Rising absenteeism and burnout.

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.

The Workplace is Your Most Undervalued Strategic Lever

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:

• ‍29% engagement (above global average)‍
• 32% thriving in life evaluation metrics
• Lower-than-average stress, anger, and sadness rates

So, what are top-performing organisations doing differently?

They’re leveraging three critical workplace management levers:

1. Strategic Workplace and Facilities Management

Gone are the days of reactive, cost-cutting FM. Today’s FM leaders are co-creating workplaces that:

• Reduce stress
• Enhance collaboration
• Support hybrid agility
• Optimise space utilisation and OPEX

2. Human-Centric Design

Think beyond fit-outs. Organisations thriving in this space:

• Provide spaces that prioritise wellness and connection
• Use data to align office design with user behaviour
• Balance focus and collaboration zones

3. Leadership Enablement

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.

Executive Actions – What You Can Do Now

If you’re a CEO, COO, CHRO or Head of Real Estate, here’s how to flip this script:

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1. Diagnose Your Workplace Reality

• Run a quarterly engagement and experience survey
• Map workspace use patterns (especially in hybrid models)
• Benchmark against Gallup’s findings and regional data

2. Redesign Your Workplace Experience (WX)

• Apply a “Minimum Viable Office” approach
• Audit physical space for wellness, inclusivity and flexibility
• Introduce rituals that foster belonging and purpose

3. Partner With a Workplace Strategist

• Don't try to fix this internally. Bring in expertise.
• A Workplace & Facilities Management Consultant helps you align people, place, and performance without costly capital spend.

Call to Action – The Time to Act Is Now

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.

The workplace is the last great differentiator. Let’s build one worth showing up for

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