Every year since 2022, employees have been less and less emotionally attached to their employer. Last year this movement stopped. From 2024 to 2025, the emotional bond between employees and their employer increased slightly again. While 9 percent of employees were strongly emotionally tied to their employer in 2024, this figure will rise to 10 percent in 2025. This emerges from the current Gallup Engagement Index, for which 1,700 employees were surveyed.
77 percent of those surveyed are slightly emotionally attached to their company (compared to 78 percent in 2024) and 13 percent of employees remain not at all emotionally attached. The numbers sound frightening – but could possibly describe a normal state of affairs in the economy. Even in the period with the highest emotional connection since the index was collected in 2001, the high emotional connection was only 17 percent. Those were the Corona years 2020 and 2021.
How is emotional connection defined?
To understand why this is, it’s worth finding out how emotional attachment is defined by the consulting firm Gallup. The research team understands emotional connection to be the “willingness and enthusiasm that employees show in their work and at their workplace”.
According to Gallup, for both to be high, managers must meet twelve needs of their employees. In order to see whether each need is met, a question was created that was asked of the participants in the Engagement Index. They form the basis for segmentation into three groups (high, low, no commitment).
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The Q12 questions according to Gallup for emotional connection to the employer
- I know what is expected of me at work.
- I have the materials and tools to do my job properly.
- Every day at work I have the opportunity to do what I do best.
- I have received recognition or praise for good work in the last seven days.
- My manager or someone else at work is interested in me as a person.
- There is someone at work who supports my development.
- At work, my opinions seem to matter.
- My company’s goals and philosophy make me feel like my work is important.
- My colleagues have an inner drive to produce high-quality work.
- I have a very good friend at work.
- Over the last six months, someone at work has been talking to me about my progress.
- Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to learn and grow at work.
Aspects that, according to the survey results, are not found in many companies. Marco Nink, Director of Research & Analytics at Gallup EMEA, sees this as a weakness in the leadership culture in German companies. “The results of the Engagement Index Germany suggest that only a small proportion of managers understand how to continuously address the needs of employees in the workplace,” says Nink.
How do crises affect the quality of leadership?
In times of economic crises, transformation and geopolitical tensions, this weakness in leadership is even more pronounced, which, according to Nink, explains the collapse in emotional connection between 2023 and 2024. “Executives were primarily concerned with crisis management,” says the Gallup Research expert. “Employees have therefore slipped off the attention radar.”
During the Corona pandemic, however, managers seemed to focus more on employees and their needs than usual. In no other year of the index was the emotional bond as high as in 2020 and 2021. “Many people moved closer to their employees during the pandemic – even if the contact often took place digitally,” says Nink. Managers listened, provided regular information, actively sought exchange with their teams and at the same time paid more attention to the individual needs of employees. “This gave many employees the feeling of being seen and supported,” says Nink. “They showed a real interest in the people behind the workforce.”
Benefits and general conditions do not necessarily have an impact on the emotional bond
The consistent lack of commitment could also be due to the different perceptions of the company and employees. Emotional connection is easy to confuse with satisfaction. The assumption: If I am satisfied with my job and my work environment, then I am more emotionally attached to my employer.
This connection is not reflected in the Gallup Engagement Index. Because the satisfaction of employees is much more pronounced and has increased more than the emotional connection. 27 percent of employees are extremely satisfied with their jobs and 47 percent are satisfied with what they do every day. The working situation and working conditions are also perceived by many as good (27 percent are extremely satisfied with it, 45 percent satisfied). The remuneration is also perceived by just over half as performance-related (28 percent fully agree, 34 percent agree).
For the Gallup experts, it is clear: emotional ties are not promoted through benefits and work organization or general work conditions, but through leadership. This can be seen in other figures in the report: “Employees in companies that actively work on leadership quality and the working environment in this country achieve, on average, a high emotional bond of 40 percent,” says the report. “In the best companies, this value rises to almost 60 percent.”
This finding could also be interesting for the performance debate in the Federal Republic and, among other things, classify the demand of Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) for longer working hours in order to achieve higher performance. “Far too many employees in Germany work in energy-saving mode, despite generally positive assessments of their working conditions,” says Nink. “This is not an attitude problem, but a leadership problem.”
This is what the willingness of employees to change was like in 2025
However, there is an expected connection elsewhere in the index: those who are more emotionally tied to their employer are more likely to want to stay with the company for a longer period of time and tend to be less likely to look for a job. Currently, 56 percent of employees want to continue working for their employer a year later (in 2024 it was 50 percent), 40 percent want to spend the next three years with them (in 2024 it was 34 percent). Among employees with a high emotional bond, 80 percent plan to stay with their employer for the next year, and 57 percent plan to stay with their employer for the next three years.
39 percent of employees with a low emotional connection and 23 percent with a high emotional connection are actively looking for a job. “The direct manager has the greatest influence on the intention to stay,” says Nink. “This is followed by factors such as further development and further training opportunities, the perceived interest in the well-being of the employees, a good work-life balance and pay.”
The conclusion of the study authors: More support is needed for managers in the form of training and coaching. At the same time, the promotion logic that currently exists in many places should be questioned: subject matter experts often become managers who primarily take on the leadership role because they want to make a career. Instead, employees who really want to lead people and have a talent for it should be promoted.
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There Gallup Engagement Index
The Gallup Engagement Index has been conducted annually since 2001. This year, 1,700 randomly selected employees aged 18 and over were interviewed by telephone between November and December 2025. According to Gallup, the survey is representative.
Lena Onderka is editorially responsible for the Employee Experience & Retention area – which also includes, for example, the topics of BGM and employee surveys. She also looks after the topic of diversity. She is also the editorial contact for the German Human Resources Summit and the HR Forum Banking.
