The Ignite Pulse Report · No. 01October 2026 · Global Edition
Leaders and the people closest to the work are no longer describing the same workplace. A monthly reading of the research shaping organisational capability and human experience.
Healthcare executives and their frontline workers rate the same leadership 30 points apart.
of frontline workers say their leaders understand their challenges, down from 62% in 2024.
of managers worldwide are engaged, after the largest single-year fall since 2022.
of workers have the learning they need, down from 59%, even as AI use climbs to 64%.
Every month, the world publishes a remarkable amount of research about work: how people feel about it, what they expect from it, and what it is quietly costing them. Most of it is read once, quoted once and set aside. I'd like to do something more useful with it.
The Ignite Pulse Report is my monthly reading of that research, gathered from credible sources around the world and read through one question I believe every leadership team should be asking: where is the pressure really building, and are we looking in the right place?
This first edition begins with a pattern that surfaced again and again this year, in hospitals, on shop floors, across service operations and in global surveys of tens of thousands of workers. Leaders and the people closest to the work are describing two different organisations. That distance has a name, and once you see it, you begin to notice it everywhere.
Every figure in these pages is sourced and credited. Where the evidence is limited, I'll say so. And when our own Pulse data is strong enough to stand beside the world's, I'll share it, with the sample size beside every number.
When leaders and the front line stop seeing the same organisation.
Three studies released this year, from three very different corners of working life, point to the same widening distance. The starkest comes from healthcare, where leaders and the people carrying their decisions into every shift rate the same leadership a world apart.
In 2024, most frontline workers believed their leaders understood the challenges of their working day. By 2026, fewer than half did, and 89% of frontline workers and managers say shift-level problems affect their wellbeing.
A quarter of senior leaders say they feel disconnected from the people on their front line, even as most say they prioritise engaging with them. The intention is there. The connection is not landing.
What makes this signal so consequential is that none of these organisations is short of information. They run surveys, dashboards and town halls. Yet the knowledge that matters most still struggles to travel far enough, quickly enough or safely enough to change a decision. The visibility gap opens in exactly that space, between what an organisation senses and what it is able to act upon, and its roots can lie in decision rights, hierarchy, incentives, capacity or the design of the operating system itself.
What an organisation cannot see, it cannot intentionally improve.
of employees worldwide are engaged, the lowest level since 2020, after the first two-year decline Gallup has recorded
estimated cost of low engagement in lost global productivity
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 adds the piece that, for me, explains why the visibility gap is widening rather than closing: the decline in engagement is driven almost entirely by managers.
Think about what a manager is in the life of an organisation. They hear what the front line knows and carry it to where decisions are made, then carry those decisions back in a form people can act on. When that bridge is stretched, the information still exists. It simply stops travelling.
A front line that feels less understood and a management layer that is less engaged belong to the same story: two ends of one weakened connection, and they will respond to the same repair.
of managers are engaged in Gallup's best-practice organisations, nearly four times the global average.
| What leaders see | What may sit beneath it | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Problems that keep coming back | Each is handled as an isolated incident, so the pattern is never seen | Sense |
| Slow execution | Unclear decision rights, overloaded approval paths, too little capacity | Decide · Enable · Execute |
| Inconsistent service | Broken handovers, standards that aren't reinforced, competing local priorities | Organise · Execute |
| Low initiative | Authority too far from knowledge, or a high personal cost to speaking up | Decide |
| Change fatigue | New initiatives layered onto an operating system that hasn't changed | Enable |
| Customer complaints | Process, coordination or expectation failures that began long before the customer saw them | Sense · Organise |
| High performers exhausted | Results depend on discretionary effort rather than designed capacity | Enable · Organise |
| Leaders hearing about it late | Signals travel slowly or feel unsafe to raise, so they arrive after trust has already fallen | Sense · Decide |
A table cannot diagnose an organisation. Its purpose is to slow the reflex that assumes the visible problem tells you where the work belongs.
Questions that can change what the room is able to see.
Trace one example from the moment someone notices something important to the moment action is taken. Where does it slow, disappear or lose its meaning along the way?
Look for the issues that survive changes in personnel. When the people change and the problem stays, the design around them is telling you something.
Find the decisions pushed upward by habit rather than necessity. The distance between knowledge and authority is very often where speed, and confidence, are lost.
A 30-minute exercise for closing the visibility gap, one decision at a time.
Pick one that happens often enough to expose the system, rather than the biggest decision in the business.
Who usually holds the earliest useful knowledge?
Count the approvals, handovers and escalations that sit between that knowledge and action.
Separate essential judgement from inherited process.
Redesign one decision path, then watch what changes in speed, confidence and follow-through.
Fix one decision path well, and it will teach you a great deal about the rest.
of UK workers sometimes choose not to use AI tools, even when they are available
of US employees describe disruptive change, where AI has been adopted against where it has not
PwC's survey, published at the end of September, describes a workforce beginning to move at two speeds: AI use climbing sharply while access to the learning people need to use it well is falling. Read beside this month's signal, the implication is plain. Where signals travel well, AI will help them travel faster. Where the visibility gap is wide, it risks widening it further, producing more output while leaders see less of what people are living.
Who decides, with what information, and at what level.
Where context, ethics and relationships change the answer.
Whether faster systems make the lived experience clearer or more fragmented.
Every figure in this report comes from published, credible research, credited on the final page. Our own Pulse findings will appear only when the response base is large enough to support them: always anonymised, always aggregate, always shown with the sample size.
More than 85,000 respondents is the sum of the published sample sizes of studies 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7.
Manager engagement in 2022 is calculated from Gallup's reported nine-point fall to 22% in 2025.
Read side by side. These studies cover different populations and countries, and are never combined into one measure.
Framework. Sense, Decide, Organise, Enable, Execute, from organisationalintelligence.ai.