April 17, 2026
Your Employee Experience Roundup: Perception Gaps, Disengaged Managers and the Agentic AI Future
Every fortnight, I’ll be rounding up the latest employee experience news, research and insights, and pulling out the threads that connect them. So if you’re too busy to track every report drop, every new trend, or indeed every time a tech boss creates an AI avatar of themselves, consider this your shortcut.
In this first roundup, I’ll be exploring the manager engagement crisis found in Gallup’s latest data, what AI transformation means for different job roles (including HR), and why there’s a worrying gap between how leaders perceive the employee experience and how workers actually live it.
The manager disengagement crisis and leadership wellbeing paradox
The biggest research report to land in April so far has been the Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, which found that employee engagement has fallen for two consecutive years and sits at its lowest level since 2020. When engagement drops so too does productivity, costing the global economy around $10 trillion (equivalent to nine per cent of GDP).
The study finds that manager engagement, which has historically sat above employee engagement, now accounts for a significant proportion of that downward trend. Organisations flattening hierarchical structures are leaving surviving managers to lead larger teams. And the pressure of that expanding load is, unsurprisingly, producing a dissatisfied middle layer.
The picture looks different at the top, but not necessarily better. ‘Managers of managers’ reported higher levels of work engagement and overall wellbeing. Yet these same leaders more frequently reported experiencing stress, anger, sadness and loneliness than their employees. This leadership wellbeing paradox is likely down to a dual reality of feeling well-respected and valued on the one hand, while carrying the daily emotional burden of high-stakes decisions on the other.
This data highlights the need for a more dedicated focus on both the middle manager and leadership experience, particularly for those who are coping with expanded team responsibilities. Structured peer support networks, clearer role boundaries and meaningful AI training are all levers worth pulling.
AI at work: transformation, not elimination — mostly
Workers’ fear of being replaced by AI is an important consideration for EX professionals. And with news of Meta building an AI avatar version of Mark Zuckerberg, not long after proposing a 20% headcount reduction, these fears are valid.
But new research from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) offers a more reassuring outlook: for most workers, the story will be transformation rather than elimination.
There’s a lot around this debate of replacement versus augmentation, however BCG’s analysis seems more robust than others, applying a microeconomic model to approximately 165 million US jobs across 1,500 distinct roles. From this, the report identified ‘six categories of exposure’ with varying degrees of impact on roles. Of course, not all roles are ‘safe’. BCG puts contact centre workers in the ‘substituted’ category — a finding that will be difficult to ignore for anyone working in CX-adjacent organisations.
But what about HR and employee experience roles? Josh Bersin, last week, published his HR 2030 vision for agentic human resources. Across the next four years, AI superagents will transform the function, Bersin predicts. HR won’t be eliminated but it will look entirely different, taking the form of a business enablement function rather than a people operations department. It’s a compelling vision, and one with potential to close the longstanding gap between customer experience and HR. However, there is a concern around agents making high-stakes decisions without adequate human oversight — and what that means for employees’ sense of fairness and trust in the process.
The perception gap: leaders think things are fine. Workers don’t.
A few recent studies have surfaced a disconnect between HR and leadership perceptions of various work issues and the actual employee experience. Axonify’s 2026 Frontline Operations Report found that the further away someone is from the frontline, the more positive and unrealistic their outlook. The majority of leaders believe they are providing strong internal communications, closing feedback loops and supporting employees through quality training and development. But far fewer frontline workers feel the same.
When it comes to perceptions around pay, a similar gap shows up. Salary.com’s 2026 State of Pay and Compensation Practices Report finds a 31-point confidence gap between what HR believes about pay fairness and what they think employees actually experience. The root cause appears structural: a significant proportion of the organisations surveyed lack formal job architectures or levelling procedures. This means pay decisions lack the transparency and consistency needed to build trust.
Together, these studies point to the importance of EX leaders getting closer to that frontline reality to ensure the people issues they are fixing are the right ones.
Get in touch
That’s it for my first roundup. I’ll be back in a fortnight. In the meantime, if you have employee experience stories to share, connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at [email protected]
Becky Norman is the Employee Experience Editor for CXM. With 14 years in digital publishing, she champions the organisations and practitioners creating exceptional experiences for their people — and driving measurable impact on customer success as a result. Prior to this role, Becky spent eight years as editor of B2B publications HRZone and TrainingZone, covering the most pressing issues facing HR, people, and learning leaders. In 2020, she co-created Culture Pioneers – a global campaign recognising the organisations shaping workplace culture to drive both business performance and employee experience.
