🙉 🙈 Leave me alone, already

Workers experiencing 275 interruptions daily (Microsoft)

Author

Eryn Peters
May 04, 2025

In partnership with

Happy Sunday, pals!

It’s a nerdy double header of heavy-hitting workforce reports. Refill your coffees, clean your glasses, touch grass, and let’s begin.

In today’s issue

⚡️ Lightning List ⚡️ 

🔥 Don’t lose your streak. Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI.

😡 Malicious compliance. Employees are engaging in revenge RTO.

🎬️ Give the people what they want. Digital creator jobs jump 7.5x since pandemic.

📊 State of the Global Workplace 📊 

Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workforce report is out (read my summary of last year’s report here). This year's report includes 227,347 responses collected from April to December 2024, bringing the full trend data (2009-2024) to a total of 5,490,517 records.

10 Facts & Figures

  1. 📉 Global employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% in 2024. This two-point drop equals the decline during COVID-19 lockdowns. Manager engagement fell significantly from 30% to 27%, while individual contributor engagement remained flat at 18%.

  2. 👩‍💼 Managers are experiencing burnout at alarming rates. Female manager engagement dropped by seven percentage points, and young manager (under 35) engagement fell by five points. Manager well-being also saw concerning declines.

  3. 💸 Lost productivity from low engagement costs the global economy $438 billion annually. Gallup estimates that if the world's workplace was fully engaged, $9.6 trillion in productivity could be added to the global economy (9% of global GDP).

  4. 🌡️ Global employee life evaluations fell to 33% thriving. After several years of steady improvement, the percentage of employees thriving in life has declined over the last two years.

  5. 😰 40% of global employees experience daily stress. The United States and Canada region has the highest stress levels (50%), while Post-Soviet Eurasia has the lowest (21%).

  6. 😡 21% of global respondents experience daily anger. South Asia experiences the most anger (34%), while Europe and Latin America tied for the lowest (14%).

  7. 😢 23% of global respondents experience daily sadness. South Asia experiences the most daily sadness (39%), East Asia experiences the least (14%).

  8. 😔 22% of global respondents experience daily loneliness. Sub-Saharan Africa experiences the most loneliness (30%), while Europe and Australia/New Zealand tied for the lowest (12%).

  9. 🗺️ Regional engagement varies dramatically. The United States/Canada and Latin America tied for highest engagement (31%), while Europe has the lowest (13%). South Asia, Post-Soviet Eurasia, and Southeast Asia tied for second place (26%).

  10. 🔍 50% of global respondents are watching for or actively seeking a new job. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest percentage seeking new jobs (72%), while Europe has the lowest (30%). Young employees under 35 (58%) are much more likely to be looking than those 35+ (43%).

Bonus: 3️⃣ Actions for Leaders

  1. 📚️ Provide basic training for all managers. Less than half of the world's managers (44%) have received management training. When managers receive training, they are half as likely to be actively disengaged.

  2. 💪 Teach effective coaching techniques. Manager training in coaching practices can boost manager performance by 20-28% and team engagement by up to 18%.

  3. 💰️ Invest in ongoing manager development. When employers provide manager training and someone encourages their development, manager thriving increases from 28% to 50%.

🌎️ State of the Global Workplace 🌏️ 

Microsoft’s Annual Work Trend Index Report is out. This year's report analyzed survey data from 31,000 workers across 31 countries, LinkedIn labor market trends, and trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals. It also includes insights from interviews with AI-native startups, academics, economists, and thought leaders.

10 Facts & Figures

  1. 📈 82% of leaders say this is a pivotal year to rethink key aspects of strategy and operations, and 81% expect agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their company's AI strategy in the next 12-18 months. Adoption is accelerating, with 24% of companies already deploying AI organization-wide, while just 12% remain in pilot mode.

  2. 🧠 Intelligence is becoming an essential durable good: abundant, affordable, and available on demand. With AI and agents that can reason, plan, and act as digital labor, companies can scale capacity as needed to close the widening gap between what businesses demand and what humans can sustainably deliver.

  3. ⚡ Employees are interrupted every 2 minutes during core work hours by meetings, emails, or chats, adding up to 275 interruptions daily. 60% of meetings are ad hoc versus scheduled. Edits in PowerPoint spike 122% in the final 10 minutes before a meeting, and chats outside the 9-to-5 workday are up 15% year over year.

  4. 🤖 46% of leaders say their organization is using agents to fully automate workstreams or business processes for entire teams or functions. Customer service, marketing, and product development are the top three areas for accelerated AI investment in the next 12-18 months.

  5. 🤝 46% of workers treat AI like a thought partner, having conversational exchanges to challenge their thinking and spark creativity, while 52% treat AI as a command-based tool, giving direct commands to get work done.

  6. 💼 The top reasons employees turn to AI over a colleague: 24/7 availability (42%), machine speed and quality (30%), unlimited ideas on demand (28%). Notably, reasons related to avoiding human traits—like impatience or judgment—ranked lowest, suggesting people prefer using AI to enhance human value, not replace it.

  7. 📊 A "human-agent ratio" is emerging as a new critical business metric. Leaders must determine how many agents are needed for specific roles and tasks, and how many humans are needed to guide them. This balance will vary by function, with some requiring more human oversight than others.

  8. 👩‍💼 Leaders are ahead of employees in adopting an "agent boss" mindset. 67% of leaders are familiar with agents (vs. 40% of employees), 69% use AI regularly (vs. 45% of employees), and 78% trust AI for high-stakes work (vs. 66% of employees).

  9. 📱 Within five years, leaders expect their teams' scope to include: redesigning business processes with AI (38%), building multi-agent systems to automate complex tasks (42%), training agents (41%), and managing them (36%). This evolution will create entirely new roles and career paths.

  10. 🚀 Frontier Firms are proving what's possible: 71% of employees at these AI-mature companies say their organization is thriving (vs. 37% globally), 55% say they can take on more work (vs. 20% globally), and 90% report having opportunities for meaningful work (vs. 73% globally).

Bonus: The Three Phases of the AI Journey

  1. 👶 Human with assistant - Every employee has an AI assistant that helps them work better and faster.

  2. 🤝 Human-agent teams - Agents join teams as "digital colleagues," taking on specific tasks at human direction.

  3. 🥇 Human-led, agent-operated - Humans set direction and agents execute business processes and workflows, checking in as needed.

⭐️ Community Spotlight ⭐️ 

🏆️ LAST CALL!

IF YOU KNOW OF AMAZING WOMEN IN DIGITAL (you should, come on) let’s recognize and celebrate them.

It’s time for the annual ISG Women in Digital Awards, and the deadline for nominations is fast approaching on May 13th.

Here are the pages to nominate for

Note: I won the Digital Innovator category last year and will be a judge in EMEA this year - so I want to see your names in that application list!

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📚️ Term of the Week 📚️ 

Frontier Firm noun | MICROSOFT FUTURE OF WORK TERM

a company powered by intelligence on tap, human-agent teams, and a new role for everyone: agent boss. These organizations are structured around on-demand intelligence and powered by "hybrid" teams of humans + agents that scale rapidly, operate with agility, and generate value faster.

Related terms: agent economy, work chart, intelligence resrourcing

That’s all for now, pals. See ya next week.