The 75% 'Good Boss' Anomaly: What the New Survey Data Actually Means

A new survey from GroupTogether, conveniently released just ahead of Boss's Day, has delivered a Boss’s Day Bombshell: 75% of Employees Actually LIKE Their Boss – New Survey Shatters Stereotypes: 75.9% of employees report that they like their boss. Ali Linz, the company’s co-founder, suggests this finding "proves the clichéd stereotype of people hating their boss is outdated."

On the surface, it’s a comforting statistic. It paints a picture of harmonious workplaces where the age-old tension between labor and management has softened into mutual appreciation. But I've looked at data sets for a long time, and my first instinct is always to check the fine print. When a number feels too clean, it’s usually because it’s sanding down a much rougher reality.

The reality is that this single, cheerful data point sits atop a foundation of far more troubling metrics. It’s like admiring the fresh paint on a house while ignoring the cracks spidering across its foundation. The data suggests we aren't in an era of newfound managerial excellence, but rather an era of profound disconnection between perceived sentiment and operational reality.

The Politeness Premium

Let’s first address the methodology. The 75.9% figure feels optimistic because it likely is. A separate HR Dive report from earlier this year provides the necessary context: 47% of workers admit they feel pressured to not be fully honest in engagement surveys. Nearly half. Furthermore, 44% believe their manager would overestimate their positivity, and a significant portion doubt the surveys are even anonymous.

This isn’t a minor statistical noise; it’s a fundamental challenge to the validity of the entire premise. If nearly half of your sample size feels they can't provide candid feedback, then you're not measuring satisfaction. You're measuring a performance of satisfaction. What is the real cost of this "politeness premium" that employees pay in surveys? Does it mask simmering issues until they become full-blown retention crises?

This discrepancy is particularly alarming when you consider Gallup's long-standing research, which finds that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement. The manager-employee relationship isn't a "nice-to-have"—it is the central pillar of a functional team. Yet the primary tool we use to measure the health of that pillar appears to be systemically flawed. We're getting a filtered, curated version of the truth, and building entire corporate strategies on it.

And this is the part of the report that I find genuinely puzzling: the top reason cited for liking a boss was "they create a great team culture" (27.7%), followed by "they’re a nice person" (22.9%). These are subjective, personal qualities. Meanwhile, core competencies like "communicating clearly" (10.2%) and "encouraging employee development" (12.6%) lag far behind. Are we now selecting and rewarding managers for being agreeable rather than for being effective?

The Great Burnout Cascade

The illusion of the happy employee shatters completely when we zoom out. While three-quarters of employees might say they like their boss, U.S. employee engagement has cratered to a 10-year low, dropping to around 20%—to be more exact, somewhere between 18% and 21% in 2024. This is not a dip; it's a collapse. A workforce where four out of five people are disengaged is not a healthy workforce, regardless of how they feel about their immediate supervisor.

The problem is, the managers themselves are part of the casualty list. Another recent survey from Kahoot! found that global manager engagement has fallen to just 27%. Worse, 46% of managers reported they would willingly give up their title just to feel more engaged in their work. Let that sink in. The very people tasked with fostering culture and engagement are so depleted that nearly half of them want out.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop. An exhausted, disengaged manager struggles to support their team, which in turn becomes more disengaged, which adds more pressure on the manager. It’s like a power transformer in an electrical grid. The manager’s job is to step down the high-voltage corporate strategy into usable, motivational energy for the team. But the transformers are overheating. I can almost picture one of them now: sitting alone in a home office at 10 PM, the only light coming from a laptop screen filled with team performance dashboards, the quiet hum of the fan the only sound as their own engagement flatlines.

This is the central contradiction. We have a workforce that professes to like its managers, yet neither group is engaged in their work. It suggests that "liking" your boss has become decoupled from professional respect, motivation, and productivity. It’s a pleasantry, not a performance indicator.

Investing in the Dashboard, Not the Driver

So, how is the corporate world responding to this crisis of engagement? Not by fundamentally addressing the burnout, but by throwing money at technology. The global Human Capital Management (HCM) software market is a juggernaut, projected to swell from about $35 billion in 2024 to nearly $58 billion by 2029 (a compound annual growth rate of approximately 10.5%).

Within that, AI-powered HR tools are the high-growth darlings, with a forecast annual growth rate of a staggering 45%. We see tools like Workday's "Recruiting Agent" AI, which promises to slash resume screening time by 57%. This is efficiency, yes, but efficiency in service of what? It’s a faster way to pour people into a system that is actively disengaging them. The stock market is rewarding this trend, with consensus analyst targets for giants like Workday (WDAY), ADP (ADP), and Paychex (PAYX) all pointing north. The market believes in the technological fix.

But no amount of software can fix a human problem of this magnitude. Companies are spending billions on sophisticated dashboards to monitor the health of an engine that is running on fumes. They are optimizing the process of managing a workforce that has lost its will. Some are even investing in lavish office campuses to "rebuild connections," a strange, cargo-cult-like attempt to solve a burnout problem with architecture.

What if the issue isn't a lack of AI-driven insights or a shortage of kombucha on tap? What if the problem is that the fundamental contract of work—the balance of effort, reward, and purpose—is broken for both the employee and the manager?

We're Measuring the Wrong Signal

The 75.9% "like my boss" statistic isn't just misleading; it's a dangerous distraction. It allows leadership to check a box on "culture" while the real metrics—engagement, burnout, and manager attrition—flash red. Liking your boss is irrelevant if you're both on a path to burnout. The data, when viewed as a whole, points not to a failure of interpersonal skills, but to a systemic exhaustion that no software suite can fix. We're obsessively polishing a single, pleasant-sounding number while the entire structure groans under the weight of a workforce that has simply had enough. The problem isn't the people; it's the operating system they're forced to run on.