The Case for Learning as a Line Item
What the Data Says About Investing in People and Culture
Every budget season, learning and culture work gets treated as the flexible line. The evidence says it is one of the least flexible costs an organization carries. You pay for it either way: up front as development, or later as disengagement, turnover, and strategy that stalls.
The cost of doing nothing is already on the books. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 reports that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest point since 2020. Gallup estimates the price at about $10 trillion in lost productivity, roughly 9% of global GDP.
Managers are where it is slipping. Most of the recent decline came from managers, whose engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. These are the people expected to carry culture to the front line, and Gallup notes that many have never been trained to coach a team toward high performance. The decline is avoidable. In Gallup's best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged, nearly four times the global average, and those organizations treat engagement as part of long-term business strategy.
Leaders believe in development. Their systems leave no room for it. LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that 88% of organizations are concerned about retention, and offering learning is their number one strategy for keeping people. Nearly half of learning leaders (49%) say their executives worry that employees lack the skills to execute the business strategy. Yet only 15% of employees say their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months. Belief is rarely the barrier: just 11% of respondents named leadership undervaluing development as a top obstacle, while 50% said managers lack the support to deliver it.
Learning gives work its meaning. In the same LinkedIn survey, 84% of employees agreed that learning adds purpose to their work.
Three questions for your 2027 plan
Before the learning line gets its forty seconds, ask:
What do we need our people to be able to do next year that they can't do today?
Which managers will carry that change, and what support have we funded for them?
How will we see it in behavior, and in results, by this time next year?
A Shingo-based learning path is built to answer all three. It gives the whole organization a shared language of principles. It teaches leaders and managers to see behavior and the systems that drive it. And it connects both to the results the business is counting on. Planned as a sequence across the year, it becomes capability your organization keeps.
If you are setting your 2027 plan now, we would be glad to help you map it.
Sources
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report (2025 data, 141,444 employed respondents)
LinkedIn Learning, 2025 Workplace Learning Report (937 L&D and HR professionals, 679 learners). This is the latest edition under this title; LinkedIn's 2026 release is the Talent Velocity Report, which I have not pulled figures from.
