The decline isn’t evenly spread. Retail is the worst hit, with 88% of companies reporting falling effort. IT and Professional Services follow at 77% each. Construction and Real Estate sit at 71%. Financial Services is a relative outlier, at 62%, and with a smaller average drop of just 4%. Manufacturing is the most resilient sector of all: only 44% of companies saw a decline, and the drop averaged a modest 3%.

The pattern, as indicated by industries, suggests something structural, not whimsical. Sectors built around routine, high-churn, transaction-heavy work are bleeding effort fastest. Sectors with longer employee tenures and more stable teams are doing steadier. The common thread seems to be specialisation. Manufacturing, the most steady sector, leans on niche, trade-specific skills that take years to train and build. That kind of expertise tends to come with deeper attachment to the job itself, not just the paycheck. Retail and IT, by contrast, run on roles that are easier to fill and easier to leave. Where skills are interchangeable, so is commitment.

So what actually moves the needle on effort? The report’s leadership data offers a clue, and it’s stark. When employees feel their leaders genuinely care about them, discretionary effort hits a high of 99%. When that caring is absent, it collapses to 29%. That’s a 70-point swing, the single biggest factor in the entire report.

Inspiration works almost as powerfully. Effort sits at 98% when employees find leadership inspiring, and falls to 32% when they don’t. Listening, celebrating wins, and sharing information all show similar, if smaller, gaps, each one worth 30 to 45 points of effort.

Interestingly, some leadership behaviours matter less than expected. “Developing” employees, training, mentoring, and skill-building show the smallest gap of all, just 25 points. It still helps. But it isn’t what’s driving the recession. Care and inspiration are.

That points to something counterintuitive. Companies chasing effort through better learning and development budgets or career-progression frameworks might be solving the wrong problem. The data says the fix is more basic: whether managers show up for their people, day to day, as human beings.

Layered on top of this is a generational shift accelerating the crunch. Gen Z now makes up 26% of India’s workforce, nearly double their share in 2023. That growth is happening everywhere from pharma to retail, banking, IT, and manufacturing, at an average pace of 16% a year over the last four years, as per the report.

This is arriving at the same moment as AI disruption, and leadership is struggling on both fronts. Nearly 58% of CHROs say they’re trying to manage generational change and AI transformation at once. Half admit they don’t fully understand what motivates their younger employees.

Put together, the picture is of a workforce transforming faster than the leadership structures meant to hold it together. Effort isn’t disappearing because people have stopped caring about work. It’s disappearing because, in many organisations, fewer people feel their leaders care about it.