Here is an excerpt from an article written by Ryan Fuller and Nina Shikaloff for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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So much depends upon managers. For example, a Gallup study found that at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores is driven by who the boss is. This is disconcerting because the same research found that about 70% of people in management roles are not well equipped for the job. This state of affairs is hurting not just employee engagement and quality of life, but also corporate performance.

Most companies understand the importance of having highly effective managers, but few invest heavily in training to help them get there. One reason is that it’s difficult to measure and quantify what good management actually looks like. While there has been a lot of great work done to identify qualitative traits of great managers — they create trust, focus on strengths, instill accountability, avoid politics, etc. — these traits don’t provide much insight into how great managers spend their time on a day-to-day basis that differentiates them.

But there’s new data that can help. Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics product analyzes metadata from the digital breadcrumbs of a customer’s millions of de-identified email and meeting interactions to generate an objective and granular set of behavioral KPIs across the organization (for example, how much time managers spend in one-on-ones with employees, how quickly they respond to emails from each direct report, how large and diverse there networks are, etc.). Among other things, these KPIs can then be combined up with other data sets to understand what behaviors differentiate sub-populations of employees.

We recently had the opportunity to combine behavioral KPIs with employee engagement survey results for two Fortune 100 clients comprising thousands of knowledge workers. Inspired by Gallup’s findings about the influential role managers play on employee engagement, we wanted to understand what made managers of highly engaged employees different than the rest on a day-to-day basis. The results were illuminating.

Managers lead by example when it comes to working hours. Two metrics we use to provide a proxy of active working time per week are utilization and after-hours time. ”Utilization” essentially looks at the average amount of time between your first and last email or meeting of the day across several months of data and estimates total weekly working time for each employee. It’s an imperfect metric, but does provide a good directional sense of working norms. “After hours” is the amount of time spent in email or meetings outside of an employee’s normal work hours, which are typically 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The data shows that managers in the top quartile of utilization — a.k.a. those who work the longest hours — end up with employees who work up to 19% more hours relative to their colleagues who report to less highly utilized managers. This is perhaps unsurprising. What might be more surprising is that even though they are working more hours, the engagement scores of these employees are actually 5% higher than their lower utilization colleagues. It’s also true that employees of managers in the lowest 25% of utilization have lower than average engagement scores (2-4% lower). This suggests that people are more engaged if they work for a manager who is working at least as much as they are.

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Bad management is estimated to cost the U.S. economy up to $398 billion annually. Historically, the lack of objective data has made it difficult for companies to instrument the quality of their managers and therefore even more challenging to provide effective training and ongoing feedback loops to improve it. Our data is a start, highlighting some traits of good managers that are actionable on a daily basis. The opportunity is huge for better-run organizations and a higher quality of life for workers. In the future, it’s a good bet that the most successful companies will continue be the ones with the best managers.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Ryan Fuller was the CEO and co-founder of VoloMetrix, a leading people analytics company acquired by Microsoft in 2015. Within Microsoft, Ryan leads a business unit focused on making organizational analytics capabilities broadly available. Previously he was a management consultant at Bain & Company.

Nina Shikaloff is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, where she delivers actionable insights for improving organizational efficiency and talent management to Fortune 500 companies using Workplace Analytics. She previously led analytic consulting, R&D and product management functions at FICO and InfoCentricity.