A recent Gallup study is going to hit uncomfortably close to home for some managers.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Gallup's James Harter says the wide-reaching State of the American Manager survey finds that less than a third of Americans are engaged in their jobs. It's been this way the entire time Gallup has conducted the survey, nearly 15 years.

But take heart. The report also provides a close look at what makes a truly good manager, and managers account for as much as 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores.

So what is an engaged employee? It's an employee who is enthusiastic and involved in their work, and also in their workplace, and there's a lot managers can do to make sure employees feel engaged. Most managers aren't creating environments in which employees feel anything close to engagement.

"The majority of employees are indifferent, sleepwalking through their workday without regard for their performance or their organization’s performance," Harter writes. Click here for the HBR piece.

Organizations need to understand what managers are doing in the workplace to create or destroy engagement. Harter provides three key tips to help make that happen:

Communicate

Communication is often the basis of any healthy relationship, including the one between an employee and his or her manager.

Gallup has found that consistent communication – whether it occurs in person, over the phone, or electronically – is connected to higher engagement.

For example, employees whose managers holdregular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as employees whose managers do not hold regular meetings with them.

Gallup also finds that engagement is highest among employees who have some form (face-to-face, phone, or digital) of daily communication with their managers.

Managers who use a combination of face-to-face, phone, and electronic communication are the most successful in engaging employees. And when employees attempt to contact their manager, engaged employees report their manager returns their calls or messages within 24 hours.