Before the data upload: What you need to know

Starting point You want to start your first survey soon, but first you have to collect, prepare, and upload your employee data to My Effectory. For this, it is crucial to understand how to structure your employee data effectively in order to obtain the most meaningful insights from your surveys. This article will explain why it is important to think about how to map your organization before preparing your data for upload in My Effectory. 

 

Step 1: Define objectives before preparing employee data.

Setting the stage for a successful survey involves more than just collecting data; it begins with defining clear goals. Think of it as mapping your journey before embarking on a significant trip.

Outlining your survey goals can act as the blueprint for gathering employee data. This framework guides every aspect of the data preparation process, ensuring that each step aligns with the intended outcomes. Your survey objectives are critical in determining the specific data points, questions, and methods necessary to extract relevant information from your employees. Without this clarity, the survey might lack direction, leading to erratic data collection and a lack of clarity about the necessary information.

Defining your objectives does not only help in choosing the questions for your surveys, but it can also help you to identify which data you might need for creating group structures and additional data segmentations once the survey results are in.

 

Step 2: Think about the "right" structure of your organization.

What we call organizational mapping refers to creating a visual representation or organigram of the structure and relationships within a company. It is like drawing a map that shows who reports to whom, the various branches, departments, and teams.

Organizations often have multiple hierarchical levels. These levels constitute what we refer to as the group structure. Read more about group structures here.

Why is it useful? The organizational mapping...

  • helps you see the hierarchy and connections within the organization.
  • is useful for designing employee surveys because it allows you to understand the different levels and areas of the company.
  • helps you target specific groups, such as departments or managerial levels, to gather more relevant feedback.
  • will pave the way for effortless processes on the platform, such as assigning coordinators, defining rights and roles, creating surveys, choosing the right participants for surveys, and generating reports

Therefore, it is essential to start thinking about the "right" structure before preparing and uploading your data in My Effectory. How to create a group structure and thereby map your organization? Find a guide here: How to: Creating group structures in my project

Note: Sometimes, it might be necessary to map your organization in multiple ways. If that is the case for you, read more about this here: Learn more: multiple structures

 

Step 3: Think about the data categories that you need.

Certain data categories need to be included in your employee data to run surveys successfully. Other data categories are optional depending on your objectives and the insights you are interested in. Read more about the employee data categories here:

Preparing your employee data for import

 

Use case example - Preparing employee data

Let us look at a use case: You plan to run a quarterly pulse survey for all teams within the organization. Next to that you also want to conduct a yearly organizational-wide survey. This means your employee data needs to contain all the information to be able to run these kinds of surveys effortlessly without having to alter too much data afterwards.
  1. For pulse surveys your team managers or direct managers will get the opportunity to start a survey for their own team within a given time frame. This means you need to create a group structure - mapping your organization - in a way that allows each team manager to select their team from the organizational tree. This way they will also receive their own team's results. You will want to make sure the managers are not part of their own teams.
  2. For your yearly organization wide survey, you probably want to capture the answers based on the organization's current setup, starting from the highest level (the organization itself) down to the individual teams. Next to that you also would like to be able to look at the results geographically because your organization is situated in several countries.
So, when preparing your employee data, you will need to make sure that for the purpose of organizational mapping it contains at least:
  • all hierarchical levels --> to create your main structure for the org wide survey
  • geographical information --> to use for an additional structure for your org wide survey
  • direct manager report information --> to create a structure for the quarterly team pulse surveys

Read more:

 

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