Preparing your employee data for import

Starting point You are about to set up your organization's My Effectory account. You will first have to collect your organization's employee data for the import to our platform. This article will guide you through the preparation of your employee data to ensure you get the insights you need from your employee listening!

What is an employee data file?

An employee data file (or employee file) is a structured document containing essential information about all employees. Its content can differ across organizations according to the specific employee listening needs. Generally, most employee files contain an employee identifier, demographic data, e-mail addresses, organizational structure data, etc.

Why do you need it for employee listening? My Effectory enables you to run surveys, collect insights, and analyze results based on your employee data. For this reason, the completeness and quality of your employee file are crucial for the success of your employee listening strategy.

There are two ways in which you can start setting up your employee data file:

Download our template Excel file and insert your organization's employee data. Our template ensures that all the essential variables are covered, and you can access clear instructions and requirements.
Export data from your HR system. You may have to run some checks on the exported file to ensure that it is processable for our platform.

Note: Is your organization using an integration to your HR system to retrieve employee data? If so, your data is synced directly to My Effectory, and you don't need to manually prepare or import data files. However, the information below can still be handy during your integration setup!

The content of your employee file

In the following sections, you will find the most commonly used variables in employee files.

I. Basic employee data

Employee ID
E-mail address
First and last name
Language

II. Additional employee data

III. Manager data

IV. Organizational levels

I. Basic employee data

Employee ID (required)

Why? My Effectory uses a unique ID per employee to identify them. Adding, removing, or modifying employee data is based on this unique identifier in the Employee ID column. Due to its function, the Employee ID column cannot contain duplicates!

This variable is essential for the correct functioning of My Effectory for your organization; for this reason, it is required.

Tip! No unique Employee IDs? If your organization does not use unique employee identifiers, you can use e-mail addresses as identifiers which are usually unique. To do this, make a copy of the e-mail address column and change the column header to Employee ID.

E-mail address (required)

Why? My Effectory uses e-mail addresses to send participants personal invitations to your surveys. Additionally, respondents can use the same e-mail address to log into Your Feedback (if your organization uses it), which enables them to view and compare their responses with those of their teams or the rest of the organization.

Tip! Not every employee has an e-mail address? The E-mail address field is a required variable. However, in Column settings , you may allow empty values for this variable. When this option is activated, My Effectory will not mark missing e-mail addresses as errors. This is a useful option when also distributing hard-copy invitations for non-desk employees in the organization.

Note: Always use work e-mail addresses in your employee data! Privacy legislation often restricts the use of private e-mail addresses and may even result in issues reaching survey participants with our invitations.

First and last name

Why? We use your employees' names for personal invitations and to welcome them to the platform. Your data file should include your employees' first and last names, preferably in separate columns.

Tip! Include last names with prefixes entirely in the Last name column!

Language

Why? Including the Language variable in your employee data enables us to address your employees in their preferred language. When responding to a survey, participants will also see the questionnaire in the language assigned to them in the employee file.

What should the Language variable look like? My Effectory uses ISO 639-1 standard language codes. Once you've matched your column containing language data with our Language field, My Effectory will automatically show you all available options in a drop-down menu. Please refer to this page for a list of all supported language codes.

II. Additional employee data

Why? You can use additional characteristics per employee to make use of data segmentation. This enables you to gain in-depth insights into and compare employee groups. Variables commonly used for this are, for instance, age, gender, and date in service. You may segment your employees based on any characteristics that are relevant to your organization.

Note: When adding additional employee data, please make sure you do so in accordance with your Data Processing Agreement. Effectory should not receive sensitive personal data, and you will be notified if such information is detected during the data import.

Tip! Make sure to use consistent date formats when adding additional variables such as Birthdate or Date in service!

III. Manager data

Why? Adding manager data at this stage enables you to make use of coordinator linking to connect group coordinators automatically to their corresponding teams' survey settings and results.

To include manager data, all you need to do is have the variable Manager e-mail address as a column in your employee data file. Then, use it to add for each employee their direct manager's e-mail address. When setting up your project later on, My Effectory will use this data to make suggestions for linking coordinators to the right teams.

Note: Each manager is most likely also managed by another manager. Make sure that this management hierarchy is linear and not circular! This means that John can't be Martina's manager if Martina is, in turn, John's manager. If you need any more help, please get in touch with our helpdesk or your Customer Success Manager!

Tip! Remember that your managers should be participants too! You might also want to send them specific surveys to gain their insights.

IV. Organizational levels

Why? When setting up a new project in My Effectory, coordinators are instructed to set up at least one group structure. Organizational levels are the building blocks of any group structure. When arranged hierarchically, they provide an accurate representation of your organization, based on which it becomes possible to:

assign coordinator access rights.
invite employees to surveys.
analyze survey results.

Organizational levels can be variables such as business unit, department, team, but also function, region, location, and more. The more diverse the variables you include in your employee data, the more flexibility you have in creating different types of group structures within each project.

Tip! We don't report the scores of groups with less than five respondents! Avoid excessive fragmentation of employees into small groups, especially at the lower levels of your group structures.

Next step Now that your employee data file is complete, you can import it into My Effectory. Find out how in this article!