What are 'Circular Loops' in My Effectory, and how do they occur?

Summary 

Circular loops can occur when you are using automated manager linking. A circular loop happens if a manager seems to repeat in an illogical way while linking them to their team. You will get a warning and can either ignore this or download your employee file and correct the affected columns. In any case, this warning will not keep you from setting up My Effectory and running surveys.  

How automated manager linking works 

When you first upload your employee data, My Effectory gives you the option to fill in your managers’ data separately, as an attribute of an employee. Adding managers to your teams at this stage can help you later when you want to delegate user rights or give access to survey results. My Effectory will look up the participants’ managers and automatically link them to their teams according to the hierarchy you have set in your organizational structure. The platform will suggest the right manager. This way, you will not have to look them up and fill them in manually.  

What causes a circular loop? 

My Effectory will look up managers going bottom-up, starting at the lowest level in the hierarchy, and link each manager to their team. A circular loop occurs if an irregularity in your employee file interferes with identifying the right manager.  

Example  

Let’s say we have three managers that we call Eve, Joe, and Kate. Suppose Eve is the lowest ranking manager; the system will start with Eve and look up her manager (Joe). Following, the system will look for Joe’s manager (Kate). The automated linking will work that way on a hierarchical order basis. 

If a person repeats in this order, it will break the hierarchy. In other words, if Eve is managed by Joe and Kate manages Joe, then Eve cannot be the manager of Kate again. The result is that the system cannot identify the correct manager in charge anymore and link managers above Kate. 

What does this mean in practical terms? 

The consequence of a circular loop is that you will not receive automated suggestions when adding managers; However, you can still add them manually. We will warn you about this, but it will not stop you from continuing to set up My Effectory and running surveys with it.   

What can you do? 

My Effectory will show you the group of managers that are affected, but it cannot show which manager is causing the loop. You can review the affected group and compare it with your HR files in Excel. You can then remove the repeated person or add a new manager to your Excel file. After that, you can re-upload the updated file to My Effectory. Alternatively, you can add each manager manually in My Effectory.  

Why are circular loops complicated? 

Most likely, you don’t have three managers like Eve (C), Joe (B), and Kate (A), but a lot more; imagine starting at Z and going up in the alphabet. The larger your employee file is, the more error-prone it will be. With many hierarchy layers, the possibility of loops will increase.  

Let’s sum up 

When a circular loop occurs, we will warn you about it. You will have the option to ignore this warning or remove / edit manager data in your file and re-upload it. The circular loop does not hinder you in setting up My Effectory. You might need to add managers manually later when deciding on access rights to the results section, for example. 

Please reach out to the helpdesk if you need more information regarding this topic. If you want to know more about how automated manager linking works, click here.