Employee Engagement
Participant List / Hierarchy
What is your participant list / hierarchy?
If you have experience running employee surveys in your organization, you will know that this is one of the most complex pieces of any employee survey project. One of the most important things we need to get right for reporting is ensuring that all managers receive the right data in their dashboard reports. That means employees need to be coded into the right team in the organization, to ensure their manager, their manager’s manager and so on all the way up to the top of the organization have their responses in their dashboard results.
We do this by creating a reporting hierarchy, which denotes all the managers in the organization and the participants who are in their area of the business. There are two main hierarchy types. Select the one that best fits your organization:
- Parent-Child Hierarchy:
Each individual business unit has one manager (e.g. there is one manager for each department/office/business unit) - Level-Based Hierarchy:
One business unit has multiple managers (e.g. the accounting department has two managers)
What should a good hierarchy file include?
Your hierarchy file must contain the following for every employee:
- Unique employee identifier (usually employee ID) – with no duplicates
- A manager aligned to every employee
- An email address
- First Name
- Last Name
You may also include any demographic information you want to pre-code for every employee, such as their tenure with the company or age bracket.
Implementation
What do you need to prepare in order to create a hierarchy?
The best and most accurate way to create a hierarchy is to base it on your existing reporting relationships that are already defined and familiar to your organization. In order to do that you need to export employee information from your HR system into a CSV spreadsheet, which lists every employee and their manager. It may also include demographic information you wish to code against each employee (Age, Tenure, Function, etc).
This information will then be uploaded into our hierarchy tool, which is designed to assist you with making hierarchy and employee updates.
When do you need it prepared by?
Your Implementation Consultant will define deadlines with you further, but generally you need to have a final, clean participant file no later than 1 week before your desired survey launch date. As this file will need to be final, we strongly recommend you work with your Implementation Consultant to upload an initial file as soon after your kick off call as possible so we can assess the health of your HR data and let you know any updates that need to be made.
Click one of the two hierarchy type templates later in this section to download the template for your participant file. First, read the instructions on the first tab (named “Instructions”). Then in the second tab in the spreadsheet (named “Organization”), delete the example data and input your real employee data in the same format, and then let us know when it’s ready.
Download a Parent Child Hierarchy employee information template!
Download a Level Based Hierarchy employee information template!