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Employee Directory (EX)


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About the Employee Directory

Your Employee Directory contains a list of all people – participants or administrators – uploaded for use in EX projects. Each person may or may not be included in a project or hierarchy. Additional staff can be added manually or by mass import.

The directory is useful because it allows you to save a lot of information about people for reuse across multiple projects. For example, you can save metadata, manager-direct reports relationships, and email addresses inside the directory.

To navigate to the Employee Directory, use the navigation menu in the top-left to select Directories and then choose Employee Directory.
using the navigation menu to select directory

choosing employee directory

Qtip: By default, only Brand Administrators, EX Administrators, and Employee Insights Admins will have access to the Employee Directory. To give access to other users, enable the Access Directories account permission. Note that users with access to the Employee Directory will be able to view and modify all personal information and metadata for all users within your license.
Attention: Your directory contains every participant and user in your entire organization! Be very careful when adding and removing people, since you are not just adding or removing them from a single project.

Qtip: Managing your employee directory is an important step in Employee Experience project distribution, since it is where your project participants are all ultimately stored. Once you have your directory configured as desired and your employees uploaded, you have a number of options for participant setup, followed by project distribution.
For participant setup, see the following resources:

For distribution, see the following resources:

Global Information Window

When you click on a person’s name or email address inside the Global Directory, this opens the global information window. Here, you can view and revise information about a particular person in your directory.

Participation section in a user's Global Information Window

Basic Information

Participant's basic information in the Global Information Window

This section contains information about the First Name, Last Name, Email, Unique Identifier, and Login Name. To edit a field, click directly to the right of the field name and type in the new value. This change will reflect in the Admin page and all projects in which the individual is a participant.

Metadata

This section contains information about the various pieces of metadata that have been assigned to the participant.

Participant's metadata information in the Global Information Window

  1. To remove a metadata field for a participant, hover over the field value and select the red X.
  2. To edit or assign a value to a metadata field, click directly on the field value, or click to the right of the field name and type in the new value.
  3. To rename a field for only the selected participant, click on the field name.
  4. To add a new metadata field for a participant, select Add Field.
Attention: Changes made to metadata in the directory will not reflect in projects. The only exception is 360 projects with a status of New.

Relationships tab

The Relationships tab allows you to manage a person’s relationships in 360 projects. Relationships established here can be loaded quickly and efficiently into a 360 project for future use.

These relationships will not affect Employee Engagement or Employee Lifecycle projects in any way.

Participant's relationship information in the Global Information Window

To add a relationship:

  1. Find a person already in the directory using the Search bar.
  2. Click Select Relationship and determine what kind of relationship they have.
  3. Click Add.

To remove a relationship, click the dropdown next to a relationship and select Delete.

Participation tab

The Participation tab displays every 360, Employee Engagement, and Employee Lifecycle project the person is listed as a participant in.

Participant's participation information in the Global Information Window

  • Project: The project’s name.
  • Evaluations Received: In a 360 project, this is a measure of how many other participants did evaluations of this subject.
  • Evaluations Completed: In a 360 project, this is a measure of how evaluations this person completed of themselves and other people. In Employee Engagement, this number is 1, because the person only completes 1 evaluation per project.
  • Status: Whether the participant’s response is Complete or Not Complete.

Searching the Directory

You can search for a desired participant by typing a name or email address into the Search bar, or you can make use of the Advanced Search feature.

Conducting an Advanced Search

  1. Navigate to your Employee Directory under Directories.
  2. Click Advanced Search.
    clicking the advanced search im employee directory
  3. Choose from a list of criteria to filter by.
    performing a search
  4. Combine conditions by clicking the plus (+) sign to the right of a condition.

Adding People Manually

  1. Navigate to the Employee Directory under Directories.
  2. Click Add People on the top-right.
    clicking add people then add people
  3. Select Add People.
  4. Type in a Unique Identifier, Email, First Name, and Last Name.
    Adding an individual's information in the Add People window

    Qtip: Running out of lines to manually add participants? Press Enter on your keyboard to create a new row.
  5. If you click the plus (+) sign, you can add columns for Language and as many metadata fields as you desire. These are not required fields.
    Attention: If your organization uses SSO, create a column named UserName when adding your directory contacts. Make sure you are using the correct username for your organization. For example, Jane Doe’s username at Company, Inc. might be jdoe@companyinc.org.
  6.  When finished, click Add.
Qtip: This window can also be used to edit users. If you use the search box to find existing users, or enter the Email exactly as it’s saved in the directory, you can change a user’s name, language, and metadata. When you click Add, instead of creating a duplicate person, the directory will just update the person using the email as a reference.

Importing People

Instead of adding people manually, you can also upload a spreadsheet.

How to Import People

  1. Create a spreadsheet in Excel or another spreadsheet program.
  2. Include a column for Unique Identifier. This is how people in your directory are differentiated from each other.
  3. If your organization has SSO, include a column for UserName. Make sure you are using the correct username for your organization. For example, Jane Doe’s username at Company, Inc. might be jdoe@companyinc.org.
  4. Add the columns FirstName, LastName, and Email.
  5. Add additional desired columns, such as LanguageManagerID, custom metadata fields, 360 relationships, etc. Note that order of columns doesn’t matter. However, spelling, capitalization, and spacing does matter.
    Qtip: Check out an example file by clicking either CSV Template or TSV Template. If you decide not to use the example document to upload people to your directory, make sure the Unique Identifier, Email, FirstName, LastName, UserName, Password, and Language fields match this formatting exactly (including spacing and capitalization) if you choose to add them.
    CSV and TSV templates in the import window
  6. Add people to your spreadsheet, with 1 row for each person.
  7. Save the file as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) or TSV (Tab Separated Values) file. Note that the maximum file size for a contact list upload is 100 MB.
  8. Navigate to the Employee Directory under Directories. 
  9. Click Add People on the top-right.
    clicking add people then import people
  10. Select Import People.
  11. Click Browse and select the participant file on your computer.the import screen with an error showing a duplicate row in the file
  12. If the importer detects initial issues, it will not let you proceed, and will list issues in red. Read these descriptions and make corrections to your file. After you’ve saved the changes, click Browse again and re-upload the file.
  13. If no issues are detected, click Check for Errors.
    the import screen with the green message that your file has no errors
  14. While the importer is loading, you can return to your participant list.
    the screen while the file imports and checks for errors
  15. When loaded, the importer will summarize what participants will be updated or added to the directory. The importer will also warn you if there are any errors in your rows.
    the import participants screen showing what changes will happen in the directory
  16. If you are happy with these changes, click Finalize import.

Import Fields

  • Unique Identifier: The means of differentiating the participant from others in the directory. See Unique Identifiers for more details. This field is required.
  • Email: The person’s email address. This field is required.
  • FirstName: The person’s first name. This field is required.
  • LastName: The person’s last name. This field is required.
  • UserName: The username a person uses to log into dashboards, admin accounts, and more. If you don’t provide a username, the email address will be used. For organizations with SSO, a hashtag (#) followed by the organization’s ID will be added to the email to create a username.
  • Password: The password a person uses to log into dashboards, admin accounts, and more.
  • ManagerID: The email address or username of the person’s manager.
  • Language: The language the user should see the survey in. This field has a pre-defined set of Available Language Codes. EN, for example, refers to English, while FR refers to French.

You can also add as many custom columns as you want. These columns are referred to as metadata, and can be used in the dashboard to create more dynamic filters and data reporting.

Errors Detected

If the importer detects errors with your import, you will be given an error report that you can download as a CSV file. This report contains information about which rows in your column contain the errors.

Red error warning message. Link to download errors

Click Download Error Report to view this.

The report will give the exact row of the file that had the error, the field that had the issue, and the unique identifier of the participant who had the error.

Example: We accidentally uploaded our user with the unique identifier “bp3835453” twice. Both the unique identifier and email address are the exact same on each of the 2 rows. If we erase 1 of the rows, the issue will be resolved when we go back to upload the file.

CSV of error messages and rows afflicted

CSV of participants that was uploaded and caused the errors

Qtip: The person importer does not detect hierarchy-specific issues.

Common Errors to Watch Out For

Although this is not an exhaustive list, here are some general tips for building your file to help you avoid issues uploading participants:

  • Make sure the first row of the file has UniqueIdentifier, First Name, Last Name, and Email.
  • Your file headers should not contain any special characters – this includes characters that are not numbers or the English alphabet.
    Qtip: This rule only applies to headers, not column values.
  • Headers cannot exceed 100 characters.
  • Your file headers should not use terms from existing Qualtrics fields:
    • SID
    • RID
    • Auditable
    • EndDate
    • RecordedDate
    • StartDate
    • Status
    • Points
  • Be careful not to include duplicates of the same row – no 2 participants should have the same unique identifier or email.
  • The file should not have more than 200 header fields.
  • The file should not have more headers than columns.
  • Make sure column values do not exceed 1000 characters.

Removing People

Attention: You must be a Brand Administrator to remove someone from the Employee Directory. If you are not a Brand Administrator and would like someone to be removed, contact your Brand Administrator.
Warning: Deleting someone from the directory also deletes all of their responses in all projects! Be very sure you want to remove someone before doing so.

Individually removing one employee at a time

To remove 1 employee from the directory, click the arrow next to them, and then select Remove from Directory.

the remove from directory option

Manually removing multiple employees at a time

If you check the box next to each person you want to remove, you can delete them by clicking the menu on the left and choosing Remove from Directory.

selecting multiple people in the directory

Attention: Be careful – next to the menu is a Select All option. If you click this, it’ll select every single person on that page of your directory.

selecting all in the directory

Removing many employees at once

Using a spreadsheet, you can upload a list of employees you’d like to delete from the directory. See Delete People from Directory.

Editing Multiple People at a Time

Using the import option, you can also edit multiple people in your directory at a time. Every time you import into the directory, the directory looks for a unique identifier that has already been assigned to a person. If it finds that person, it updates them with the new information instead of adding a duplicate.

Additionally, you need to be careful if your file contains the Email field. This Email field will be read as the participant’s username if no UserName field is specified. This can cause issues when updating participants in bulk if participants share the same email address. We recommend that you only include the UniqueIdentifier when updating participants, unless you need to update their email address or login name. If you need to update 1 of those fields, then we recommend including both in your import to prevent errors.

Qtip: Remember that uploading edits to participant metadata in a project is different from uploading edits in the directory. To ensure responses are updated to reflect new metadata, go to the project whose responses you’d like to update update responses with new metadata.

When importing people into the directory, you can only add onto existing fields. If you include a metadata field as a header with no values, this will erase any previously uploaded values for the participants in the file. Excluding a column altogether will not remove that data.

Example: If you initially uploaded people into the directory with Age and Department metadata, then decide to import another file with the same people, but no column for Department, Department will not be removed. However, if the column Department is included in the file and has blank values, then this metadata will be removed for any participant in the file.
Qtip: Metadata edits made in the directory only apply to the directory, and metadata edits made to the project only apply to the project. However, if edits are made to first name, last name, UserName, email, or Unique Identifier, the information will be updated across the platform.

Contacts Directory

When you visit the Directories page, you will have 2 choices. The first is the Employee Directory, which gives a list of possible participants for your Employee Experience projects. The second is the Contacts Directory.

using the navigation menu to select directory

the contacts directory

The Contacts Directory is a feature completely separate from the Employee Directory. Instead of containing participants for Employee Experience projects, it contains lists of respondents for the Survey Platform. These contacts do not have any means of accessing features like dashboards and participant portals. Someone can be listed in both the Employee and Contacts directory, but a person listed in 1 directory is not automatically entered in the other, and changes to 1 do not affect the other.

The specific features available in the Contacts Directory differs based on the software you have purchased. See either  XM Directory Lite or XM Directory.

Qtip: Interested in either of these options? Contact your Qualtrics Account Executive for more information.

FAQ