Create your employee data file

How to set up your employee data file for upload

Jared Ellis avatar
Written by Jared Ellis
Updated this week

What can I learn from this page?

How to set up your employee data file for upload

Who is this guide for?

Account Admins

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Prepare your employee data file

To import your employee data into Culture Amp via a manual upload, you will create a file that includes required information, such as Name, Preferred Name and Employee ID/Email Address, as well as additional demographic information, such as Date of Birth, Start Date, End Date, Language and demographics. To add a hierarchy, you’ll also need to include Manager Email or Manager ID.

Create your employee data file

We recommend that you start with our Employee Data File Template. Make a copy of this document, then follow these steps to ensure you’ve formatted it correctly.

Note:

  • If you plan on using 1-on-1 conversations or you are a Performance customer please reach out to support@cultureamp.com following the upload of your file to request the mapping of your performance demographics. At a minimum you must have Manager Email, Department and Job Title included on user file upload. The mapping process is a one-time task completed by our support team and ensures that your demographic data populates in the Performance side of the platform/1-on-1 conversation tool.

  • For Performance customers, we can also map Job title level, Gender, Location, Business unit, Division, Country and Employment type so consider adding these to your upload file.

  1. Column headers A-H must be present in your data file and need to use the exact same headings as this template (names and casing).

    1. Columns A (Name), B (Preferred name), and D (Email) are mandatory, so fill them in with your employee data.

    2. Column C can be left empty if all your employees have an email address. Employee Ids are only used with Kiosk mode.

    3. Columns E (Date of birth), F (Start date), and G (End date) are optional. Including Date of birth and Start date will allow us to calculate Age and Tenure demographics for your employees, which is helpful for analyzing survey results. Most organizations leave End date blank and populate this manually when using the Exit survey.

    4. Column H (Language) is optional, and allows you to configure a preferred language for employees. Please note that once your file has been imported, the Language code specified under this column in your file, will translate to the Preferred Language field within the users profile. Learn more about language codes for employee data.

  2. Column I (Manager email) is required in order to add a hierarchy. The values must all be in lower case.

  3. Besides Column K, everything after column H is where you’ll load in any demographics you wish to include. We have included some examples we typically see being used. There is no limit on the number of demographics you can add.

Formatting notes and tips

  • Most organizations include all active employees in their data file, excluding any terminated employees and employees on extended leave.

  • Demographic values with the same characters but different capitalization (e.g. ‘Melbourne’ and ‘melbourne’) will be merged using the first value provided.

  • For any demographic columns you add, use consistent formatting for the headers as demographic titles are case sensitive in the platform. If you use inconsistent naming conventions, you will create duplicate demographics (e.g. “Performance rating” and “Performance Rating” will each be a separate demographic).

  • The order of the columns will be reflected in the employee's Demographics page, so grouping similar fields together is advisable (e.g. Division, then Department, then Team).

  • Dates in Culture Amp are stored in the format mmm dd, yyyy. Please import dates either in this format, or in the alternative acceptable formats MMM DD YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD. See instructions for customizing the date in Excel and Google Sheets.

  • If you load language codes into Column H, reach out to our Product Support team to enable these languages for your account.

  • Your file to be uploaded can only have one sheet, e.g. if you used more than one sheet to pull your employee data together with pivot tables, etc, these will need to be removed (or just copy your final data set to a new file)

  • The file name can't contain any special characters or punctuation, or you will get an Invalid data format. Please make sure you have followed the required order error.

  • The file can't have a password

  • The file can't have any hidden columns

  • The file header row (first row) can only contain Text characters, no invisible control characters (like Shift-In)

Save your employee data file

Once your file is complete, save it as a CSV (with UTF-8 encoding and the separator a comma) or an XLSX file. XLSX (Excel workbook format) tends to handle formatting better. If you created the file in Google Sheets, click File > Download and select the file format you’d like to download.


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