Who can use this feature?
Available on:
All Culture Amp subscriptions
Importing employee data into Culture Amp? In some cases, your import may be blocked if we detect an issue with your data that could create problems with some features of the Culture Amp platform, such as hierarchy-based report sharing or performance cycles.
To complete the import, you must correct these issues and try importing the data again. Depending on your data, you may need to repeat this troubleshooting process several times until validation passes.
Here are some of the key errors you might encounter and how to correct them.
“Import blocked due to reporting loops“
FIX: Find and resolve the root cause of the loop in the hierarchy.
Employees can’t appear in a hierarchy more than once. If an employee appears twice in your hierarchy, this will trigger a ‘loop’.
The simplest example of a loop is: Lucy is assigned as Jessica’s manager and Jessica as Lucy’s.
There could be more complex loops, with many employees caught in between, see the diagram below for an example.
Most loops are unintentional and caused by data errors. If your organization has a complex or non-traditional hierarchy, you may have deliberate loops. In these cases, we recommend you determine a more simple top-down hierarchy that you can use for Culture Amp reporting purposes.
“Import blocked - These employees are assigned managers that are not in your employee list”
FIX: Check your data to ensure all managers that appear in the Manager Email or Manager ID column also appear somewhere in the Employee Email or Employee ID column.
The Manager Email or Manager ID you provide for each employee must match up with an individual’s Email or Employee ID, so we can validate each manager is also an employee in your organisation. You’ll see this error when a Manager Email or Manager ID does not match an employee in the user list.
For example, Lucy is managed by Jessica. Jessica’s email is jessica.edwards@work.com. There must be an employee with the assigned email “jessica.edwards@work.com” in order for us to validate that Jessica is an employee.
Note: The hierarchy supports email or ID values for any user on your account, whether they are active, former, or deactivated, but will reject any value not recognized by the system at all. While assigning inactive managers is technically possible, we recommend assigning only active managers to prevent reporting discrepancies later on.
It’s also possible to trigger this error by selecting a non-unique manager identifier, such as Manager Name. Make sure you select an identifier that can only be matched to a single employee, such as Manager Email or Manager ID.
It is also possible to trigger this error if you have not completed an import to first add the managers to the platform as users, prior to completing a full import to validate your hierarchy.
Employee ID and Manager ID formatting mismatches
Employee ID and Manager ID formatting mismatches
A common but easy-to-miss cause of this error is a formatting mismatch between the Employee ID and Manager ID columns. For example, if an employee's ID is stored as 00123 in your HRIS but exported without leading zeros as 123, Culture Amp will not be able to match the Manager ID to a valid employee — even though the same person exists in your file.
FIX: Check that the format of your Manager ID column exactly matches the format of your Employee ID column — including leading zeros, spacing, and capitalisation. Export both columns side by side and compare a sample of rows before re-importing.
Identifying which manager in the chain is causing the block
Identifying which manager in the chain is causing the block
When a hierarchy import is blocked due to a deactivated or invalid manager, the error may not always point directly to the root cause, especially in deep reporting chains. An employee may appear valid, but one of their managers higher up the chain may be deactivated, causing subordinates further down to also fail validation.
To trace the issue:
Start with the employee flagged in the error and identify their Manager ID or Manager Email assigned to this user (whichever demographic is listed as your hierarchy).
Search for that manager in your Users list (including inactive users) to check their status.
If that manager is deactivated, check who their manager is, and repeat until you find the root of the chain.
Reactivate or reassign the manager at the root of the issue, then re-import.
Note: If the manager who is causing the block has legitimately left the organisation, assign the affected employees a new active manager in your HRIS before syncing.
The flagged employee is not in the import file
The flagged employee is not in the import file
If you manually update a manager’s email address (or employee ID if using an ID-based hierarchy) in Culture Amp, the hierarchy will update automatically for their direct reports in the platform. However, exported employee data may occasionally still reflect the manager's old email address. When you use this data for a partial import, Culture Amp may flag the old email as "unrecognized," even if those direct reports aren't included in your current import file.
Fix: To resolve these validation errors, update your import file to ensure the hierarchy matches:
Include the flagged users: Add the direct reports being flagged to your import CSV.
Update the Hierarchy demographic: In the
Manager Email(or alternative hierarchy) column, ensure the manager’s new email address is listed for all their reports.Include the Manager: Ensure the manager is also included in the import file.
Verify the match: The email address in the manager’s
Emailcolumn must exactly match the email listed in their reports'Manager Emailcolumn. If using an ID-based hierarchy, the manager's Employee ID must match what is in their direct reports' Manager ID column.
“Import blocked - These employees are assigned managers that can’t be imported due to invalid data”
FIX: Check the “Ignored Data” section for employees who are managers. Correct any invalid data that may be preventing their import.
You will see this error if an employee cannot be imported and they are also listed as a manager. For more information on the specific error that is preventing the import, you can refer to the “Ignored Data” error section.
Culture Amp has several core demographic fields that must be formatted in a specific way. Specifically, each employee in an account must:
Have a Name, and/or an email address and ID
Not have a Start Date that’s before their Date of Birth
Not have an End Date that’s before their Start Date
Not have a Date of Birth that’s less than one year before today
Not have an invalid email address: (Must follow the format [name]@[domain].[domain]/No special characters eg ()/!*)
Not have an invalid language code
A User can’t be added to Culture Amp if their email address is the same as that of another User (either in the account, or globally).
If a User is a Primary Account Administrator, they cannot deactivate themselves (eg an End Date cannot be set for them until another Administrator is designated).
If a User’s ID is the same as that of another User in the account, the new User data will be flagged & ignored.
Dates in the Date of Birth, Start Date and End Date fields must be in an accepted format. We request dates in the format Mmm dd, yyyy (eg Feb 20, 1947), and can accept dates in these additional formats: MMM DD YYYY (eg Feb 20 1947); YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601 standard, 1947-02-20).
If your import contains employees that do not meet these requirements, these employees will be considered ‘Ignored Data’ and will not be imported into Culture Amp.
"No leader of organization assigned"
FIX: Ensure at least one employee in your HRIS has no manager assigned and complete a manual sync.
You may see this error if you have integrated Culture Amp with your HRIS and have enabled autosyncs.
In order to have a valid hierarchy, your employee data must always contain at least one employee that has no manager assigned (or an employee that is assigned as their own manager). This employee will be placed at the top of your hierarchy.
To avoid breaking your hierarchy, we will block any autosync that assigns a manager to the employee at the top of your hierarchy. To fix this issue, ensure your top of hierarchy has no manager assigned in your HRIS. Or, you can complete a manual sync to select a new top of hierarchy.
"More than one organizational leader?"
A common workaround if your organisation has two or more leaders, is to create a dummy user profile where those leaders/CEOs report to them as their manager. When you complete your sync, the dummy user would then be placed at the top of the hierarchy.
“These employees don't have managers”
FIX: Ensure anyone you want to include in your hierarchy (except the top of hierarchy) has a Manager Email or Manager ID assigned.
Employees who have not been assigned managers will not be assigned a level in your hierarchy. They will still be assigned direct and indirect reports, but won't be included in level-based report sharing. Furthermore, any direct and indirect reports of the employee will not be assigned a level either. To assign them a level, make sure everyone in the reporting line has a manager assigned.
Some employees may not have a traditional manager, such as contractors. Others may be temporarily without a manager. In these cases, you can either assign them a ‘proxy manager’, or simply choose to exclude them from your hierarchy by not assigning them a level. If they are not a manager themselves, and you are not planning on including them into surveys and performance cycles, you may consider removing them from your employee data and this way deactivating their account in Culture Amp.
Tip: If you keep running into this error but are certain the flagged users have a manager assigned on your import or sync file, double-check that you have included your hierarchy demographic on the file with the exact same spelling.
For example, if your hierarchy was validated under Manager Email but your file lists the demographic as Manager's Email, the import would treat this as a new custom demographic and would not update the hierarchy correctly.
You can check what demographic your hierarchy is validated under by going to Account Demographics and seeing which demographic has a hierarchy symbol next to it.
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