In order for Retention Insights to be as accurate as possible, you may need to configure your employee data to ensure that you’re including all the necessary information. This guide will explain what data is required to get the best results from Retention Insights, and outline best practices for ensuring that your data remains accurate over time.

The insights in Retention Insights are calculated based on the last three years of data for the people employed by your organization - including when their employment started and ended, and which demographics they belonged to during that time.

It is important that each employee is represented once and only once in your employee data, and that their start and end dates are kept accurate over time

In order to display the monthly joins and exits for your organization, and calculate your trailing 12 month Retention Rate over time, your employee data must include the following fields:

We also highly recommend having additional Demographic fields for richer insights.

Please refer to the specific guides for your HRIS integration for instructions on how to ensure these fields are included in your imports. If you’re using a manual import, ensure that you are including values for the start date and end date columns in your CSV.

In order to keep the historical data in your Retention Insights as accurate as possible, we strongly recommend that you sync your employee data with Culture Amp on a regular basis. Where possible, we recommend that you use one of our HRIS integrations to sync your employee data with Culture Amp daily. This will ensure that information such as exits and changes in demographics are accurate to the day.

Sync with HRIS

If you’re unable to use a HRIS integration, we recommend that you manually sync your employee data as frequently as you can. The more often you sync your data, the more granular the changes in your organization’s headcount and demographics will be in your dashboard. Once you have loaded your employee data, syncing with a manual upload is easy; Employee changes (i.e. new hires, exits, demographic changes) can be managed through frequent manual 'partial uploads' to keep role information accurate in the platform."

See Importing and managing demographics below for more information on how we calculate and display historical demographic information.

Culture Amp supports two methods for importing employee data: Full Import and Partial Import. If you're importing data manually, you can choose between running a Full Import or a Partial Import. For automated HRIS integrations, the system defaults to a Full Import, while syncing via SFTP uses a Partial Import.

During a Full Import, only currently active employees are synced. Any employees who were active previously in Culture Amp but aren't in your current data are automatically marked as former employees and become inactive in Culture Amp. While it's not strictly necessary to include terminated employees in your data sync, for accurate Retention Insights, it's best to include terminated employees from the past 3 years with their end dates specified. Terminated employees are flagged as former employees from their specified end date.

For specific information about how to include the End Date in your employee data when using an HRIS integration, please refer to the support guide article for your system.

When it comes to importing your data manually you have the choice between importing via a partial or full import.

When to use a partial import

Partial imports are a good option when you want to update demographics for some — but not all — of your employee base. We recommend using partial imports for your day to day updates.

When to use a full import

Full imports are a good option when you want to make sure every employee record in your account is up-to-date. Full imports completely overwrite any other data in the platform meaning any user not included on your file will be deactivated automatically when you upload. Full imports are good for when you would like to do a large overhaul of data.

For help further help on deciding which option best suits, check out our guide.

As THE best practice for keeping your employee data free of duplicates, we highly recommend that your employee data include an Employee ID value that will never change. While email addresses might not change often, they can and do change in the event of an employee changing their name, your organization renaming or rebranding, etc.

It’s possible that over time you may inadvertently import the same employee twice into Culture Amp, which would make some of the calculations in Retention Insights inaccurate. In order to reduce the risk of double-counting employees, Retention Insights automatically merges employee records that we think represent a single employee. You can check how many of your employee records have been merged by looking in the Data Health drawer (see below for instructions).

We do this by merging employee records where the Name and Start Date values are the same. In order to make this process as accurate as possible, please ensure that:

If you have two employees with the same name that began on the same date, you could differentiate them by adding their initials, middle name or offsetting their start date by a day.

If you are not uploading employee names to Culture Amp for privacy reasons, we recommend that you use a unique identifier (such as employee ID) for each of your employee records, to reduce the likelihood of incorrect de-duplication.

To get the most out of Retention Insights, you’ll want to understand the experience of different groups within your organization as it relates to retention / turnover. When syncing your employee data, it’s important to include all demographic information that you might want to use to slice and filter your Retention Insights dashboard. For example, if you want to understand how different departments are impacted by retention and turnover, you’ll need to include the Department demographic in your employee data import. See: additional demographic examples.

Demographics are assigned to your employees every time you sync your employee data. Every account demographic imported into your account will become visible as a filter and in the Turnover by Group section, with the exception of:

The first time you include a new demographic in your employee data, we back-date the assignment of that demographic. For example, the first time you import values for the Gender demographic, any employee that is assigned Female will be considered to have been a member of that group since their employment started.

This allows us to display historical headcount, joins, exits and retention for groups that are newly imported, so you don’t have to wait before seeing historical data in your dashboard.

Demographics are assigned to your employees every time you sync your employee data. If an employee changes groups within a demographic, that change is dated from the time of import. As a result, if you were to only import new employee data every six months, you would only see changes in demographics occurring every six months.

We strongly recommend you include all your relevant demographics in every employee data sync, and that you sync your data as often as possible. See Sync your employee data regularly above for more details.

Demographic information is automatically applied to employees when you sync your employee data, which means you can filter the retention, headcount, exits and joins data by demographics as soon as your data has been synced.

In order to see engagement and survey data for groups and to make use of the Commitment Motivators section, demographics must have been applied to your employees prior to the opening of your base survey.

You can apply additional demographics to a prior survey for analysis in Retention Insights: