Managing People Data & Team Hierarchy in Teamgage

Teamgage helps you build and maintain an organisational hierarchy that reflects your employees, teams and managers. A well-designed hierarchy ensures leaders receive meaningful results, protects employee anonymity, and makes it easier to manage feedback across your organisation.

This article is relevant for:

1. New clients setting up their initial hierarchy during onboarding
2. Existing clients maintaining their people data as employees join, leave or move teams
3. Administrators reviewing their current Teamgage structure and looking for best-practice recommendations
   

No matter the size of your organisation, we'll recommend a structure that is simple to manage and makes sense to your leaders.

Designing Your Team Structure

Before importing data or creating teams, it's important to consider how your organisation will be represented within Teamgage.

Our recommendation is to create teams based on either:

1. Reporting lines
2. Natural working groups

In most organisations, the best results come from grouping together people who work closely with one another and share similar experiences. This ensures leaders are reviewing feedback from teams they can meaningfully influence and support.

Keep It Simple

One of the most common mistakes organisations make is creating too many small or highly specialised teams.

A simpler structure is often easier for leaders to understand, manage and take action from.

When reviewing your proposed hierarchy, ask:

1. Does this team regularly work together?
2. Does the leader have influence over this group's experience?
3. Will the feedback be meaningful when viewed together?

If the answer is yes, the structure is likely appropriate.

Small Teams

When designing your hierarchy, it's important to consider team size.

Because Teamgage protects anonymity:

1. Teams with fewer than 4 members will not have a dedicated team results dashboard available
2. Teams with fewer than 4 submissions will have their dashboard locked until 4 or more submissions have been made

If your organisation contains very small teams, you may wish to:

1. Combine similar teams together
2. Create larger working groups
3. Review reporting structures
4. Use parent team reporting

Learn more in the understanding Small Teams in Teamgage guide.

Structuring Manager Teams

When designing your Teamgage hierarchy, it's helpful to consider where managers should sit within the structure.

There are two common approaches.

1. Managers Belong to the Team They Manage

Managers are included as members of their own team alongside their direct reports.

This is a simple structure and works well when managers participate in the same feedback cycle as their team.

2. Managers Sit in a Direct Reports Team

Managers are grouped into a separate Direct Reports team under their leader.

This allows senior leaders to view results specifically for the managers who report to them, while operational teams continue to submit feedback within their own teams.

Both approaches work in Teamgage. The best option depends on how your organisation wants leaders to review results and conduct leadership discussions.

If you want senior leaders to easily review feedback from their leadership team only, creating a Direct Reports team for managers can make reporting much clearer.

Keeping Team Memberships Up To Date

Organisations are constantly changing. Employees join, leave, change roles and move between teams.

Keeping your Teamgage hierarchy up to date ensures leaders always see accurate results and employees receive the correct notifications.

Depending on your organisation's setup, Teamgage offers several ways to manage team memberships:

Self Allocation

Self Allocation allows team members to request:

1. Moving to a different team
2. Joining an additional team
3. Correcting their team allocation

Depending on your organisation's settings, requests may require approval from a Manager or Administrator.

Learn more about Self Allocation here.

Manager Team Management

Manager Team Management allows leaders to:

1. Add team members
2. Remove team members
3. Maintain team memberships themselves

This is particularly useful in organisations where team membership changes frequently.

Learn more about Manager Team Management here.

Ways To Manage Your Data

You can choose from four main approaches depending on the size and complexity of your organisation.

Self-Managed Data Guide

Suitable for organisations with smaller teams or those wanting complete control over setup and maintenance.

Using our Template to Build Your Organisation in Teamgage

Recommended for organisations with fewer than 200 employees. Use our People & Teams template to upload users, teams and managers into Teamgage.

Uploading your HRIS Data

Recommended for organisations with more than 200 employees.

Export your HRIS data and upload it securely into Teamgage. Our team will configure transformation rules to ensure future uploads remain simple and consistent.

Automated Upload via SFTP

An advanced option for organisations wanting automated and secure data transfers between their HRIS and Teamgage.

Making Updates Over Time

Your organisation will evolve over time. Employees will join and leave, managers will change and teams may be restructured.

Keeping Teamgage updated ensures leaders continue to receive accurate results and employees remain connected to the correct teams.

You can update your data in three ways:

1. Make small adjustments manually, such as updating a user or manager (Learn more)
2. Restructure teams by renaming teams, moving users or updating reporting lines (Learn more)
3. Upload an updated People & Teams file using your existing data management approach

Data Security

We take data privacy and security seriously.

For this reason:

1. We will never ask you to send people data files via email
2. All uploads are encrypted and processed securely
3. Data files should only be uploaded via the Teamgage Portal or approved SFTP connections

If you're unsure which data management approach is best for your organisation, please contact support@teamgage.com and our team will be happy to help.

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