Organizational Hierarchies

Qlearsite supports 9 levels of organisation hierarchy (10 in total, if you include the top level ‘Organisation View’).

While the platform can support up to 9 levels, it is not always advisable to setup this many for your survey and you should consider how large each team is. Having too many hierarchy levels increases the possibility that there are insufficient responses from each team to expose the results. In the past, we have found that 5 levels of hierarchy is suitable for most of our customers, allowing them to have enough responses in each team to expose the data without compromising employee privacy.

How do I handle department matrices, cross-functional or dual-reporting relationships?

If you have a cross-functional or matrix structure in your business, we recommend that you structure your hierarchy against your primary reporting lines. You can then add an additional attribute against which you can filter when seeing the results.

For example, one might have Department in the hierarchy (‘Sales’, ‘Marketing’, ‘Finance’, etc), but then Country Team as an attribute (Country Team = ‘France’, ‘Germany’, ‘Spain’). An attribute (such as ‘Country Team’) can be provided directly using an employee register file, or collected as a question in the actual survey.

Note that you can only currently share online reports by hierarchy, not by attributes.

An alternative is to use one of your hierarchy levels as the cross functional level.  For example, hierarchy level 1 is the Department as before (‘Sales’, ‘Marketing’, ‘Finance’, etc), but hierarchy level 2 is the cross-functional team (Sales + ‘France’, Sales + ‘Germany’, Sales + ‘Spain’). While the hierarchy becomes bigger to handle, the benefit is that you will be able to share online reports with both department and cross-functional line managers.

To discuss ideas on how best to set this up, please contact us.