How to create an organization chart in Employee Directory Pro

Organization charts are designed to display overall structure of an organization and the relationships between people holding different jobs or positions. To be able to create an organization chart in Employee Directory Pro, you must have the following at minimum:

1. Employee profiles are created and published.
2. The reporting relationships between employees must be set using "Reports to" connection box in the employee profile editor.
3. A WordPress page with organization chart shortcode created and published.

Creating Employee Profiles

You can create employee profiles in 3 ways. Please follow the links below for detailed instructions on how you can enter employee profile data:

• Manually entering data using WordPress editor
• Bulk importing employee data from CSV
• Bulk importing and syncing employee data from Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP server

Creating reporting relationships

Employee to manager relationships are created using "Reports to" connection box in employee profile editor. "Reports to" connection does not allow more than one manager connection. However, assigning every employee to a manager does not ensure that the organization chart will be created successfully. The overall employee relationship data must validate too.

To be able to create an organization chart in Employee Directory Pro, you must have the data representing the reporting hierarchies between employees entered correctly. Your reporting data must conform to the following rules:

1. All employee records to be included in your chart are in published status.
2. All employees except one employee or organization or group with the highest rank (Customer,CEO, President or Board of Directors) must have a manager or supervisor set. In other words, no orphan nodes are allowed.
3. An employee can report to at most one manager. This rule is enforced if you entered your employee relationship data using WordPress editor. If you entered your data using other methods, your data must conform.
4. All department employees must report to the same department manager. This is required to create departmental organization charts. For example, you can not connect an employee working in HR to a manager in Marketing. The profile editor allows this relationship to be created. However, when you want to create the marketing or human resource organization chart, the chart will not display correctly.

Validation of reporting relationships

The validation of reporting hierarchies ensures that you entered the employee relationship data correctly.  We recommend the following methods:

1. Validate the direct reports of managers or supervisors using "Direct Reports" columns of Employee list in WordPress dashboard.
2. Validate the direct reports of managers or supervisors by exporting the Employee Relationships to CSV and opening it in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets.

Using "Direct Reports" column

1. Click on All Employees Or Directory menu link after you logged in to WordPress Dashboard as administrator or employee manager.
2. Drag and drop "Direct Reports" and "Departments" columns right next to Title column from Filters & Columns section and click Apply.
3. Select department from the "Add a Filter" dropdown and set it to a department.
4. Validate each employee working at the department reporting to the same manager using the "Direct Reports" column.
5. Go through each manager and make sure all direct reports are correctly entered.
6. Fix incorrectly entered relationships by editing the employee records not matching your organizational structure.

Using Employee Relationship export to CSV

1. Click on All Employees Or Directory menu link after you logged in to WordPress Dashboard as administrator.
2. Click on "Operations" button right next to Add New button.
3. Click on Export tab.
4. Find "Employee Relationships" section and click Export button while "Direct Reports (manager)" value selected from the dropdown. A CSV file is going to be exported.
5. Import the CSV to Google Spreadsheet or Microsoft Excel
6. Sort by "Reports To Employee No" column.
7. Go through each row to ensure all direct reports of a manager are correctly entered in "Direct Reports Employee No" column.
8. Validate each employee working at the department reporting to the same manager using "Direct Reports Employee No" column.
9. Validate there are no empty cells in "Direct Reports Employee No" and "Reports To Employee No" columns.
10. Validate there is no employee number entered more than once in "Direct Reports Employee No" column. In other words, no employee can report to more than one manager.
11. Fix incorrectly entered relationships by editing the employee records not matching your organizational structure.
12. If you made changes, export the data to CSV again and import using the Import tab after clicking on the Operations button.

Displaying organization charts

To display an organization chart:

1. Create a WordPress page.
2. Enter [employee_orgchart] shortcode in the editor.
3. Publish and view your page.

For detailed instructions and examples of creating more advanced organization charts, visit the Employee Directory Pro demo site.