Trying to add up the number of times an employee code shows up

I'm working on a time sheet and I'm trying to have one place where I can see the number of employees who have worked for the week. Obviously, I can just sum up the number of entries, but there are employees who get paid different rates and therefore are listed more than once.

How can I count up the number of employees without counting them every time?

They use individual employee code numbers which show up in one column from a VLOOKUP function based on a drop down list.

I have tried using every option I can find for this including COUNTA (which isn't working because the numbers are in the VLOOKUP function and therefore have a 0--I already made sure it didn't say N/A), COUNTIF, SUMPRODUCT, and UNIQUE (which doesn't work because I don't want a list of them, I want to know how many of them there are).

I'm not a huge excel user but understand basic functions. I just can't seem to make this work. Any suggestions are appreciated.