How to use the 'Teammates' function to connect with your colleagues and build your connections

When you’re part of a company or organisation, it’s important to keep up to date with what your colleagues are doing. When we all worked in offices together, this was fairly easy but now we have to make a bit more of an effort. The Teammates feature on LinkedIn is a great tool that can really help colleagues and teams stay in touch on a day to day basis.

The other really useful thing about the Teammates option is that it will increase the ‘reach’ of your posts. In other words, it enables them to be seen by more people. The great thing about LinkedIn is that when your posts are seen by more people, it ensures that your profile will be seen by more people too. This means that utilising the Teammates feature is an easy way to grow your professional network.

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The Teammates feature was initially rolled out by LinkedIn in 2019 but, as usual with these updates, they don’t always allow everyone to have all the features. If you have it, it’s quite a nifty little feature.

WHAT DOES ‘TEAMMATES’ DO?

In order for you to be able to better connect with other members of your company, the Teammates feature will enable you all to be notified about each other’s activity on LinkedIn. So, once you’ve added someone as a Teammate, you will be notified whenever a colleague or boss:

??Publishes a post    

??Shares someone else’s post

??Comments on someone else’s post

??Has a birthday or work anniversary (which could save some embarrassment/win you some brownie points!).

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WHO CAN BE A TEAMMATE?

According to LinkedIn:

“You can currently add your manager, teammates reporting to your manager, other teammates, and direct reports. We’re working to improve the feature, so you’ll be able to add other types of coworkers and important professional relationships in the future. At this time, you can add up to one manager, 19 teammates who report to your manager, 20 direct reports, and 30 other teammates.”

So while the feature doesn’t let you necessarily connect with everyone in your organisation, it can keep up to date with teams who you work with fairly closely.

It’s important to point out that Teammates have to be part of the same company. So if you were working on a project with people from a different company, for example, you couldn’t be Teammates.

 My guess is that this is to prevent people using the Teammates feature to set up LinkedIn ‘pods’ which are hugely frowned upon by LinkedIn.

CAN I USE THE FEATURE TO SPY ON MY EMPLOYEES TO MAKE SURE THEY’RE USING LINKEDIN PROPERLY TO GROW THEIR BUSINESS NETWORK?

Well, not so much ‘spy’ exactly!

You can certainly keep an eye on them but, in order to preserve people’s privacy (thank you LinkedIn!), when you add someone as a Teammate, they get a notification that you want to share the Teammates feature with them. They will have to verify they are a co-worker of yours before you can start seeing their updates.

HOW DO I CONNECT TO AND SET UP A TEAMMATE?

??First ensure that the person is listed as an employee of the same company as you on LinkedIn

??You also need to be connected with any prospective Teammates via your personal profiles

??Head to ‘my network’ from your home page

??Go to ‘Teammates’ in the menu on the left and click on it

??The 3 categories will appear:

??Click ‘+ ‘on the relevant category

?? Start typing a name to add them

??When one of your team members gets the notification, they just verify you are indeed co-workers and that’s it!

If you get to a point where you have too many teammates to add any more, you may want to review them all to make sure you’re benefitting from the feature with all your listed members. If not, then you can easily switch them out for someone new.

HOW DO I MAKE THE MOST OF THE TEAMMATES FEATURE?

In order to utilise the feature to its fullest capacity, I advise that you

??Log on to Linkedin at least once a day. 

??Check your notifications and you will see if you’ve been notified of any LinkedIn activity by your Teammates.

??Engage with your colleague’s posts. You can simply ‘like’ them or add another emoji response (there are several, I’ve written about them in a recent blog on my website and here on LinkedIn). The most effective way of commenting on other people’s posts, however, is to add a comment. (How best to comment on other’s posts on LinkedIn will be my next blog!!).

So there you are – an easy to use and effective tool to help you engage better with your colleagues and potentially get more reach and engagement on each other’s posts!

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