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Reporting Teams on Blink
Reporting Teams on Blink

Blink. And every manager has their own team.

Updated over a week ago

In this article:

About Reporting Teams

We can now use the reporting structure of an organization to automatically create teams, which can be used to target Feed posts, control access to Hub items, and create chat Channels.

We configure this in the new “Organization setup” section in the Admin panel:

There are three toggles that be switched on for each organization:

  • Direct Reporting Teams:

    • Creates a Team for every Manager containing that manager, and all of their direct reports.

    • The Manager is the sole Team Admin for that team.

    • Permissions for the team are set to Only Admins can Post. That is, by default, only the manager can send feed posts to their directs, and the direct reports cannot send feed posts to each other.

    • Teams are created and destroyed as people become / stop being managers, and team membership is automatically kept up to date with joiners, leavers, and movers.

  • Default Reporting Team Channel:

    • Creates a Team Channel for each Direct Reporting Team. This is a channel that contains all the members of the Direct Reporting Team.

    • Unlike other channels, the active membership of this channel is automatically kept in sync with changes to the membership of the team. Individuals cannot choose to leave the channel.

    • By default, the manager is notified of the creation of the channel, but the direct reports are not.

  • Org Teams:

    • Creates a Team for every Manager who has at least one direct report that is themselves a manager. i.e. for anyone who has indirect reports.

    • The team contains the manager, and recursively all of their direct and indirect reports. Note that for large organizations, this can create very large teams for senior managers.

    • The Manager is the sole admin for the team.

    • Permissions for the team are set to Only Admins can post.

    • Teams are kept in sync as for Direct Reporting Teams, above.

Impact of this Feature

This feature is hugely beneficial to large organizations, for two key reasons:

  • Firstly, it provides communication mechanisms for local managers to easily interact with their teams. This can complement teams set up around other characteristics, like location or job role.

  • Secondly, it automates the creation of these teams. This is more than just “Dynamic Teams”, as it goes ahead and automatically creates one dynamic team for each manager within an organization. The equivalent might be automatically creating a dynamic team for each department or location in an organization (a future feature, no doubt!)

Step-by-step instructions

To set up Reporting Teams

  1. Go to Org Setup, under the Setup section in the Admin panel.

  2. Toggle on the options that you would like to see.

  3. That’s it! Teams (and, optionally, channels) will automatically have been created and can now be used!

To use a Reporting Team in Feed

  1. Compose a new feed post.

  2. In the audience, you will see your Reporting Teams. As a manager, your Reporting Teams are always at the top of the list. As a report, you will only see your managers’ reporting teams if they have changed the posting permissions to be more permissive.

  3. That’s it! Super simple, like any other team.

To use a Reporting Team Channel

  1. Go to chats. As a manager, you will automatically see your reporting team channel in the list of channels - click on it, and chat away!

  2. As a report, you will need to search for the channel using the search bar, or navigate to it by doing through Directory > manager’s reporting team > channels. The channel will be named “Firstname Lastname’s Team” using your manager’s name. Note that this isn’t expected to be a common pattern, as it is expected that managers will drive usage of their channel.

FAQs

Why don't Org Teams have channels as well?

Channels are only suitable for relatively small groups (at very most 1000 participants), and while no manager should have that many direct reports, in large organizations, senior leaders can often have more than that number of total reports in their orgs. For more information on Channels, check out this article.

How are Managers configured to set up the reporting hierarchy?

Every user has a “Line Manager” field in their user profile, which can be set directly in Admin, via bulk upload, or brought in via a User Sync (CSV, Workday, etc.)

What is this Org Setup section?

Great question! This is a new Admin configuration screen, where we’ll be adding (and moving!) a lot of our “one time” or “once in a blue moon” configuration options. This will help clean up the rest of the Admin panel, and especially help bring focus to the parts of the app that our customers might actually be using day to day, without the distraction of things that one Admin set up once a long time ago.

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