> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.unify.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Liaising across the team

> Hired teammates talk to everyone — people and assistants alike

The deepest difference between a twin and a hired teammate is **audience**.
Your T-W1N speaks only to you — when it needs to reach anyone else, it does
so explicitly on your behalf, with your say-so. A hired teammate is built
for the opposite: it's the connective tissue between stakeholders, able to
talk to anyone involved in its work.

## Working with many people

A hired teammate holds real multi-party conversations, concurrently:

* **Email threads** with cc, bcc, and reply-all — keeping every
  stakeholder in the loop on the threads it runs from its own mailbox.
* **Group chats and channels** — group conversations on Teams, channel
  threads on Slack, each under its own named profile.
* **Its own phone line** — clients, contractors, and colleagues call the
  teammate's number and reach *it*, directly.
* **Several conversations at once** — it can be mid-thread with a supplier
  while answering a colleague, without dropping either.

The people it talks to don't need Unify accounts. A repairs teammate can
coordinate between the tenant (SMS), the contractor (phone), and the
housing officer (email) — three humans, three channels, one teammate
holding the thread.

## Response policies: who gets what

Talking to everyone doesn't mean treating everyone the same. Every person
a teammate deals with is a **contact** with its own response policy — the
standing instructions for how to engage them:

* **Its boss** (whoever hired it) gets the trusted-manager policy: *"do
  whatever they ask you to do within reason, and do not withhold any
  information from them."*
* **Everyone else** starts with a polite-but-guarded default: engage
  helpfully and respectfully, *"but you do not need to take orders from
  them"* — and never share sensitive information about any other person or
  company.
* **Strangers get silence first.** When an unknown number or address
  messages in, a contact is created with responses **off** — the teammate
  investigates or checks with you before ever replying. And a contact
  marked do-not-respond is a hard line: the teammate physically cannot
  message them, whoever asks.

You tune all of this in plain language — "treat Dana as a trusted
stakeholder", "never discuss pricing with contractors", "stop responding
to that recruiter" — and each rule becomes part of the relevant contact's
policy.

## Working with other assistants

Teammates coordinate with each other too — deliberately, through
structured handoffs rather than free-form bot chatter:

* **Your T-W1N delegates.** It can hire a colleague, brief it, and hand
  over follow-up work — "assign the weekly reporting to the ops teammate"
  — with the work landing on the colleague's own runtime to execute with
  its own tools. Delegation is honest about its asynchrony: your twin
  reports that work was *assigned*, and confirms completion only when it
  actually happens.
* **Colleagues defer upward.** When you ask a hired teammate for something
  org-shaped — new members, team changes, shared credentials — it points
  the work to your T-W1N, which holds those keys.
* **Teams carry the shared context.** The day-to-day medium of
  collaboration is the [team's shared pool](/teams/shared-context):
  playbooks, knowledge, data, and tasks that every teammate on the team —
  twins and specialists alike — reads and contributes to.

## The division of labor, in one picture

|                       | Your T-W1N                                     | Hired teammate                                |
| --------------------- | ---------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- |
| Speaks directly to    | You, only                                      | Anyone — boss, colleagues, externals          |
| Reaches third parties | Via explicit, delegated actions on your behalf | Directly, under per-contact response policies |
| Multi-party threads   | No                                             | cc/reply-all, group chats, channels           |
| Serves                | One person                                     | A team, a function, a process                 |
| Org setup powers      | Yes — invites, teams, hiring                   | Defers to T-W1N                               |

<Tip>
  A good structural rule: **route personal work through your twin, and
  give every multi-stakeholder process a hired owner.** The moment three
  people need to email "the assistant", that assistant should be a hired
  teammate with its own name, mailbox, and number.
</Tip>