Before Monday: three decisions and one document
Do not start by buying seats for everyone. Start by choosing the work. Pick two or three tasks that happen every week, take real time, and produce text a person checks anyway: quote cover letters, meeting summaries, supplier emails, first drafts of procedures. Those become the test cases for the whole week.
Next, choose the plan. For a business sharing client material, the Team plan is the usual starting point. It needs at least two members, supports up to 150 seats, and gives each member their own usage limits, so one heavy user does not lock out everyone else1. The account that creates the organisation must use a business email address, and every member needs an address on one of your allowed domains2.
Then choose the people. A first cohort of four to eight works well in a small firm: the manager who owns the rollout, one or two keen early users, and at least one sceptic who does the target tasks every day. The sceptic will find the problems you need to know about.
The document is a short usage policy. It does not need to be final, but it must exist before day one and cover which account to use, what information stays out, and who checks output. A separate guide on this site covers writing it.
- Pick two or three weekly tasks to test.
- Choose Team unless you have a clear reason for something else.
- Name the rollout owner and the first cohort.
- Have a one-page interim policy ready to share.
Monday: accounts, roles and settings
Set up the organisation from claude.ai with the owner's work email. If that person already has a personal Pro or Max account on the same address, read the upgrade screen carefully. Ticking Keep your personal account separate creates a new workspace and leaves personal chats where they are; without it, the upgrade happens in place and some content moves into the organisation, where it cannot be moved back2. For most owners, keeping them separate is cleaner.
Give roles deliberately. Only Owners and the Primary Owner can enable integrations, change capabilities and turn project sharing on or off, while ordinary users can chat and use Projects3. In a small firm, make the rollout owner an Owner and leave everyone else as a User.
Write the organisation instructions before anyone logs in. They apply to every conversation, take up to 3,000 characters, and live under Organization settings, then Organization and access4. A practical first version for a New Zealand team might say: write in New Zealand English with NZ spelling; when a question involves tax, employment or law, flag that a qualified person must check the answer; do not repeat customer account numbers or IRD numbers in output. Save it, then open a fresh chat and test that Claude follows it.
- Check Organization settings, then Capabilities. Code execution and file creation is on by default for Team organisations, and it is what lets Claude create Word, Excel and PowerPoint files15.
- Leave connectors off for now. They come on Thursday.
- Leave memory off for now. On Team plans, owners decide whether memory is available, and each member must turn it on themselves9.
Tuesday: build one shared Project around real work
Projects are where a team rollout pays off. A Project holds uploaded reference material and a set of instructions, and every chat started inside it uses both5. Create one for the most common task you chose before Monday. Go to Projects, choose New Project, name it, and on a Team plan pick whether it is private or visible to the organisation5.
Fill it with what a new employee would need. Imagine a seven-person electrical contractor in Whangārei building a Project for quote cover letters. The knowledge section gets two or three past letters the owner is proud of, the standard terms of trade, a list of services and service areas, and a short note on tone. The project instructions say what the letter must always include, what it must never promise, and that prices come from the job sheet only, never from Claude.
Share it with the cohort with Can edit for the owner and Can view for everyone else6. Can view still lets people chat inside the Project, but stops accidental edits to the instructions6. Chats inside a shared Project stay private to each person unless they choose to share them, which matters when people are practising6.
Name files clearly. When a Project's knowledge grows large, Claude switches to a retrieval mode that searches the files, and Anthropic recommends descriptive file names so it finds the right one7.
Wednesday: a hands-on prompt session
Run a 60-minute session where everyone works on their own real tasks inside the new Project. Avoid demonstrations of party tricks. People need to see Claude fail and recover on their own work, because that is how they learn where to trust it.
Teach three habits. First, give context the way you would brief a capable new starter: who the reader is, what the document is for, and what good looks like. Second, attach the source instead of describing it: upload the PDF, the CSV or the email thread. Claude reads PDF text and visuals for documents up to 100 pages, and text only up to 1,000 pages, so most contracts and reports fit8. Third, ask for the evidence: tell Claude to quote the clause or line it relied on, then check it.
End the session by having each person save one prompt that worked into a shared note inside the Project. These become the starting library, and the first draft of a team skill later on.
- Each person completes at least one real task from start to finish.
- Each person sees one wrong or weak answer and fixes it.
- Each person saves one prompt that worked.
Thursday: connectors and skills, carefully
Connectors let Claude search and act inside tools such as Google Drive, Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Slack10. On a Team plan, an Owner enables each connector for the organisation, and each person then signs in, so Claude inherits that person's permissions and cannot see files they cannot see10. Owners can also set tool permissions for each connector to Always allow, Needs approval or Blocked10.
Many New Zealand small businesses run on Microsoft 365. The Microsoft 365 connector can search SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams, and needs both the Claude owner and a Microsoft Entra Global Administrator to complete setup before staff can connect11. Book that with whoever manages your Microsoft tenant before Thursday, or the day stalls.
Turn on one connector only, set it to read-only, and test it on the week's tasks. A useful test for a Hamilton accounting team: ask Claude to find last month's emails with a particular supplier and summarise what was agreed, then check the summary against the inbox.
Skills are the other Thursday topic. A skill is a packaged set of instructions, and sometimes scripts, that Claude loads only when a task needs it, and Team owners can provision skills to the whole organisation12. Do not build one yet. Instead, look at the prompts saved on Wednesday and pick the one most worth turning into a skill next month.
Friday: review with evidence, then decide
Hold a 45-minute review with the cohort. Ask three questions of each test task: did Claude save time once checking was included, what went wrong, and what rule or instruction would have prevented it. Write the answers down; they become changes to the Project instructions and the policy.
Look at the numbers as well. Team plan Owners and the Primary Owner can open Analytics to see active members, adoption, skills and connector use, and can export a usage report13. If someone has not logged in since Wednesday, find out why before adding seats.
Finish with a decision, not a vague intention. Either widen the rollout to the next group, with this week's Project and prompts as their starting point, or fix the blockers and repeat the week with the same cohort. Both are good outcomes. Quietly letting it drift is the only bad one.
- Update the Project instructions with what the team learned.
- Update the interim policy with any new rule.
- Choose the next two tasks and the next cohort.
- Set a date to revisit memory, more connectors and a first skill.
Common first-week problems
People hit usage limits sooner than expected. Each Team seat has a session limit and a weekly limit, visible under Settings, then Usage1. Long chats, big file uploads, research and higher effort settings all use more of it14. Teach people to start a new chat for a new task, and to keep reference files in the Project, where reused content is cached and counts less against limits14.
Answers ignore the house style. Usually the instructions are vague. Replace words like professional with specifics such as active voice, no exclamation marks, and sign off with the person's first name. Anthropic's own advice on organisation instructions makes the same point about being concrete4.
Someone pastes in something they should not have. Treat it calmly and fast: delete the chat, tell the policy owner, and record what happened. Then ask whether the policy example list needs another line. The week will go better if people know that reporting a mistake is expected.