Collaborating Teams Workspace Setup

When multiple people in your organisation use Claude, you want consistent behaviour -- the same tone, the same rules, the same access to company knowledge. A team workspace makes this possible. Everyone works from the same instruction set, the same file conventions, and the same custom skills. What each person keeps private are their own credentials and personal preferences. Everything else is shared.

The workspace configuration -- the CLAUDE.md file and the rules and skills that sit alongside it -- lives in a shared repository (version control tracks every change to these files, so nothing is lost and you can always go back). When one team member improves a skill or adds a new rule, everyone benefits automatically the next time they open Claude Code.

What to share vs what to keep personal

The dividing line is simple: anything that should behave consistently for every team member goes in the shared workspace. Anything that is specific to an individual's machine, credentials, or working style stays local.

Skills as intellectual property

The skills your team builds over time represent genuine competitive advantage. A well-written /proposal skill that produces your standard pitch structure, a /client-report that formats your monthly deliverable correctly, a /meeting-summary that captures decisions and actions in your preferred format -- these encode how your business operates. They are not just convenience; they are institutional knowledge in a form that can be replicated, improved, and passed on.

Treating skills as IP means managing them deliberately. Review skill changes before they are merged into the shared workspace, the same way you would review a change to a document template or a process manual. Document each skill in a registry so new team members can see what exists. When a skill stops reflecting how you actually work, update it rather than working around it. An outdated skill that no one uses is clutter; one that gets updated regularly is a living process.

Sharing skills via the workspace also means a new team member inherits the team's accumulated process knowledge on day one. They do not need to learn your preferred output format by trial and error -- it is built into the skill they run from the first session.

Team onboarding checklist

When a new team member joins, they need to complete the following before their first session produces consistent output:

1. Install Claude Code and authenticate with a paid account (Pro or above)
2. Clone the shared workspace repository -- the rules and skills are already in .claude/ and load automatically
3. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in their personal credentials for any integrated services
4. Register personal MCP servers in ~/.claude.json using the server definitions documented in .mcp.json as a reference -- substituting their own credentials
5. Run /help in the first session to confirm skills are loading correctly
6. Run the opening command (typically /day) to verify the workspace state reads correctly and the session banner shows the right workspace identity

Handling conflicting instructions

If a team member's personal ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md conflicts with the workspace CLAUDE.md -- for example, one specifies UK English and the other US English -- Claude Code loads both and applies workspace settings for conventions that affect shared output. If the conflict causes unexpected behaviour, address it explicitly: add a note in the workspace CLAUDE.md identifying conventions that must not be overridden at the personal level.