Hand Off a Whole Job with Cowork · Lesson 6 of 6

Review before anything leaves, plus team settings

15 minutes. Make the review step a routine, then look at the settings that control Cowork for your whole team.

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You've now handed off three jobs. Each one ended the same way: a person checked the work before it went anywhere. This lesson turns that into a routine you can teach, and then covers the admin side for businesses on a Team plan.

Why review is the job now

When you did these jobs by hand, the doing took two hours and the checking took five minutes. With Cowork, the doing takes five minutes of your time. The checking is now most of your part, and it's the part that protects the business.

Anthropic says the same thing in its own words. For work with real consequences, like money, messages sent as you, or important files, stay close and review what Claude does.

Three things go wrong most often with handed-off work:

  • A confident wrong fact. A total that dropped 14 rows. A date from the wrong year. A reason ("due to the heat wave") nobody gave it.
  • Scope creep. It did a little more than you asked. Tidied a column. Added a slide. Moved a file one folder further than the brief said.
  • The wrong reader. Something private that made it into a file meant for many people.

The Review and Release Checklist catches all three.

The release routine: four questions

Before anything you handed off goes to a customer, a meeting, a vendor, a bank, or even the shared drive, a person answers four questions. Print them. Tape them beside your screen.

  • Did it do the job in the brief, and only that job? Compare to the brief's goal, format and limits. Anything extra gets removed or approved.
  • Is every fact traceable? Each number to a source file. Each date to a document. Each name spelled right. Each reason given by a person. Anything you can't trace, cut.
  • Is anything private in it? Names, phone numbers, pay, account numbers, health details. Search the file. Check who will see it.
  • Would I sign my name to it? If not, fix it or send it back with one clear sentence.

Then a person releases it. A person attaches the report. A person presents the deck. A person swaps the cleaned folder into place. A person sends the welcome letters. Cowork prepares. People release.

Anything that touches money gets a second person. An invoice batch, a price list, a payment schedule: one person prepares it with Cowork, a different person checks it before it's used.

Keep a job log

Add one line per job to a simple log (the template has one):

| Date | Job | Brief | Fixes in review | Brief updated? | Released by | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Oct 3 | Sept service report | Monthly report brief | Week split across months | Yes | Marisol | | Oct 7 | Q4 team deck | Quarterly deck brief | Truck 4 date, slide 6 wording | Yes | Ray | | Oct 9 | Scans cleanup | Cleanup brief | Inspection vs Permit rule | Yes | Marisol |

After a month, the "Fixes in review" column tells you which briefs need work. After three months, it tells you which jobs are ready for a lighter review, and which never will be.

For businesses on a Team plan: the settings to look at

This part is for whoever administers Claude for your business, usually the owner or the office manager. Anthropic's help pages say Owners and Primary Owners manage Cowork in Organization settings > Cowork. Here are the settings Anthropic lists, with the Team plan defaults it gives:

| Setting (as Anthropic names it) | Team plan default | What to decide | |---|---|---| | Enable for your organization | On | Is Cowork on for everyone? | | Run Cowork in the cloud | On | Can sessions run in the cloud as well as on people's computers? | | Allow "Automatically approve" mode | On | Can people skip the per-step approvals? Consider turning it off until your team has done a few jobs in Manual. | | Allow "Always allow" for connector tools | Off | When Cowork is connected to other business tools, connector tools that can make changes need approval for each task unless you turn this on. Leave it off unless you have a reason. | | Built-in browser | On (rolling out) | Can Cowork use a browser to visit websites? |

Anthropic also says admins can turn off web search for Cowork and chat in Organization settings > Capabilities.

A few more facts from Anthropic's pages that matter to a small business:

  • Where sessions are kept. Anthropic says local Cowork sessions keep their history on the user's computer and aren't covered by its standard data retention policies. Cloud sessions are saved to the member's Claude account.
  • Sessions can't be shared. You can share an individual file Claude made, but not a whole session. Another reason to save your brief as a file.
  • Usage. Multi-step jobs use much more of your plan's usage than quick questions. People can check theirs in Settings > Usage. Anthropic suggests grouping related work into one task and starting a new conversation for unrelated work.

What's changing right now

Chat and Cowork are becoming one Claude. Anthropic's help pages say the new combined experience is rolling out gradually, starting with Pro and Max plans, and more plans will follow. For Enterprise plans, Anthropic says it's a public beta, it's off by default, and an Owner or Primary Owner turns it on in Organization settings > Capabilities, where it appears as Chat and Cowork unified (beta). Enterprise admins are promised at least 30 days' notice before anything changes. Anthropic's pages don't yet give a date or setting for Team plans, so if you're on one, watch for the change. When it arrives, the Chat and Cowork choice in the message box may go away. Your briefs and your review routine carry over unchanged.

If you send Cowork activity to a monitoring tool. Some businesses, usually with help from an IT partner, export Cowork activity to an OpenTelemetry collector (a log system) for security records. Anthropic says this is available on Team and Enterprise plans and is set up in Cowork's admin settings. What those events contain depends on a device setting called otlpContentCapture. Today, Anthropic's documentation says that when that setting isn't on a person's computer, on Claude Desktop version 1.17377 or later, the events carry the text of what people typed, Claude's responses, and tool details. Setting it to an empty list, written `[]`, exports metadata only. Even then, events still include the names of the folders people connected and, on Anthropic's own service, the user's email. If your business exports this data, ask your IT partner one question this week: "Do our Cowork logs contain what people typed, and is that what we want?"

To set up Claude for everyone on your team, with shared projects and settings, take [Claude for Your Team](/courses/claude-for-your-team).

Do this now
  • Print the four release questions and put them beside your screen.
  • Start your job log with your three jobs from this course.
  • If you're the admin, open Organization settings > Cowork and look at each setting in the table. Write down what you chose and why.
  • If your business exports Cowork activity to a monitoring tool, send your IT partner the question above.
  • Save your three briefs in one "Briefs" folder, and tell one coworker where it is.

Check it worked

  • Every job you handed off this week was released by a person, after the four questions.
  • Your job log has three rows, each with a fix that went back into its brief.
  • If you're on a Team plan, someone has looked at the Cowork admin settings and made a deliberate choice for each.
  • You know whether your business exports Cowork activity, and if so, what's in it.
  • Your three briefs are saved where you, and one other person, can find them next month.

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That's the course. You've handed off three whole jobs, each with a brief, a run, and a review. Next month, open the brief, change the date, and hand it off again.

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