How we make remote working work at Articulate

Working from home is a real art. Lots of people think it's all daytime TV and curling up on the sofa with your laptop, but in many ways, it's much harder than working from an office. You need discipline, motivation and you have to be very happy in your own company!

But, the benefits of working from home are obvious. If you're a regular employee: you skip the commute and there are no office distractions for the day. If you're an entrepreneur: reduced overheads, no commuting and a congenial working environment. 

We love studies and statistics at Articulate, but we’ve never needed them to convince us that we made the right choice to be a fully-remote business from the start, 20+ years ago. With that said, there’s a lot we’ve learnt about what works (and doesn’t work) along the way.

This article explains why everyone, especially our clients, benefits from our remote-working model. We also share the remote working tools we rely on, how we set up to do our best work and how we close deals without shaking hands.

Why Articulate works from home

You don’t have to dig deep on Google to find the evidence that remote working has serious benefits:

• 41 percent of UK companies say they believe homeworking/hybrid working has increased their organisation’s overall productivity and efficiency. This compares to 33 percent in 2020. (CIPD Update on Flexible and Hybrid Working Practices in the UK 2022)
• Productivity is nearly 42% higher at the 2025 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® companies compared to a typical U.S. workplace (Great Place to Work®️ 2025 Remote Work Productivity Study)
• 22 percent say the biggest benefit to remote work is flexibility in how they spend their time, for 19 percent it’s flexibility in where they choose to live, and for 13 percent it’s the flexibility to choose their work location (Buffer State of Remote Work 2023)
• 73 percent of firms say they are raising prices in response to rising costs, with 62 percent citing soaring energy bills at their commercial properties as driving factor for encouraging remote working. (British Chambers of Commerce 2022 survey)
• 62 percent of people say they are more excited about their careers since shifting to a homeworking model. (Buffer State of Remote Work report 2022)

That’s strong evidence for a fully-remote business model. But there are also things we know from experience that mean it works best for our clients and for our teams:

• We can be more flexible: No worrying about traffic, cancelled trains or delayed flights. Unless we already have another meeting booked, we can usually meet at a time and day that works for you with the magic of Microsoft Teams.
• We can work with global clients: We’ve worked with multiple clients in the US who benefit from our experience in B2B technology, health and sustainability with a little shrewd scheduling.
• We can hire talent from anywhere: We’re less likely to miss out on the best people for our team (and our client work) because we’re not restricted by geography.
• We can be more competitive: With no overheads for office space and the enormous energy and IT infrastructure costs that come with it, we don’t have to factor that into our pricing model.

The tools that make remote working work

Any remote business is only as functional as its tool stack. Get this wrong and you're fighting the working day. Get it right and it runs smooth as butter, freeing up your team to get more done. Here are some of the core tools we use every day at Articulate:

• Notion: With its incredible flexibility, integrations and automations, Notion does a little bit of everything for us. We use it for project management, document creation and collaboration, client portals and as an intranet for our company policies and other key information.
• Microsoft 365 (including Microsoft Teams): Working with enterprise businesses, we need enterprise-level software. Microsoft 365 handles our email, video calls, cloud storage and those all important Excel spreadsheets.
• Slack: A staple for fully-remote teams. Slack’s channel-led messaging makes asynchronous communications much easier to follow and less likely to get lost in long email threads.
• HubSpot: Hubspot’s not just our favoured CMS (and what we build our clients’ websites on) but also our CRM, making our remote sales process completely transparent and easy to manage.
• Turbine: Our small but mighty sister company, Turbine, manages all our expenses, holidays, sick leave and training days.
• Canva: Our designers and developers have their own tranche of specialist tools, but Canva allows them to create templates for non-designers on the team. It helps avoid bottlenecks without compromising design quality.
• Calm: Everyone at Articulate gets a free subscription to Calm to support their wellbeing at home, making it another essential tool for running the business.

Remote working tips from our CEO

There's a reason why Google spends a fortune on its offices: a well-constructed work environment can have a dramatic effect on employees’ creativity and motivation. Organisational behaviourist Monica Parker maintains that a well-designed office is the key to ‘ensuring you have a healthy, happy workforce'.

As a fully remote working organisation, we've got a lot to say on the subject. Here are some top tips from Matthew Stibbe, our CEO at Articulate Marketing:

• Separate phones: You need a phone that you can switch off when you stop work. Although I have two landlines, I use Microsoft Teams more and more as it integrates with my PC better than a regular phone.
• Keep work and home separate: Ideally, you need a separate room or outbuilding for work. It's good to shut the door on work at the end of the day and it shuts out distractions. I also use Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones with noise-cancelling (but no music) to shut out sounds from outside.
• Business-class IT: Get Microsoft Office 365. You'll get enterprise-class software that even ten years ago would have required on-premises hardware and a very geeky friend to set up.
• Everywhere is your office: I use a local club for interviews and meetings. Starbucks or Cafe Nero are just as good. Other people rent meeting rooms from local serviced offices, such as Regus.
• Be like a small big business: Much of our work is for large companies and I spend a lot of time thinking about whether there is anything they have that I can replicate.
• Insurance and tax: In the UK, you need public and employer's liability insurance and you need to figure out how to treat your home office from a tax perspective. It's different for different people so I won't give advice here.

Remote working tips from the team

The rest of the team at Articulate are also remote working pros. Here are some of their perspectives on the most important elements of working effectively from home:

• Trust: Your boss has to trust you, you have to trust your colleagues and most importantly, it's imperative that you trust yourself. If you enjoy your job and you are a responsible and decent human being then you will do the work, you will put in the hours and any doubt will only lead to unnecessary stress and overworking.
• Hours: Working from home means fantastic flexibility, but you don't want to find yourself working when all your office-based friends are down the pub just because you had a lie-in. Try to set regular working hours and stick to them. This also ensures you don't slip into excessive overtime without realising, which is a big risk when work is always right there.
• The rule of yes: 'Fancy a coffee?' 'Want to grab a pint tonight?' No matter the offer, as a home worker, you say yes. It's difficult sitting alone for eight hours a day without the natural banter of the office, so you have to put that extra bit of effort into your social life to balance it out. Don't sink into a nightly sofa slump - say yes and get out of the house.
• Colour: If your office looks lifeless and drab, your work probably will be too. Psychologist Dr. Chris Knight says; ‘If you are working in an environment where there's something to get you psychologically engaged you are happier and you work better’. And in an interview, colour psychologist Angela Wright highlights the power that different wavelengths of light (aka colours) have on our psychology. Blue stimulates logic and productivity, yellow heightens creativity and red encourages physical action. Your senses affect your mood, so make your space a happy one and the benefits will follow.

Remote sales: closing deals without a handshake

Our remote sales team understands our marketing funnel almost as in-depth as our marketing team does. If a prospect follows the channels and becomes a sales-qualified lead, but a salesperson can’t continue to deliver the same expertise, the prospect will likely disappear. Opportunity lost.

If your marketing funnel is reliable, you’ll have a plethora of personalised information about a prospect. You can view what blogs they read, how they entered your site, who they may have already spoken to, and whether or not they’re a returning visitor. With this information, you can begin to tailor your sales process to each individual.

Consultations, technical audits and workshops are all ways to offer more value to prospects in the sales cycle. It’s why we launched our marketing strategy sessions. They’re often quick to perform, easy to contextualise, and they help keep a prospect engaged. We’re not saying that you need to give away your secret sauce before you sign the paperwork. But, as HubSpot says: ‘Always be helping’.

Invariably, more phone time means more time for rapport, more time to showcase value, and a higher probability of closing a deal. Despite the two computers that sit between you and your prospect, you’re just a person, sat (virtually) in front of another person, asking them to trust you. Investigate their business, understand their needs, offer them some help for free, and be a human.

Access our expertise from anywhere

Book a free 30-minute marketing strategy session with Matthew Stibbe, Articulate's CEO. You'll get a straight read on what's working, what isn't, and where to focus first. The session follows our Difference Engine® framework, so you get structured thinking, not just opinions, which you can apply to your marketing immediately.

[This article includes contributions from Clare Dodd, Callum Sharp and Madeleine Leslie]