Remote working is now normal for a large part of the UK workforce, and small businesses have had to figure out how to manage it without the HR infrastructure that larger companies have. Most get through it, but not always efficiently. The tools you choose make a meaningful difference.
The core challenge
In an office, a lot of management happens informally. You can see who's busy, you know what everyone's working on, and quick questions get answered in seconds. Remote working removes all that ambient visibility.
The risk isn't that remote workers don't work; most research suggests remote workers are at least as productive as office workers. The risk is that managers don't have the visibility they need, and communication becomes more effortful than it needs to be.
Communication tools: choosing the right channel
Email is for things that don't need an immediate response and need to be referenced later. A messaging tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams is for quick back-and-forth that doesn't warrant an email. Video calls are for conversations that genuinely need to be conversations.
The problem for most small businesses is that everything ends up in one channel. Everything goes in Slack, which means important things get buried. Or everything goes in email, which is too slow for quick questions. Having a clear team agreement about which channel is used for what saves a surprising amount of friction.
Teams with defined channel norms, clear rules about what goes where, report significantly less communication fatigue and fewer missed messages than teams without them. It's worth spending thirty minutes agreeing this as a team and writing it down.
Project and task visibility
When you can't walk to someone's desk and ask what they're working on, you need a shared view of tasks and progress. This doesn't have to be elaborate. A simple board where each person's active tasks are visible is enough.
The key is that it needs to be up to date. A task board where half the tasks are two weeks old and nobody updates it is worse than not having one, because it gives you false confidence.
Video meetings: fewer, better
There's a tendency to over-correct on video meetings when teams go remote. If your team is having more than two or three scheduled video calls a week per person, something has gone wrong. That's a lot of synchronous time that could be handled asynchronously.
A brief written update often replaces a meeting that nobody really needed. A short video message (tools like Loom are good for this) can convey nuance that text can't, without requiring everyone to be available at the same time.
Managing hours and availability
For most small businesses, tracking hours worked remotely isn't about distrust; it's about understanding capacity and allocating work sensibly. If one person is consistently doing twelve-hour days while another is finishing early, that's useful information for a manager to have.
The simpler approach is agreed core hours, a window when everyone is expected to be reachable, and flexibility outside of that. That handles most small businesses without needing complicated time-tracking software.
Keeping culture alive
The informal moments that happen naturally in an office don't happen remotely without intent. A team lunch, a quick catch-up chat, celebrating wins together. None of this requires elaborate team-building activities. It requires someone deciding it matters and scheduling it.
A fifteen-minute optional catch-up on Friday afternoon, a shared channel for non-work chat, a brief team check-in on Monday mornings. Small, consistent, and optional tends to work better than infrequent and mandatory.
The tools that actually get used
The best remote working setup is one that your team actually uses consistently. That usually means not having too many tools, having clear norms about each one, and not adding new ones until the existing ones are actually being used well.
The combination that works for most small remote teams: a messaging tool for day-to-day communication, a project or task tracker for visibility, a video tool for calls, and a shared document space for anything that needs to be referenced over time. Four tools, each with a clear purpose.