Art UK’s 33 staff and 150 volunteers are scattered around the UK but their collective impact is vast – including more than five million people visiting the charity’s website over the past 12 months.

Based in Stoke-on-Trent, Art UK’s mission is to connect anyone anywhere with the nation’s art – from schoolchildren to scholars and from teachers to tourists.

It provides a vital service to 3,500 UK art collections, ensuring they have a chance to engage digital audiences with their artworks. Over the last 12 months Art UK has developed a new Art UK Shop platform to help collections generate critical revenue, launched an education programme that will transform young lives and begun planning to add millions of object records to its site as its Museum Data Service gets underway.

Meanwhile Art UK’s staff continue their day-to-day work of adding artworks to the database, publishing fascinating stories, solving art mysteries and engaging with a wide range of people and communities.

With a distributed workforce and volunteer network, maintaining support, communication, transparency and wellbeing are key. Art UK policies help its team achieve a work-life balance and ensure they feel valued, through regular 1-2-1s and annual work reviews, wellbeing surveys and opportunities for flexible working.

It runs a variety of initiatives and activities to unite the team so they don’t feel isolated working from home. An internal newsletter, State of the Art, provides news about the achievements of staff and volunteers and highlights the work that different departments have been doing.

In its most recent annual staff survey 100% of Art UK employees agreed that the organisation treats all employees fairly regardless of ethnic background, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or age, and 97% said they are proud to be associated with Art UK. 100% said they know how their work contributes to the organisation’s objectives and 100% agreed that they are trusted to do their job.

Katey Goodwin, Deputy Director of Art UK, has nominated the organisation’s employees and volunteers in the Team of the Year category of the Staffordshire University Business Awards.

She said: “Although we don’t see each other in person every day our shared values and goals, and our collaborative working practices, mean that a small, distributed team can achieve a lot.”