Companies that take advantage of allowing staff to work from home must ensure that their employees are well managed or many of the potential benefits will be lost, it has been claimed.

Research commissioned by Cisco concludes that managers need to ensure that they do not communicate too often or too rarely with their home-based workers in order to get the best out of them.

Furthermore, the recent study suggests that having the latest communications equipment can be of benefit to home-based workers, reports management-issues.com.

"As the mobile working phenomenon continues to grow, organisations must ensure that they have suitable leadership in place to manage teams of mobile workers," said Stuart Duff, occupational psychologist at Pearn Kandola and author of the report.

"Managers… need to be effective communicators and relationship-builders with an adaptive management style that they can tailor to the personalities within their team," he added.

It was revealed recently that the British government will soon utilise some of the latest unified communications equipment to allow it staff to operate remotely or from their own homes.