The global data storage and information security company employed Vanson Bourne to conduct the research for them and a total of 500 IT decision makers in UK and Germany were questioned as part of the study.

It was revealed that 96 per cent of the surveyed organisations allow remote or mobile working. Furthermore, 98 per cent said that they believe remote working is advantageous to their organisation.

Among the benefits seen by businesses was the fact that employee motivation is perceived to increase with the greater flexibility brought about by remote working. This was cited by 62 per cent of respondents.

Home working was the most common means of remote working, cited 62 per cent. Other methods deployed were bring your own device (51 per cent); virtual desktop infrastructure (46 per cent) and working from client sites (32 per cent).

Nick Banks, vice president of EMEA and APAC at Imation Corp's IronKey division, commented: “Whilst making remote working available to a larger number of employees has its benefits, the cost and risks associated still make it a difficult route for many organisations to tread.

“Businesses are unaware of the amount, and type, of data leaving the office, yet they are well aware that employees are regularly breaking the rules in order to take work home. Inadequate security, combined with the naivety surrounding the protection of corporate data, is putting organisations at risk of a data breach.”

The company surveyed 5,000 UK directors and business owners and found that 60 per cent of all employees could be regularly working from home in seven years' time. It also found that almost three quarters (72 per cent) of business leaders feel that face-to-face meetings will soon become a thing of the past.

Virgin Media Business' research indicates a clear shift to a more mobile workforce that does not operate in the traditional manner of working from a desk and travelling to meet clients. Technological advances have made this possible while there is also a growing demand from workers to be allowed to work more flexibly, something that can help people strike the right work-life balance.

In article for HR Magazine, Narelle Morrison states: "Forget the misconception that flexible working is a benefit reserved only for the career mum. The working practice should be extended to all employees and discussed early on in the hiring process in order to attract and retain talent."

At present, just 6.2 per cent of advertised jobs say they allow flexible working, according to the Timewise Flexible Jobs Index. Ms Morrison urges companies to change this attitude and embrace homeworking as a means of boosting productivity and job satisfaction.

The salary and careers site, PayScale, joined with telecommuting job listings site FlexJobs to compile a list of the top 10 highest paying work from home jobs. They compared data on real-time FlexJobs listings with PayScale approximate top paid similar flexible positions.

The survey found that high paid roles including top senior executives were regularly flexible, in positions at companies deemed to be small-to-medium-sized (SME), holding less than 1,000 members of staff. These firms make up 99 per cent of the total organisations present.

The top 10 highest paid flexible job positions, as according to research into SME companies, are as follows.

1. Medical director – £132,000

2. Chief executive officer (CEO) – £120,000

3. Vice president of marketing – £99,000

4. Chief operations officer (COO) – £92,000

5. Regional vice president – £90,000

6. Chief financial officer (CFO) – £84,000

7. Government affairs director – £68,000

8. Director of business operations – £66,000

9. Senior business analyst – £55,000

10. Director of education – £41,000

CEO of FlexJobs Sara Sutton Fell said that these figures dispel the “common misconception that work-from-home jobs pay nowhere near traditional jobs”. The study found that pay in both at-home and office-based roles were not dissimilar.

Ms Sutton Fell added that recent changes allow for candidates to apply for positions in a wider local area than they would usually be able to. This opens them up to the added potential for higher wages and greater benefits.

PayScale’s director of analytics, Katie Bardaro, claimed that advances in technology has meant that companies are working and communicating with both staff and customers more regularly via email and video conference, for example. She added that this in turn means: “Telecommuting almost becomes standard in many higher-level positions.”

While the previous held benefits of working from home were well known – less commuting, more time to spend with family, environmental benefits, and a better work-to-life balance – this research shows that it is now the case that employees are not missing out on high wages when taking flexible work.

Under new legislation, which was introduced as of July 2014, any employee who has been working for a company for 26 weeks or more can ask for a range of flexible options, including compressed hours, four-day weeks, working from home and job shares. This right had previously been restricted to those with children or caring responsibilities.

The legal change will mean that 20 million people will now have flexible working rights, more than double the previous figure. Of those who already offer it, many businesses say working from home or changing working hours increases staff motivation and productivity while also reducing absence.

The Department for Business Innovation and Skills hopes it will modernise workplaces and bring them into line with demands for work-life balance. However, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) believes that formal change was not required; the organisation says that the move will create more administrative work whereas many smaller companies were already offering flexible working through a consensual approach.

There have also been concerns raised by groups such as Working Families around whether or not firms will approve the process. Some believe that there will be a reluctance to allow staff to work from home, with fears that it could create workplace tensions or that some employees could abuse the trust placed in them.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has released figures this month showing that one in seven Britons are now working from home. In total there are 4.2 million people in the UK who work from home either full-time or occasionally – this accounts for 13.9 per cent of the entire workforce.

This is the highest proportion since records began in 1998. Around 1.5 million work from home on a permanent basis while nearly double that, 2.7 million, say that they use their home as an alternative to travelling into the office on an ad hoc basis.

However, despite this surge in home working, TUC states that there are still many bosses who do not trust or want their staff to work from their own homes. The group’s general secretary, Frances O'Grady, said: "Too many bosses still don't trust staff to work from home and instead force them to trudge into the office so they can keep an eye on them.

"Employers' attitudes to new working practices must change to make a much better use of modern technology in all workplaces.”

The proportion of people working from home has grown steadily from 11.1 per cent in 1998. The ONS also found that home workers were likely to be well paid and highly skilled; the median wage for someone working from home is £13.23 an hour, compared with £10.50 an hour for other workers.

According to a study by the Carbon Trust, the widespread access to fast broadband, smartphones and the use of cloud storage has made homeworking a viable option for most companies. If staff are able to work from the comfort of their own home, companies can downsize their energy needs within their offices.

Furthermore, if employees were working remotely then they would provide significant environment benefits by not having to drive to the office.

The Carbon Trust points to telecoms giant BT’s homeworking policy, which apparently saved 14,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent over 12 months. The change meant BT could reduce its office space and save £60 million a year – roughly £6,000 per full-time homeworker.

Hugh Jones, managing director of advisory at the Carbon Trust, commented: “Homeworking is on the rise, with numbers increasing by over half a million since 2007… In the right circumstances, it has the potential to be expanded significantly and be a win-win for business and the environment.”

However, some have stressed that the energy saving benefits of working from home should not be overestimated. On the one hand, it is suggested that some homes are not as run as efficiently as modern offices, thus meaning that having someone at home – requiring the heating and electricity to be on – would be worse for the environment. As such, the real benefits are only said to be realised when the homeworker is located a long way from the office.

Compiled by the Office for National Statistics, the data showed that 2.1 million people opted to work from home in 2001. But by 2011, this had risen by more than 2.8 million, almost one in every ten British residents.

However, the increase has not been an even spread across the country and certain counties are more interested in home working than others. For example, the biggest increases have been seen in areas in the countryside that are close to major towns and cities.

Meanwhile, in the Cotswolds, different kinds of home-based businesses have grown. Start-ups selling products like organic clothes have helped drive up the proportion of people working from home from 14 per cent to almost 20 per cent.

West Somerset still has the highest proportion of people working from home, with 25.99 per cent recorded as homeworkers in 2011, up from 18.18 per cent in 2001.

Andrew Bates, an analyst with the ONS, told the Telegraph: “More people are self-employed and there are more small entrepreneurs. For people using eBay to sell items and small traders it doesn't matter where they are located.

"A lot of people also don't like the commute or can't afford the rising train fares. Good employers are now offering more flexible working."

Conducted by Dr Abigail Powell from the University of New South Wales in Australia, the research looked at 7,000 employees and found that men tended to be better at “maintaining boundaries” between work and domestic chores.

Dr Powell confirmed that “men who work at home did not increase their share of child care”. She added that men actually recorded an extra 51 minutes of paid work compared to their time working when commuting, while women only recorded an extra 41 minutes.

Women involved in the study explained that working from home generally resulted in them balancing childcare and housework.

Social researcher Mark McCrindle spoke to the Australian Financial Review about the study: “Companies always fear their employees might slack off, but I think they are also coming around to the fact people slack off at work, in the office, too.

“It’s more possible to work from home now. It was talked about in the eighties but now technology makes it possible to make it a reality.”

According to a recent report from the Financial Times, residential furniture designers are starting to create items then fill gaps in the market, particularly hybrid items that provide more than one purpose. Among these designs are chairs with electric sockets built in an tables with integrated PCs.

Frank Merlotti, president of furnishings brand Coalesse, told the paper about the firm's extensive research it undertook before it delivered its latest collection to Europe. He commented on one particular bit of research that focused on 16 people working in creative or knowledge-based fields: “All 16 people had home offices and didn't use them. The home office had become used for storage.”

Coalesse's collection was designed with these people in mind; it delivered items such as the Lagunitas sofa that aimed to replace the conference table and chair image with cushions that flip down to support a mobile device and allow the user to sit in a working posture.

Work from home furniture doesn't need to be top-end, however. There are some clever ideas filtering through the market to help improve everyone's productivity, regardless of their budget.

Anti-capitalist protestors and riot police clashed in areas of London's West End over campaigns against the G8 summit. A number of fund managers told their employees to work from home on the advice of the police in order to avoid problems.

Investment Week reported that Artemis was one of the companies to do so. Around half of the Artemis team worked from home, with just 11 managers coming into the company's offices on St James Street.

A spokesman for the fund told the news source: “We were advised by police that our building might be targeted because of [hedge fund] Millennium Global's presence and took the prudent decision that anyone who wanted to could work from home. But it is business as usual at Artemis.”

Having the facilities in place for people to work from home really helped Artemis to ensure that business was not disturbed by events around the office and things could continue to run smoothly.