When all employees in the company were given the option of working from home, about half took up the opportunity and the gains from the strategy almost doubled to 22 per cent. ''Our results suggest a promising future for working from home,'' concluded the economists' paper, Does Working From Home Work? Evidence From a Chinese Experiment. Even though the research was conducted in China the paper's lead author, Bloom, said the results were likely to be similar in comparable firms in Western countries.

So if telecommuting can be so beneficial for employers and employees, why isn't it more common? Some firms have decided they need workers to be side-by-side if they are to succeed. Chief executive of Yahoo! Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting this year, arguing workers are ''more collaborative and innovative when they're together''. Also, many employees like the social interaction of work and fear their careers may suffer if they are not in the workplace.

But the Centre for Work + Life's director, Barbara Pocock, said managers in industries that lend themselves to telecommuting have been surprisingly resistant, even though workers would like to do more work at home. ''We underestimate the stickiness of old-style cultures of supervision and management, which like to see face-to-face,'' she said. ''There's a bit of managerial catch-up needed here - it's been a bit slower to unfold.''

While a surprisingly small share of Australians have formal telecommuting arrangements, a larger proportion are taking work home thanks to mobile technology. The Work and Life Index found 41 per cent of workers take work home and about half those hours were unpaid. It estimated the average employee who took work home last year donated three weeks of labour annually - almost as much as their annual leave entitlement.

A separate survey on email use by the Centre for Work + Life found 48 per cent of workers who had a mobile device with email access checked their work emails when they were not at work. One in five checked their emails before breakfast and more than a third checked them in the evenings.