A survey of almost 200 people in senior jobs with flexible working arrangements such as job-shares or reduced hours, found that 70% had a 30% higher level of output and scored higher on resilience, leadership and commitment than their traditional full time colleagues.

The study was presented at the British Psychological Society's occupational psychology conference in Winchester yesterday.

John Knell of the Industrial Society, which helped compile the research, said: "Employers find it hard to believe that flexible working among executives can work. And managers often regard mak ing such a request as career death. This research knocks both these misconceptions on the head."

She published early results from a national survey of 7,500 employees showing that demand for flexible working was equally strong among those with caring responsibilities and those without. In both groups 19% want to be able to work part-time.

Demand for flexitime was similar among both groups, with 37% of the carers and 34% of non-carers wanting that option. Just over a quarter of both groups wanted to be able to work from home.

"A better balance between work and life is an issue for everyone," Ms Hodge said.

Guardian Monday March 6, 2000

Bill Saunders reports:

Many of the received wisdoms about secretaries have been proved wrong in recent years. They are not all women, many are highly qualified, and they certainly do more than take memos all day. But while the role of the office support worker may have changed beyond recognition, we at least expect them - by definition - to work from the office.

Increasingly, even this assumption cannot be relied on. As developments in communications outstrip the importance of being on the premises, a new generation of secretaries has realised that they can report to work without ever leaving the house.

Paula Graham, a senior secretary to a director of a department in the Royal Mail, is something of a pioneer in this area. She has worked from home for six years - since the days when email was new to most of us - and describes the original decision as "a wild Friday afternoon idea". But her manager had the imagination to see it might work, and after a successful six-week trial, Graham established her office at home.

Having linked her PC to the office main frame for such traditional jobs as diary management, she is available to answer the telephone from 9am to 5pm. But she also has the time to take her daughter to school. There is a great deal of flexibility on both sides, she says. "Sometimes I will work for an hour or two at weekends." But never more - "because it's not fair to my family".

You don't necessarily need a flexibly minded employer in order to work from home. "Portfolio employment" - working for more than one employer on a consultancy basis - was one of the buzz concepts for managers in the 1990s. And now secretaries are following the example.

Sarah Pugh made this move out of necessity. Last February her youngest son, aged eight, was left temporarily paralysed after being knocked down by a car. With the prospect of five or six hospital visits a month, she felt it was no longer fair to her family or employer to continue as a PA at Lewisham College.

She decided her skills would suit freelance life, invested £1,500 in computer equipment, and set up an office in what had been the au pair's bedroom. So far she has worked mostly for "small local companies where there is a shortage of hands". But her work is concerned more with professional advice than taking in typing. "I help put in systems for people who aren't necessarily systems-minded," she says.

Jane Littlefield, head of the secretarial division at City recruitment firm Joslin Rowe, says the freelance PA is a growing trend. "With advances in technology increasingly allowing people to work from home, it is now possible for someone to have a secretary or PA who supports them from a completely separate location," she says. "For small companies, those in remote locations, or for any business where full-time secretarial support is either unnecessary or too costly, freelance PA or secretarial services are becoming a popular alternative solution."

BT has even launched a website designed to encourage employees to work from home, cleverly marketed as a way to stop work taking over your life in "a world where time has become the most valuable commodity". The attractions to BT are not hard to fathom - all those extra phone, fax and internet lines if more of us worked from home - but the site is nonetheless a well-designed and informative resource for workers wanting to investigate the possibility of working more flexibly.

But even if the technology is available, some of us will never be suited to working from home. It demands a certain self-sufficiency, agree both Graham and Pugh, and many people find it difficult to motivate themselves when isolated from colleagues. Graham goes into her office once a week, "because it is important to keep the social link". But, accustomed to working at her own pace, she admits she now finds the constant interruptions of office life distracting: "I usually have to find a quiet corner to work in!"

But when Joe Mann, a trading standards officer, responded to the advert as part of an investigation into the scheme, he received a bag of roughly cut plywood, a tube of glue and some indecipherable instructions. Unable to assemble a single box, he was forced to forfeit his joining fee.

The scam may seem painfully obvious, but last year saw an increase of over 60% in the numbers of desperate house-bound workers seduced by misleading get-rich-quick offers, according to the National Group on Homeworking.

Responding to adverts in the classified columns of newspapers, on supermarket bulletin boards, or flyers strapped to traffic-light poles, more and more of the estimated 1m homeworkers in Britain are being duped out of an up-front "registration fee" - or, if they complete the work, are receiving a pittance for their efforts.

Linda Devereux, director of NGH, says that the number of complaints against firms offering employment in the home increased from 6,737 in 1998 to 11,107 last year, but represented just a fraction of the total number of vulnerable homeworkers being targeted.

"Our phonelines are jammed and the calls we get are just the tip of the iceberg," she says. "We received 174 complaints about one company, but later found it had taken over 103,000 up-front payments in response to an advertisement campaign.

"Because regular homeworkers desperately need an income, many are afraid to complain when they get less than they hoped for from their wage packets.

"They are normally paid according to their output, based on a fair estimate of what can be achieved in an hour. On paper, this often works out slightly over the minimum wage. In practice, the estimates are unachievable and the homeworkers earn much less."

Vanessa Griffiths, a trading standards officer in Cheshire, says the increasing number of companies advertising misleading homeworking schemes makes legal action difficult.

"With one or two exceptions, it is a small number of complaints against a large number of companies," she says. "In most cases, the level of complaints and the amounts concerned are not enough for trading standards officers to justify enforcement action."

Private action through small claims courts was often equally fruitless and potential claimants could be put off by the cost of litigation, with no guarantee of getting their money back.

A spokesman for the Advertising Standards Authority, which has seen complaints about homeworking scams treble in the past two years, says adverts offering vast sums of money for what appears to be very little work were still very common.

"As a result, we asked for the withdrawal of 13 adverts for homeworking schemes in 1999," he says. "Unfortunately, the growing number of leaflet drops and postcards in shop windows are not covered by our regulations."

Trade secretary Stephen Byers's "modern markets" white paper last year recognised that current laws on fair trading were failing some homeworkers, and a spokeswoman for the DTI confirms that various ways of tackling the problem are still being considered.

Until then, homeworkers are told: if a job advert looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Poor rewards

Vanessa Wood recently gave up her job as a homeworker for Industrial Rubber Mouldings plc after six years. She says the final straw came when she was given a batch of particularly intricate work and was paid just £9 for what took her more than 11 hours to complete.

Three times a week, Wood, 36, from Gosport in Hampshire, took delivery of various rubber components from IRM - including stoppers for walking sticks and seals for gas-masks or inflatable lifeboats - and trimmed them to size in her living room. She says that the job had suited her circumstances as a mother of two young girls and kept her occupied when her husband, who is in the navy, was away.

"I can remember on some occasions, when my husband was at sea, that I'd work until the kids came in from school, then I would start work again about 9pm and carry on right through till about 3am," she says. "By the third night, I'd be absolutely shattered and have to go to bed at a reasonable time and then get up the following morning and rush like mad to get all the work done."

Wood fell out with IRM last year when they appeared to be disregarding new national minimum wage legislation.