ASHLEY NICHOLLS of the accountants BDO Stoy Hayward manages a team of seven that provides sales and marketing services to 27 partners and 350 staff across southeast England.

It is quite a responsibility, but the team gets together just once a week and for the rest of the time Nicholls manages her staff remotely, moving between three regional offices and the London headquarters and working from home on Fridays.

“Flexible working is definitely the future,” insists Nicholls, who took up her post with the firm (one of the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For) just over a year ago. “I love the job, and the variety and flexibility were part of its attraction.”

Management from a distance is becoming increasingly common. According to a report from the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM), part of City and Guilds, one in three managers now looks after teams that operate entirely or predominantly out of the office. Three out of four managers also report that flexible working is now common in their organisation.

The trend towards remote working is likely to continue, says the report’s author, Peter Thomson, director of the Future Work Forum. But it is not apparent among the ranks of British management. Nicholls may thrive on the challenge, but many managers regard it as a threat to their control.

While technological advances have enabled what City and Guilds director-general Chris Humphries refers to as the “quiet revolution” to take place, nearly half of managers in the ILM study said they were unprepared to look after remote staff. Only one in four had received any training.

Thomson is relieved that the business benefits of flexible working are beginning to be appreciated by companies – indeed in the ILM study, three-quarters of managers agreed or strongly agreed that flexible working increased productivity and more than half agreed it helped with recruitment – since the concept was originally sold as a social/family-friendly policy, and seen as an employee rather than employer benefit.

However, despite recognition of productivity gains and the benefits to recruitment and retention, managers are still uncomfortable with not being able to see their staff.

The ILM study reveals that nine out of ten managers claim to trust their remote employees, and yet one in three confesses to a desire to monitor staff more closely. There is still a suspicion that those “working” at a distance may in fact be sprawled on the sofa, eating chocolate and watching TV.

Nicholls doesn’t seem to worry. “I trust my staff,” she said. “I set clear objectives and everyone knows what needs to be achieved and by when. I know they are working because of the work they produce.” According to Thomson, the old focus on input – when what counted was employees being seen in the office putting in the hours – has to be replaced with a focus on output – where what matters is the quality and timely delivery of assigned work.

“What we’ve been saying to people is come to work and look like you are busy and we will pay you – and that’s crazy,” he said. “The fact is if you treat people as adults they act like adults.”

Nicholls agrees. “Faith and trust in employees is a core value of BDO Stoy Hayward. People like to be treated as grown-ups and to feel they have some control and flexibility in their work. So they can arrange their work, for example, so that they miss the rush hours. I get more out of them if they don’t have to spend two hours in a traffic jam.

“I have a male member of staff who starts work early every day so he can leave early on a Friday to collect his kids from school. That kind of flexibility creates a great working environment.”

Nicholls thinks inspiring and empowering people is a large part of remote managing. These qualities are often regarded as leadership rather than management skills.

And indeed Kim Parish, chief executive of the ILM – the biggest provider of management qualifications in Europe – argues that the current trend towards remote and flexible working actually demands that we start to turn out leaders rather than managers.

“This is a huge issue because not all managers have leadership skills,” she said. “Leaders create environments built on trust. They create a sense of integrity and a general sense of purpose rather than micromanaging. But the fact is that managers are easier to find than leaders.”

Finely honed communication skills are also regarded as crucial in those who manage remotely, given the extra effort required to foster team spirit in dispersed teams and also to pick up on any signs of staff isolation or overwork – apparently it is more likely that workaholic tendencies, rather than sloth, have to be monitored in staff working away from base.

And what of the perennial debate about whether leaders are made or born? “I wouldn’t say leaders can’t be created,” said Parish. “With the right training in the right environment, we can create leaders that understand themselves and others and understand motivation. We need to invest in leadership training.”

When it comes to management suspicion about the activities of staff they can’t actually see, Parish points out that having people in the office does not guarantee that managers can keep an eye on what they do. “It’s a complete myth that you control people when they are in the office,” she said. “Just look at all those reports in the past couple of weeks about staff in offices spending hours on Facebook.”

Managers may have a long way to go before they are entirely comfortable with out-of-office working, but clearly so do staff with remote and flexible working deals. Parish was recently in the changing room of her gym on a workday when a woman received a call from her boss.

“I heard her saying, ‘Yes, I’m just leaving the site now,’ ” said Parish. “And I was thinking, For goodness sake, just say where you are. She had probably been working late the night before and was entitled to spend an hour in the gym, but she couldn’t just be open about it.”

The “quiet revolution” is definitely under way, but there is still some way to go before people can get into the rhythm of their new working life – whether as manager or employee.

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