Phyllis Moen, a sociologist who was widowed when her two children were young, has made a career studying the challenges of working full time while raising a family. She was an early voice calling for the government to provide paid maternity leave and offer benefits for part-time workers, but eventually, when she saw no signs of progress, she began considering instead the ways that corporations could reconfigure work to address the realities of the modern employee, who was more likely than ever to be a single parent or part of a dual-income couple. ‘‘We wanted to do a field experiment at a corporation that reduced its hours,’’ she said, ‘‘but realized nobody would let us do that. We thought they would be more willing to experiment with giving workers more control.’’

Moen, a professor at the University of Minnesota, and Erin Kelly, now a professor of work and organization at M.I.T., ultimately participated along with other colleagues in a large N.I.H.- and C.D.C.-funded research endeavor examining the interplay among work, family and health. In 2005, they started studying a pilot program that Best Buy initiated on its own, which granted workers almost total control of their schedules. More recently, Moen and Kelly set up another study in the technology department of a corporation that has chosen to remain anonymous but that they refer to as TOMO in a paper they published in American Sociological Review this month.

In the TOMO paper, half the employees in the technology department were randomly assigned to a control group, which would continue operating under the company’s usual policy (flexibility given at the manager’s discretion). The other technology employees would participate in what they thought was a new initiative but was, in fact, part of Moen and Kelly’s field experiment. The new policy was both radical and, in concept, simple: Workers in the experimental group were told they could work wherever, and whenever, they chose so long as projects were completed on time and goals were met; the new emphasis would be on results rather than on the number of hours spent in the office. Managers were trained to be supportive of their employees’ personal issues and were formally encouraged to open up about their own priorities outside work — an ill parent, or a child wanting her mom to watch her soccer games. Managers were given iPods that buzzed twice a day to remind them to think about the various ways they could support their employees as they managed their jobs and home lives.