Some employees can set their own boundaries between work and family life—they can receive a text during work time that their child got off the school bus safely—while other can’t. In fact, about 25% of employees in big box stores have to lock up their cell phones at work, except during breaks.

What would happen if employees in these front-line jobs had more control over setting boundaries in both separating and integrating their work and personal lives? To find out, eminent work-life scholar Ellen Ernst Kossek led a research team to conduct a randomized field experiment in 23 grocery stores that changed their cell phone policy to give employees more control compared to 46 stores in other conditions. The results revealed that the policy change triggered a culture change benefiting employees AND the employer. Rather than cell phones getting in the way of productivity, the study found that not only were employees able to access their phone for important personal needs during the work day, they also used their phones to help customers—like finding pictures of how to use a cake mix to decorate a cake!

Watch this compelling Big Ideas Talk on Rethinking Boundary Control Toward Work-Life Equality for the Front Line. Whether employees are on the front line or in managerial jobs, Ellen Kossek says, “every job should have some form of boundary control.”

About Ellen Ernst Kossek

At the time of this presentation, Ellen Ernst Kossek was the  Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor of Management at Purdue University’s Daniels School of Business. She is currently the VMWare Women’s Leadership Lab CASBS Fellow in the incoming 2025-2026 fellows class at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a Distinguished Family Scholar in the Purdue Center for Families. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a BA from Mount Holyoke College. An eminent work-life scholar, social scientist and workplace expert, she served as the first elected President of the Work-Family Researchers Network and is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, and the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology. Dr. Kossek has received  many awards for research and service excellence to advance gender and work-life inclusion. Her current research focuses on the design and delivery of leadership and organizational interventions to adapt the modern workplace to future of work trends such as remote and hybrid work and flexibility. She recently served on a  U.S. National Academy of Sciences expert study group on the need to enhance policies and practices for supporting family caregivers working in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine). Dr. Kossek has been invited to give talks to managers and students in many countries around the world. Prior to becoming a professor, she worked on human resource issues for major corporations in the U.S., Europe and Asia.