This article was originally published by UDaily. It is written by Peter Bothum and reprinted with permission.
Job hunters choose between corporate and nonprofit positions for a variety of reasons: the tasks involved, salary and chances at career development, to name a few. Beth Schinoff, assistant professor of management in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, took both paths and came to the conclusion that the work she was doing was far less important than who she was doing it with.
After graduating from Northwestern University, Schinoff embarked on a career in corporate communications but shifted gears into a nonprofit job in search of something more meaningful. Her discovery that it was the people — not the path — led to her pursuit of a Ph.D. studying workplace relationships, the subject of her thesis and the basis of her research for the next several years of her career.
Her latest study, published in the Academy of Management journal, looks at the ways that remote work impacts the relationships between co-workers. She said her findings were surprising. Schinoff and her co-authors pored through thousands of Reddit, Twitter and LinkedIn comments and developed a model for examining the ways that working remotely versus in the office impacted relationships. They found that, despite previous literature and public opinion regarding returning to the office, working from home can actually improve workplace relationships.
Schinoff spoke about the new paper and her other research.
Q: How did you become interested in your field of research?
Schinoff: While I was working at Allstate headquarters in internal communications, my grandfather passed away, and I had a strong feeling that I needed something more meaningful in my life. I left that corporate job to start (what I thought would be) more impactful work for a nonprofit. There were parts of my nonprofit job that were meaningful, but what I really missed were the people from my job at Allstate. It was at that moment that I put the two ideas together: I realized that it was the people who I was working with on a daily basis that made my work meaningful.
Q: What was the inspiration for this new research?
Schinoff: When I was in my Ph.D. program, many of my friends and co-authors were scattered all over the country. The literature I was reading basically said that working remotely is bad for your relationships. To me, that wasn’t really getting it. And so because I was so interested in friendship in particular, I wanted to know how we maintain these friendships that we have when we’re working remotely. This study is basically questioning the assumption that working remotely is bad for co-worker relationships. We turn that narrative on its head, and ask, “In what ways could this actually be good for your co-worker relationships?”
Q: Your findings show that working from home and connecting with co-workers virtually improved relationships more than being in the office. That sounds counterintuitive to the goal of returning to the office, doesn’t it?
Schinoff: In this study in particular, we’re saying that the magic that comes with being in person is actually not as impactful when it comes to learning non-work information about your co-workers in particular. In some respects, learning personal information about a co-worker is easier when you work remotely because you can learn this information in a less curated way (e.g., a dog runs into a video meeting). When you’re at work in an office, all that non-work information is likely more filtered out. You have to bring it into the conversation. It isn’t as natural as it would be if your dog ran into the room on Zoom, right?
There is this magic to being in person that you cannot recreate on Zoom, but you don’t need it five times a week.
Q: Some people are annoyed when Fido keeps jumping onto their screen. How is this a good thing?
Schinoff: Our findings show that non-work information is fundamentally good for work relationships because it humanizes your co-worker. Learning that your co-worker has a dog and seeing your co-worker interact with Fido shows that your co-worker is a real human with a pet. When the additional layer of actually seeing that non-work information unfolds in real-time, our study shows that even on-screen Fido can motivate you to want to invest in your relationship with that co-worker.
Q: Many companies are returning to the office full-time with the idea that remote work was simply a necessity due to COVID that actually hindered connection. Is there research to back this up?
Schinoff: The narrative that remote work is largely detrimental for work relationships tends to rely on social psychology literature from the ’70s and ’80s. I don’t think our theories have kept pace with the changing nature of technology, and the way that people’s lives and relationships have changed. Our social structures have fundamentally changed over the last two decades and especially since COVID.
Q: The study shows that employees can actually enhance the way they share non-work information by not using backgrounds or blurring. Isn’t there a risk co-workers might see something unprofessional and make assumptions based on that?
Schinoff: We do have reason to believe that even non-professional things that happen in your background could humanize you in the same way. In one of our experimental conditions, we had someone’s rock climbing gear fall abruptly behind them. We also looked at things that would be considered bad, such as learning something about a co-worker that you would see as negative. Our findings suggest that it is not the valence of the information learned about the person, but more information is non-work related, and learned in a vivid and unintentional way.
Q: What roles can leaders have in using technology like Zoom to improve relationships between co-workers?
Schinoff: I think leaders can play a role in showing employees how to use technology to maintain and even grow relationships. A manager could find time during a meeting in which team members share things about their personal lives. My previous work on virtual co-worker friendship shows that just carving out space in a team meeting to talk about non-work related stuff is a huge stage-setting mechanism for fostering relationships. When you work virtually everything becomes so much more about the work and so much less about the small talk and chit chat, which is good in some ways, but also bad in others, especially when it comes to relationships.
Q: Where does your research go from here?
Schinoff: I’m continuing this thread of research on how workers can forge meaningful connections in conditions that we might assume would preclude such connection. For example, I have a paper on Peloton that’s under review right now. It looks at how we can form deeper and more positive relationships with co-workers who also use the Peloton platform.