Projects at work can impact what’s happening in our personal lives. And what’s happening in our personal lives can also inspire our work.

For University of Delaware management professor Beth Schinoff, it’s been a little bit of both. Much of her recent research on workplace relationships could be applied to her current stage in life. Now a mother of three, Schinoff, a faculty member in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, is facing challenges finding time to connect with coworkers in the same ways she did before becoming a parent. At the same time, she’s been using the Peloton exercise app as a solution to the lack of time she has for a gym or other fitness class outside of her home. It’s perhaps no accident that the two dynamics collided in her new study, “Blurring Boundaries in Coworker Relationships: How a Nonwork Setting Becomes a Relational Holding Environment.”

In the following Q&A, Schinoff talks about that study and other recent related research she’s conducted that looks at improving workplace relationships and bridging divides through the use of technology.

Q: Workplace relationships have served as the basis for more than one of your studies. How does this one build on previous research?

Schinoff: That's what I study most generally. In the past, I have focused on how specific types of work relationships develop, such as friendships between remote workers, and on how working from different locations, such as from home, helps coworkers form stronger relationships. This study builds on my previous work by broadening the focus to positive relationships more generally and also looking outside of the work context to a nonwork interaction setting (in this case, Peloton). We were really curious about how interacting outside of work could benefit coworker relationships.  

Q: So how does an exercise app tie into workplace relationships?

Schinoff: I think in the workplace in particular, people are struggling with how to build meaningful relationships when they aren’t in the same office five days a week. We know from research that one of the most meaningful ways to grow relationships at work is by bringing your non-work life into conversations (or even observations) with coworkers. The inspiration for the project was a Peloton group that female academics had created. When we saw this happening in this group and how it was benefiting work relationships, we decided to take a closer look. 

Q: Your study found that Peloton was successful at bringing coworkers together to exercise and improving work relationships because it provided a relational holding environment. Can you explain that concept?

Schinoff: The concept of a holding environment comes from research on psychodynamics, which looks at nonconscious processes. It is rooted in the idea of a mother holding their child and the feeling of safety that the child has. We found that the mother is doing the same thing that the Peloton platform is doing for participants. It sopped up, which is sopping up a lot of the negative emotions and risks that our participants might have felt when working out together in person with their coworkers.

Q: How did Peloton benefit coworker relationships?

Schinoff: Because our participants felt safer to engage on the Peloton platform with their coworkers, it changed how they saw their coworker relationships. This made taking what we call “relational risks” easier when they were off the platform. For example, they would reach out to somebody and ask them to go out for coffee, or ask them to Zoom because they felt more comfortable after having this common interaction in that holding environment. For example, I see my CEO or one of my VPs on this Peloton Slack channel, and I know that we can talk about similar — or even the same — cycling or walking classes that we’ve done together. 

Q: What are the most common things that people talk about? 

Schinoff: The platform provided a lot of new information about their coworkers that they didn't know before. We had this great example of someone who said people had no idea I was a Dolly Parton fan. The intensity of the class was another thing that people talked about. People also talked about the instructors a lot. They have these really crazy parasocial relationships with the instructors, where they feel like they're best friends.

Q: It seems like going to the gym and exercising next to your colleagues would be a personal thing. 

Schinoff: That’s right. What we heard from most of the people we interviewed is that even when you choose to work out with a coworker, there's always this voice in the back of your head saying, are they judging me? Are they going to go back to work and tell everyone that this person can't lift as heavy as you think they could lift, or they're slow as a snail on the treadmill? And then how does that actually translate into how they see me at work? Am I a less motivated coworker? Am I less dependable if I skip out on the gym one day? That was why seeing Peloton as a holding environment was so important. It reduced those voices in the back of our participants’ minds. 

Q: The last time we spoke we talked about your journey into academia and how that paralleled research you were working on. Do you see that as a running theme in your work? 

Schinoff: Yes, I definitely see a thread. Right now, my research is paralleling my own life. I'm now a mom of three, including 2-year-old twins and an almost 4-year-old. I don't have time to engage in activities with my coworkers like I used to, and so I don’t feel as close to some of them. 

My previous work shows that you can build these connections through work itself. But here I'm starting to expand into saying I can integrate my work and non-work lives in ways that also grow these coworker relationships.