An article on the Beeb’s site piqued my interest today. It revisits the matter of work attire and dress codes. As a self-employed consultant, I can pretty much dress as I please. However, if I do so, I may find that people don’t ask me back. My preferred choice is a tailored black double-breasted business suit, cotton shirt and tie with black slouch boots. One of my peculiarities – or fetish, if you prefer – is that I never wear shoes. Ever. This once got me into conflict with an HR manager who thought that I should not only cut my hair to make it “more professional” i.e. short, but that I should also wear nice business style shoes rather than my western boots. When it came to a clash of personalities, in this instance, I won. I won, not least, because the company didn’t have a written dress policy and you can’t enforce something that doesn’t exist. That is rule one of any dress code policy; write it down.
All that said, I do believe that a dress policy is a good thing. It must however, be sensible, practical and above all, properly consulted if it is to work. Which is why I smiled when I saw this:
Earlier this year, UBS created brief uproar when it unveiled a 43-page dress code for staff. It soon backed down in the face of much mockery over its demand for women to wear skin coloured underwear and men to have monthly haircuts.
Of course they were mocked. 43 pages to put down a policy that could be done on half a page is plain daft. A code should be sufficiently defined to make it enforceable, but UBS went way over the top. Skin coloured underwear, for crying out loud. And how did they plan to check compliance? As for monthly hair-cuts, this is getting very silly. A company can insist upon conventional hair styling as the law currently stands, but must do so for both men and women. They may, for example, insist that it is above the collar. Beyond that, they should leave well alone as it is none of their concern. My hair does need trimming every month or so, but that’s because I have a mop of unruly fast growing hair. Others don’t, so won’t need to cut it so frequently. Besides, providing that it is tidy and meets the corporate image, that is all that is needed. A sensible employer will have nothing to say on hair length at all. If people choose to wear it long, a company may decide that it should be tied back. This would be a reasonable compromise.
A sensible policy will merely outline the desired corporate image – for example business attire for both men and women. It may, for example state no sports tops, jeans or trainers. All of these can be clearly defined and people know what is required in order to comply. Above all, it must apply equally to both sexes or the company will find itself facing a tribunal.
It doesn’t matter to me that most of my clients dress down. I rarely see a suit and tie when I visit their premises. But I will always be wearing my suit and tie as this presents the image I wish to convey. That is, suit and tie (my favourite features book of the dead images), long coat, long(ish) hair and, of course, those slouch boots. Conventional on the surface with just a hint of different thrown in.
Leaving to one side that demanding skin-coloured underwear sounds both perverted (and racist?) and that there is implicit discrimination over haircuts for cue-ball types, I travelled a route at work from dressing soberly and professionally to, by the end, doing a nice impression of a hobo. Somewhere between five layers of management treating me like an idiot child and a full-time administrator – instead of a senior academic – and a pre-2007 smoking ban which meant I did a lot of my job in the fresh air (rain, sleet, snow) produced a childish desire to lower the tone. And the more prestigious the visitor, the worse I dressed. No dress code, you see. And I was still the most internationally significant academic on the staff.
Even half a page of dress code sounds excessive. I’m fortunate in that I work from home 99% of the time. The next 0.9%, I am in the office, where there is no dress code. The remaining 0.1% of the time involves visting customer sites, and we do have a formal, written dress code for such situations. Here it is:
“Dress at least as smartly as the smartest customer contact”
What more could you possibly need?
Succinct and sensible. I would suggest that it’s pretty much what I do.
Until the precedent set by Schmidt v Austicks Bookshops Ltd (1978) is overturned – which one day it will be – then it is deemed not discriminatory to have different rules for men and women so long as what is in place is equally restrictive. So it might be short hair for men and tied back for women. The law allows for “conventional” dress codes. For the cue-ball types, I’ve not yet come across a case where this is deemed inappropriate in the workplace, but give it time. The common sense approach mentioned by Ciaran then is in danger of becoming a minefield when employees seek clarification about what “conventional” actually means. Yup, been there… 😉
Skin coloured underwear for the girls? The colour of whose skin and, getting all Silence of the Lambs, inside or outside? Did they specify? Can someone get clarification?
Funny, I always imagined you dressed like this
http://bit.ly/eQtxG6
Close, but no cigar 😉
Started as a Draughtsman in the mid 80’s. No haircut or tie – no job. Managed to push the boundaries a bit once my feet were under the table, wearing torn jeans and “Johnny Rotten” hair, but still had the shirt and tie.
Did various other things in the 90’s more on the “arty” side of thinga and managed to grow dreadlocks to my waist and wear leather jacket with cut-off and bike to match. No-one seemed bothered at all by it.
Now back in the CAD malarky and the “Johnny” hair is back (what’s left of it) but the tie has been ditched. I get to deal with all from rufty tufty builders to architects and town planners. No-one gets upset as soon as they find that I know what I’m talking about. I get a bit of leg pulling from my boss, but that’s it.
Only problem I get is with a few bully boy site managers who think they are saving lives by making me wear gloves to take site measurements and write them down. Pillocks!
Some of those Dark Angel coats are just amazing—I think I might have to purchase a couple…
DK
P.S. The waistcoats are lovely too.
I’ve got a couple of the long waistcoats. They go well with the short velvet jacket and cravat shirt.
I had a biology teacher at school who used to dress like that. If he hadn’t had such a wierd personality (scary wierd) he would have been regarded as a cool dude.