Dress Codes are for Lemmings
I stepped into an elevator last Friday and heard this: “Can you believe the Intuit guys are allowed to wear jeans?” Everyone on the elevator was going up to a ballroom for an awards banquet with 600 people. And these folks were commiserating about how awful and unfair it was to put on professional clothes that looked great.
I’m not advocating business attire. Nor am I advocating casual dress codes. I’m suggesting we lose the childish notion of dress codes altogether.
I was at a another event last week where 10 people from a global shoe company walked into a room. Most of those 10 were dressed like they just came from a Cold Play concert. Designer jeans. French revolution-style shirts. Running shoes (from their company, of course). They looked cool. They looked serious. Most of all, their appearance was consistent with the brand image of their company. That polish didn’t come from a dress code. You can’t issue a policy statement that says “Look cool.” But you can hire people that personify the brand and culture characteristics that you want to represent.
Does not having a formal dress policy prevent a manager from confronting someone about poor clothing choices? Heck no. When Lisa shows up with low-rise jeans that reveal 3 inches of butt crack, simply confront her in a private manner and say, “Lisa, I’m not in the business of telling adults what to wear, but common sense says that butt crack can be a distraction in the workplace.”
At best, a dress code is an inauthentic attempt to institutionalize an image. At worst, a dress code is an unnecessary relic from the command-and-control days of decades-old management theory. Having a stated policy assumes that left to their own devices, employees will wear pajamas to work. At Quantum Workplace, we’ve never had stated dress code. And to date, we’ve never had someone arrive to the office shirtless, in pajamas, or in any manner that would be embarrassing to a visiting client.
This is not about workplace etiquette or productivity or comfort. It’s about psychology. By restricting jeans (or limiting them to Fridays), we send a message that wearing professional attire is bad or uncomfortable. Hipsters lost the right to claim “comfort” when the styles turned to skinny jeans. You can’t convince me that those oxygen-depriving jeans are more comfortable than my slacks. In 4th grade, my teacher allowed students to chew gum in class one day every month. What did kids do? They each brought several packs of gum on that day–more gum than a kid can chew. Who benefited? Wrigleys perhaps.
Dress codes are for lemmings–the rodents made famous for running in herds off cliffs. They comply with the movement of the crowd regardless of the crowd’s direction. I don’t hire lemmings. Therefore I don’t need a dress code.
Unless your staffing plan relies on employing 8-year-olds, shred your corporate dress policy. When a new hire asks, “What’s the dress code?” just say, “we don’t have one–we ask people to act and appear in a manner that we can all be proud of.”