3 ms·

One piece I think was missing from this article is how dressing in a suit vs dressing casually affects the culture within a company. I have to wear a full suit

One piece I think was missing from this article is how dressing in a suit vs dressing casually affects the culture within a company. I have to wear a full suit every day to work, and I hate it. In offline conversations with co-workers, they hate it too. The formal business requirement came straight from the CEO who is of the traditional belief that our suits set us apart (whatever that means). What has resulted (along with our open office plan) is a culture that is artificially stilted, both in conversation and relationally between employees. The reason I believe this to be true is comparing "normal" formal business days with the random, once a year day where we all go on a team building exercise or have to do some physical "outside" activity and we can wear jeans and shirts. The office moral, attitude, and conversation are completely different. I don't know if there is a way to quantify exactly what I am talking about, but have noticed a distinct change in our behaviors that seem directly tied to how we dress.

logfromblammo 12y ago
I once worked at a place where the dress code mandated that all employees wear clothing bearing the company logo every day. This, of course, was widely reviled by anyone that did any actual work. The software developers analyzed a loophole and published the exploit to the local branch office. From then on, people wore whatever they liked, and just kept a logo-embroidered fleece jacket draped over their work chairs. A few bolder individuals purchased a company-logo lab coat and wore it around the office. The branch manager never reported any violation of the dress code--because technically there were no violations--but did take care to inform everyone ahead of time whenever employees from headquarters were scheduled to visit. At another job, the dress code was to wear clothing when customers were in the office. The actual median daily apparel worn in those two different offices were virtually identical. The latter simply showed greater variance in styles of dress. If I had to maintain an entire closet filled with garments that I would never want to wear anywhere outside of work, that would severely irritate me, to the extent that I would almost certainly become well acquainted with a pearl wholesaler, despite the apparent physical impossibilities involved. But it is a perfect indicator that management is willing to impose arbitrary, capricious, top-down working requirements on employees, without respect to consequences, intended or otherwise. So not only do I endorse the prejudicial maxim to not do business with suits, I extend it to teams whose dress appears suspiciously homogenous, uniform-like, or logo-emblazoned. I want to deal with people, not mooks, peons, toadies, or serfs. If I see one person on a team in a t-shirt, and another in a pinstriped dress shirt with polka-dotted bow tie, I can be reasonably certain that no one told either of those two what to wear. Especially their mothers.

logfromblammo 12y ago

I once worked at a place where the dress code mandated that all employees wear clothing bearing the company logo every day. This, of course, was widely reviled by anyone that did any actual work. The software developers analyzed a loophole and published the exploit to the local branch office. From then on, people wore whatever they liked, and just kept a logo-embroidered fleece jacket draped over their work chairs. A few bolder individuals purchased a company-logo lab coat and wore it around the office. The branch manager never reported any violation of the dress code--because technically there were no violations--but did take care to inform everyone ahead of time whenever employees from headquarters were scheduled to visit. At another job, the dress code was to wear clothing when customers were in the office. The actual median daily apparel worn in those two different offices were virtually identical. The latter simply showed greater variance in styles of dress. If I had to maintain an entire closet filled with garments that I would never want to wear anywhere outside of work, that would severely irritate me, to the extent that I would almost certainly become well acquainted with a pearl wholesaler, despite the apparent physical impossibilities involved. But it is a perfect indicator that management is willing to impose arbitrary, capricious, top-down working requirements on employees, without respect to consequences, intended or otherwise. So not only do I endorse the prejudicial maxim to not do business with suits, I extend it to teams whose dress appears suspiciously homogenous, uniform-like, or logo-emblazoned. I want to deal with people, not mooks, peons, toadies, or serfs. If I see one person on a team in a t-shirt, and another in a pinstriped dress shirt with polka-dotted bow tie, I can be reasonably certain that no one told either of those two what to wear. Especially their mothers.