May I ask a question?

Would a dress code help your organization be more productive?

If you notice I did not ask if it would help improve the morale in your organization or if a dress code would reduce your turnover, those two items may go in the opposite direction in the short term. The question is when everybody returns to the office if you had a dress code, maybe it is business casual or business professional, will the productivity in your organization rise?

My guess, is yes that it will.

The United States Postal Service has come under fire for not being efficient lately, whether that is an accurate fact or not is not the question for today. Do you believe when the dress code was enforced at the United States Postal Service, they were more efficient.

Call centers sometimes do not have a dress code because they operate under the false belief that no one can see them on the phone. I pose the question to you, if they came to work dressed business casual would their productivity improve?

Have you noticed the higher the pay in a call center the better dressed everyone is. In fact, they call themselves something different, never would they refer to themselves as telemarketers.  Brokers, Financial Planners, Account Executives for example. They have a different title for their positions, but they are on the phone making cold calls or taking sales calls.

My question to you remains the same. Would your organization be more productive if you had a dress code of business casual or business professional?

I would agree that you would lose people based upon the fact that they do not wish to dress professionally and do not see a reason for it. Change is always difficult. The trick here is follow good leadership skills and have bench strength ready to go. Consider having three applicants for everyone person that may leave or that you must help leave.

Start the process now of getting 3 applicants on the bench.

Now I am sure there is a lot of you who may disagree with this and that is OK I invite your comments.

Allow me to add a twist to my question. Would your productivity, improve if you as a Leader had a dress code? If you had a personal dress code that would not allow you to come to work dressed anything less than business casual on casual Fridays.

 

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