Corporate Dress Code

One of the "perks" many companies offer is a relaxed dress code. This could mean that you're allowed to wear shorts and a t-shirt, it may mean you can wear jeans and sneakers, maybe you're allowed to wear polo shirts instead of a suit and tie. It depends on the company, and industry, in which you work. Companies do this because they spend most of their time sucking the life force from you, so they least they can do is let you choose which clothes you wear while it happens.

Many companies have developed a business casual dress code, meaning that you don't need to wear a tie, and although t-shirts are a no-no, you don't necessarily have to wear a button-up shirt; you can get away with a sweater or polo shirt. Some companies will let you wear jeans to work, as long as you aren't doing your best Daisy Duke impression. This is what I want to focus on today - jeans.

The company I work for will generally let its employees wear jeans to work. This is nice, because it fosters a casual, relaxed attitude among the employees. Okay, maybe that's not true, but at least jeans can be worn more than once without washing them, so that's a plus. Anyway, there are times when the company does not allow jeans to be worn - this usually occurs when there are customers visiting the company. Apparently, it's okay to trick customers into thinking you have professional-looking staff. What's the harm in letting your customers see your employees wearing jeans? Are they afraid that the customers will take their business elsewhere? And if that is the case, why let employees wear jeans in the first place?

So what happens if you wear jeans on a "no jeans day?" Well, unless you keep a spare pair of Dockers in your desk drawer, you have the option of going home to change, or if you live far away, going to a store and buying a pair. Naturally, you have to make up the time you missed while getting a new pair of pants. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), going pants-less is not an option at this time.

Most customer visits follow a specific path, weaving throughout certain sections of the building where employees work and also hitting many of the public areas like the cafeteria and the torture chamber. The customer path is well known to the employees - it doesn't change (the customer path is generally chosen to specifically highlight key areas of the business, stopping by to pop in on certain members of the workforce, and rarely deviating beyond this, lest the customers see some of the other "talent" that is employed at the company).

This begs the question - if I'm not on the customer path, and I'm not going anywhere near the customer path, and I'm planning on doing everything I can to avoid being anywhere in the vicinity of customers or paths, can I wear jeans that day? The answer is a resounding "WHAT ARE YOU, STUPID?"

So anyone that is "caught" wearing jeans during a customer visit is sent home (or to the nearest Abercrombie and Fitch). Chances are, this either has happened to you, or it will. This happened to me very recently. A customer visit was scheduled for a Wednesday, it got changed to a Tuesday, I didn't pick up on this and was told to go home and change. This, in and of itself, didn't bother me. What did bother me was that later that day, I witnessed over a dozen other people in my building AND in another building along the customer path wearing jeans. I also saw TWO MANAGERS wearing jeans this same day. So it's not the fact that I had to go home and change that got me angry- it was the fact that I was apparently the only one who did have to go home and change, and even other managers on my floor apparently didn't have to abide by this rule.

Did this situation improve my morale as an employee? Did being singled out while other people (even managers) openly broke the rule without repercussions make me want to work harder? Granted, I didn't want other people to get in trouble so I didn't rat anyone out, I only ask to be treated the same as everyone else.

A few weeks ago, some of my co-workers had a similar situation. We had a late-in-the-day announcement that a visit was scheduled for the next day. However, this notice came out so late that many people had left for the day and didn't get the notice until the day of the visit. These people sit about as far away from the customer path as possible, yet they were still forced to change their clothes (several actually had to go and buy new pants). And to top it off, we heard from other people that same day who were allowed to stay in jeans because they weren't on the path. Somehow, this was okay, even though my co-workers are further away from the customer path than the people who didn't have to change. You can imagine how high employee morale was that day.

Bottom line, it's nice that we get to wear jeans most of the time, and it's understandable why we are asked to dress up a bit when customers come to visit. But it only serves to kill employee morale when this rule is selectively enforced by different departments.

Does your company have a "no jeans" rule? Share your stories with us.