I like Recruiter.com, but they definitely seem to put a stranglehold on the comments to make sure everything is nice and shiny. Here’s an article they put up concerning dress code, and my response:
The problem is that people latch on to something like dress code, which may or may not influence performance, and define that as performance in and of itself, and this leads to the focus wandering from actual performance. Which is what leads to ridiculous situations like two employees of roughly equal performance getting different raises because one wears suits and the other just collared shirts, when their revenue impact on the company was in fact equal.
“Why did Joe get a better raise than me, don’t we produce at roughly the same levels?”
“Well, yes, Jimmy. But you see, Joe wears extraordinarily uncomfortable clothing, including wool suits in the middle of summer, and is always sweating like a hog, unnecessarily so, yes, and I can’t quite put my finger on why that should actually matter, but he does it, and it does matter… for some reason, and he blows most of his income on his wardrobe rather than rent and food for his kids, so therefore he must be a better performer on some level than you, regardless of what the actual metrics say…”
Dress will influence people to varying degrees and in different ways, which is exactly why it has nothing to do with performance and should not be a part of a performance requirement, because one standard does not fit all, nor work for all, and imposing one standard will then by definition narrow the pool of people who can and will be successful in your organization, which limits your ability to be productive. How in any way shape or form is that beneficial to a company, to hinder or in fact close off access to an entire portion of the labor pool because they don’t like wearing a full suit? Maybe with rising prices everywhere for food and gas and housing the last thing many people want to hear is they have to blow half their income on fitted suits for no perceivable objective reason other than the fact that the boss wants them to.
So keep it simple. Define performance in terms of actual work product – what needs to be done, when does it need to be done, and to what quality standard – and manage to that as your standard of performance. Dress code, aside from being clean and presentable and not smelling like ass, will most likely not be a part of that. I think most people will find it utterly amazing how productive their workforce gets when they stop trying to run their employees’ lives to the minutest degree and just concentrate on what’s expected of them in terms of their deliverables at work.
Dress code is like any other irrational and useless metric that’s there for no discernible reason, and it’s mostly used as an excuse for incompetent managers to prove they are managing!, even if it’s connection to actual employee performance is tenuous to nonexistent.
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