Undressing the Dress Code:

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You’re Covered, If Rules Are Applied Uniformly

By Michelle Margetts  

Tired of looking at spaghetti straps, belly buttons, lip rings and G-strings, at least in the workplace? Never fear, the well-crafted dress code is here, and as long as it’s based on business needs and applied uniformly, you’ll generally be covered — and so will your employees.     
     On the subject of dress codes, employers and employees alike are a bit touchy, if not paranoid. And for good reason: Perceptions in the workplace by bosses, co-workers and, most important, clients and customers, have a direct impact on the bottom line.     
     A project manager at an up-and- coming commercial real estate firm in midtown Sacramento with a “business casual” dress code, who prefers to remain anonymous, tells this story about an administrative assistant in her first job: “We’re too small to have a human resources department, so we have this manual that nobody really looks at. One day last summer, after she’d been working for us for a while, she came in wearing a T-shirt with a tank top over it. She’s not a small girl, so these little shirts kept creeping up on her and we got the tummy thing.”  

‘The Hairy Eyeball’
“Also, she had on these neon-blue plastic slippers and they made this really loud flap-flap noise when she walked.” But, the project manager adds with a laugh, “the slippers did match the tank top.”     
     The boss, a nonconfrontational type, settled for giving the young employee “the hairy eyeball” and then consulted the company manual only to discover, under the heading Personal Appearance, a rather useless couple of sentences that read: “It is important that you project a professional business image to our customers or clients, vendors and co-workers. Employees are expected to dress neatly and in a manner consistent with the nature of the work performed.”     
Continued...

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