Dress code for the employees is one of the inevitable factors that every company considers as it always helps in enhancing their productivity. Mark Zuckerberg, a renowned industrialist, once made a quirky remark about why he chose to wear same pair of clothes everyday to work. He says that it would allow him to make more precise decisions later in the day during his work hours. It happened to be the same case with Steve Jobs. A scientific version of his remark is that, our human brain takes a lot of mental stress during all the times and its stress would be exceptionally high when the job requires an individual to make decisions on a daily basis from case to case. If that individual is subjected to make petty decisions over the choice of his/her clothes or food that he plans to take, it may impact the crucial decisions he/she might have to take during his/her business hours. To ease these kind of situations, companies usually have a norm to subject their employees to follow a certain dress code so as to maintain their full attention to the job without any deviations regarding their appearances. Individuals with jobs in banking sector requires to meet people with different mindsets on a daily basis but whereas in software companies it is a different case scenario. A defined dress code for employees will not pave for any bias among the customers visiting the banks.
Attrition and absenteeism is another common prevailing situation in almost all the industries. Popular reasons for the rise of these situations are numerous but not limited to decline in bonus, underrated salary, excessive overtime, lack of work appreciation, corporate politics among others. Dress code is like an ornament but healthy maintenance of the life of employees in the office is a basic need that one company should take care. Employees of some of the software companies will be delighted obviously when they are allowed to wear a dress of their own choice once in a week because they have a healthy and cooperative work environment which is the primary aspect. Wearing a dress of their own choice is not a priority except that it enhances their mood while they are around in the office. Let us take a small example where there are two schools, one of the schools have a liberal policy over the dress code but executes a strict order of conduct which subjects the students to a heavy curriculum leaving no room for creative growth. Simply it can be modelled as that the students are under a tyrannical rule. The students in this kind of school tend to take more leaves than expected to find their interest in creative freedom elsewhere. Now, coming to the other school, the students are strictly advised to follow a certain dress code but allows them with creative freedom that helps enhancing their personality traits. Let us say that the latter school decided to ease up their stand on the dress code policy, this decision will be just as an additional bonus to the students because even with or without the strict dress code policy their basic need of creative freedom in the school is being satisfied. So, in turn the decision would enhance the happiness of the students by a couple of folds. If we juxtapose the school scenario and the office scenario, we can deeply understand the value that the dress code is generating, which is puny. It is just a mere tool to enhance the productivity, provided that the basic needs of the employees were catered. From this case scenarios, we can understand that the attributes of attrition and absenteeism are more concerned with the style of operation or management in a company rather than with a mere dress code policy.
To make the above problem statement more comprehensible in terms of productivity, the companies can address its employees concerns over a town hall meeting every week. This increases the trust among the employees and allows them to have a vivid perception of the management’s transparent nature of work. The companies may adopt a healthy practice of appreciating the work accomplished by the employees. Appreciating an employee over the work that they have done can highly reduce the attrition rates because employees don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad bosses. Also, companies may suggest to have a flexible policy over helping the employees to maintain an appreciable work-life balance. Such cooperative approaches may help the organizations to reduce the attrition rates and increase the presentism of the employees by many folds.
Richard Branson of Virgin Group, quotes “If you treat your employees like your own, they will work for your company like their own.” This is true to a larger extent because companies are built over the hard work of dedicated employees. Basic amenities like creative freedom, moral support, appreciable paycheck always act as major factors to retain valuable employees for an extended period of time. Companies should be considering these corporate amenities as their highest order of priority, where a mere change in the dress code policy might not change the entire big picture without catering to the basic corporate needs first.
I hope this article touches my friends in the corporate.
Image courtesy: Business Insider.
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