Casual Friday
hr92175
65 Posts
I'm trying to convince my boss, the COO, the employees are not/would not be less productive should we adopt casual Friday. He contends that ee's are less productive when they dress casual. Doesn't Microsoft dress casual all the time? I tried to find some research that might disprove his theory, but I haven't had any luck. Any thoughts on where I might be able to find something?
Comments
[url]http://www.employeesurveys.com/policies/goodpol2.htm[/url]
[url]http://lonestartimes.com/images/2006/10/casual-friday.jpg[/url]
We dress business casual on Fridays because we wear suits and are dressed to the nines the rest of the week. We look forward to Fridays and it doesn't make a bit of difference to our workloads. We are in a service industry that deals with the general public all the time. It's a nice perk and we haven't had any violations of what business casual means. Good luck !!!
About 4 yrs ago we had a heat wave come through much like the one this year and our SR.Mgmt was roasting in their attire, so they relaxed our policy ONLY for the summer. It was amazing, they discovered as much work got done if not more because less time was spent primping in the ladies room, employee morale was high and our business didn't drop, so now we are casual everyday.
The first year or so emails would go out advising employees when special visitors would be here. We would revert back to our old policy for the day to make a great impression. Now we don't even get emails. Our business has expanded each year and profits could't be better. If you Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk, Dress policies don't matter.
If I walked into a bank, for example, and the employees were overly casual in their dress or even sloppy, it would concern me.
The other problem is that what is considered "casual dress" in our society today includes clothes that no one would have stepped outside in a few decades ago.
Hip hugger pants,tight stretchy blouses made of about one square inch of fabric, etc.. Alot of what we wear today would have been considered underwear years ago.
Nae
It gradually introduced casual dress into the corporate culture. After a couple of years we moved it to every Friday and shortly thereafter dropped the donation part. It has really worked well for us.
In our handbook, we have "jeans are good!" as it's an incentive for our team to meet our sales goals each week. If your COO is looking for an incentive, this is a good no-cost one. We only missed one weekly sales target in over 2 1/2 years.
We started out with casual Fridays only and would use it as others have mentioned for charitable donations.
Good advice too on dealing with the offenders on a case by case basis which is what we do rather than punishing everyone. It definitely wouldn't go over well here if we changed back to business attire.
Can appreciate that it may not work well in all settings. It works for us as almost all of our customer contact is through the internet or phone calls.