To foster a great workplace culture, you should have a detailed dress code policy. This ensures that your entire team knows how to conduct themselves at work.
It gives a great impression to your clients as well. Even if you don’t have clients, it helps everyone at work take each other seriously. With something as simple as a dress code, you can ensure more productivity and responsibility at the workplace.
So how do you design the perfect dress code policy?
Here’s what you have to consider!
Name Tags
This is crucial if you have a medium-sized or large business. In such organizations, it’s easy for colleagues to forget each other’s names. Name tags can prevent awkward interactions where one might forget another’s name.
If you meet clients or hold public events, name tagsdr are a great way for others to remember your team member’s names. You can shop for great name tags here.
Tone of Professionalism
You want your dress code policy to outline the professionalism you expect in the workplace. However, what constitutes “professional” differs from each workplace and industry.
If you work in a more serious environment such as in banking or finance, you should expect business professional attire. Both men and women have to dress in a conservative fashion. Men should always be expected to wear neckties. Women should not wear revealing tops or excessive jewelry.
If you work at a creative agency such as marketing you can let your team dress in business casual attire. This doesn’t require them to wear jackets or ties. At most, you want them to wear slacks or khaki bottoms. If they don’t see clients, you can allow them to wear jeans.
Many workplaces today allow casual attire. These are often found in the tech industry. Many employees who aren’t required to meet in person also have the freedom to dress casually.
Even with casual attire, you can have a dress code policy. For example, you can request that no team member wears revealing clothing. Women wouldn’t be allowed to wear tops that expose the midriff.
Men wouldn’t be allowed to wear tank tops. Pants get required while shorts get prohibited. Sneakers get permitted but flip-flops get prohibited.
Think about the impression you want to give at your workplace. Even if you don’t see clients, think about what impression an outsider will get when they enter your workplace. With this in mind, you’ll be able to decide the tone of professionalism for your dress code policy.
Violation Policy
Part of your dress code policy will be the violation policy. This refers to what happens if an employee violates the dress code.
When writing this, you want to be explicit in your language. For example, you can say that the first violation will result in a verbal warning. A second violation will result in a written warning.
This written warning will detail the specific violation and what needs to change. A third violation can lead to firing the employee.
Make sure that all of your employees receive a printed copy of the dress code policy. Ask them to read it in its entirety and to pay attention to the rules of the violation policy. Ask them to sign the policy to ensure that they have read and understood it.
Inappropriate Dress
Let’s look a bit more into what’s considered inappropriate for the workplace. When designing your dress code policy you have to first consider what not to wear!
You want to make sure no one wears “revealing clothing.” This means that skin should not be overly exposed. It also means that intimate parts of the body shouldn’t be exposed or emphasized.
You can also mandate that tattoos should get covered in the workplace. You have the right to reject any potential hires who have visible tattoos that cannot get hidden easily. The one exception is if the tattoo is of a religious symbol.
In such a case, it’s possible (though not guaranteed) that an employee sue for religious discrimination if they get prevented from displaying their religious symbols.
You can also put limits on jewelry and the types of jewelry. You might wish to prohibit excessive earrings, large earrings (studs or hoops), septum piercing, or facial piercings. You can prohibit earrings from male employees altogether. Again, you want to make sure you don’t infringe on someone’s right to express their religion through jewelry.
You can also prohibit specific colors and designs. For example, you can allow black, grey, or navy suits while prohibiting tan suits or burgundy suits. You can prohibit designs such as offensive images, sexually explicit imagery, logos, etc.
What To Wear
Once you’ve told your employees what not to wear, you can give them suggestions as to what you’d like to see in the workplace.
In your dress code policy, you should provide explicit descriptions of the appropriate clothing. You should also provide images of what they can wear.
For example, you can show a woman wearing a knee-length dress skirt, matching jacket, and a buttoned shirt. This image should also show the type of jewelry she wears. It should also show how her hair is styled. The entire image should be a template for women in the workplace.
For male employees, you might want to show an image of a man in a suit. The suit should be the color that you expect them to wear. You can show designs such as checks or pinstripes if you are okay with them. As with the image of a woman, this image should leave no ambiguity as to what the men can wear.
Create Your Dress Code Policy
Now you are ready to create your dress code policy. We suggest that you do research on sample dress code policies to find a template for your own policy.
Make sure that you revise the dress code policy with senior staff members. You want to consider the desires of all staff as well so that there’s no hostility toward the policy.
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