Ours is pretty relaxed - even for front facing roles (we are a Theatre), where jeans and trainer type footwear is fine (no extreme, styles e.g. rips, tears, super tight or super loose etc). I will wear a smart work dress/shoes if I have a meeting with an external person, but otherwise I am dark jeans or linen trousers and Sketchers. I've certainly found that since the pandemic, people are more relaxed in terms of dress which I think is a good thing.

Hi Alyson
In our office pre-Covid we were business wear Monday-Thursday and then casual on a Friday. Since coming back we've relaxed it a lot and almost everybody wears jeans/jumpers/converse etc on a daily basis now. We still ask staff to observe the fact it is a work environment (in the summer a few staff members were wearing extremely short dresses or shorts) but other than that we've scrapped imposed business wear almost entirely.

In reply to Teresa:

I agree that dress codes have relaxed a lot in the last couple of years, and smart trainers are now acceptable in a lot of workplaces, including mine. I have also noticed this being the case at industry events. Can you have a look at what your competitors or similar companies to yours are doing? Photos on their website or social media may help if they have these.

In reply to Gail:

Thank you, this is very interesting and what I have suspected going off events I've been too. A lot of our competitors have all of their staff in uniform but we would like to see people being able to have their own individual clothes.

We don't actually have a policy and the reason is that we are all adults and then someone has to police it (normally HR!).

I dont know if you are all on site, or some form of hybrid

But I think dress codes are under huge pressure from hybrid working (he says here sat at home wearing jean shorts in November)

If people can be sat at home in "casual" dress do they really need to dress up to come into the office - and if so is this just another barrier to onsite working along with inconvenience and cost? If one of points (for those with hybrid working) of getting people back together is collaboration and cooperation then does dress really matter?

Clearly if you are 100% site based then different consideration might apply but not entirely...

In reply to Keith:

Thanks Keith, we have a small amount of hybrid workers but the majority are office based and prefer to be in the office but I get your point, the office would be even more appealing with a more casual dress.

In reply to Alyson:

I agree it does help with making the office more appealing. It can be small things. I cycle to the station and pre covid always wore trainers and carried my shoes or kept them in the office. Now I can wear smart trainers and dispense with the need to carry (and remember!) shoes. It's also easier to wear a smartish jacket that I can cycle in, but pre covid I would not have felt was smart enough for the office. Recently when there were storms even my normally smartly dressed senior colleagues arrived wearing raincoats rather than formal coats!

Do you have any evidence that your customers are put off by wearing trainers or hoodies?

If you don't have any such evidence, what is the point of a dress code?

Guilty as charged. :-) I wear converse and vans and how I dress is really a reflection of the client culture, type of business and what activities I'm doing that day.

Most of my clients have a business casual dress code but tend to leave it to their people to interpret that. I'm not saying there are not raised eyebrows when someone comes in in an outfit they don't like but someone might mention it and it's not often HR's job to do it.

I have even worked in companies where dress codes vary across locations with one location having jeans as standard and another office only having jeans on a Friday.

Personally, I'd go with broad parameters and any role specific rules. With the exception of health and safety requirements or environments where all staff have a uniform, I find a bit of leeway helps.

No one wants to get school vibes from the workplace unless it's clearly the culture and then people can make an active choice about joining.

*Looks down at Skechers*

Well...

I have been asked to review ours as the standard of dress has slipped slightly over the last couple of years with some people wearing vans, converse or sketcher trainers others wearing hoodies.

I can't help but notice that there's no suggestion that performance has slipped, or sales, or customer satisfaction, or stock price, or net profits, or, indeed, any meaningful measure of actual outcomes for the organisation.

If the only reason for reviewing the dress code is because someone in the C-suite is upset that people aren't wearing suits anymore, then I suggest that they need to spend a bit more time focused on their KPIs.

When Mary Barra first proposed the new GM dress code in 2018, I was pretty skeptical. She reduced a lengthy policy document to two words: dress appropriately. To some extent it was an attention-seeking act, but the object as she explained it was to both empower employees to make their own judgements about their role, their tasks and the clothes that were appropriate, and also managers to have actual conversations with employees about adapting. The 2014 media excitement about a Nasa engineer's shirt illustrated the issue that thinking about what we wear matters, but companies may lose more than they gain by proscribing dress codes, as PwC discovered when they sought to enforce a requirement that women working in reception roles wore high heels in 2016.

In short, I think companies are much better off with brief (if not GM-brief) dress codes that encourage thought and dialogue rather than setting down strict and detailed expectations.

In reply to Robey:

Also, on a related note, I was in a meeting with four colleagues the other day, on Teams, when we realised we were all wearing hoodies. We were waiting for a fifth colleague and, when she arrived, she was bemused to be greeted with cheers and laughter... because she, too, was wearing a hoodie.

We have had a 'dress appropriately' dress code in since 2018 and like others work on the basis that employees are adults and generally speaking will make sensible grown up decision, especially if not policed by a 'HR' policy!

Hi Alyson,

I really hate dress codes for exactly the reasons mentioned below: people are adults - you should expect and trust them to dress appropriately. And I've come across the whole 'we MUST have a policy' (to deal with the one person who's missed the mark, rather than everyone else).

We're a relatively casual tech company - it just means that those of us looking a bit smarter today because of external meetings have had jokes about job interviews all morning!

In reply to Robey:

Hoodies, the dress code for those who are trying not to put the heating on.

Your post also reminded me of the dress code - Wear clothes. Meant as a tongue in cheek of course but designed to treat people as adults. This was an accountancy firm.