Should we get dressed up to work from home?

In less than a year, remote work­ing and Zoom calls have borne wit­ness to a trans­for­ma­tion in the way busi­ness is con­duct­ed. Con­ven­tion is out, con­ve­nience is in. Meet­ings take place on the sofa, at the kitchen table or even in the bed­room. But accord­ing to grow­ing num­bers of pro­fes­sion­als, it’s also com­ing at a cost to sar­to­r­i­al stan­dards of busi­ness attire.

“Break­ing down bar­ri­ers is one thing, but we’ve start­ed to notice a creep towards low­er­ing stan­dards,” observes Lynne Lis­ter, man­ag­ing direc­tor of X‑Press Legal Ser­vices, a net­work of 26 offices ser­vic­ing hun­dreds of legal firms. “I’ve seen peo­ple in meet­ings still in their PJs and it’s reached a point where we’re going to be doing some­thing about it.” 

David Jones, part­ner at Glaisy­ers Solic­i­tors and who con­fess­es to reg­u­lar­ly being the only per­son still wear­ing a suit and tie, says: “Now is when we need to nip things in the bud. Things have slipped. Our view going for­ward will be, it’s bet­ter to be too smart­ly dressed rather than under-dressed. 

“The nov­el­ty of the cool lawyer wear­ing jeans and a T‑shirt is wear­ing off. If we’re going to stay remote, we need to up our game.”

What they’re both opin­ing is a sense of loss of pro­fes­sion­al­ism; that expec­ta­tion still remains, but thanks to Zoom casu­al clothes risk breed­ing casu­al minds too.

“Recent­ly, it was a joy to get out a shirt and tie for an AGM I was host­ing,” says Mau­rice Helf­gott, chair­man of retail man­age­ment plat­form Bright­pearl and for­mer direc­tor at Marks & Spencer. “It made me feel more dis­ci­plined, and for­mal, and that I was rais­ing my game. What you wear can def­i­nite­ly make you feel more pro­fes­sion­al.”

Is casual dress being normalised?

Cer­tain­ly, atti­tudes to dress are chang­ing. Recent research by Main­tel found two thirds of work­ers admit they no longer change their clothes to look smart ahead of video calls. Some 17 per cent claim they tum­ble out of bed just min­utes before an ear­ly-morn­ing Zoom call starts. Mean­while, just 6 per cent of staff now say they plan to buy a tra­di­tion­al busi­ness suit this year, accord­ing to a poll by Bright­pearl. 

But are firms right to insist on smart­ness? “Per­cep­tion is every­thing,” says pub­lic rela­tions con­sul­tant Sara Tye. “We risk casu­al­i­sa­tion becom­ing nor­malised, when real­ly it means you can’t be both­ered. When all we now see is the top half of a per­son, it’s almost incum­bent to work hard­er to con­vey con­fi­dence. And it’s about show­ing respect. We seem to be for­get­ting we need to present our­selves just as we would face to face.”

If noth­ing else, Jones says dress­ing more akin to being in the office gives staff an oppor­tu­ni­ty to change out of their “work clothes” and recre­ate a sense they’re leav­ing the day job behind. It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant, he says, at a time when there is very lit­tle home-work dis­tinc­tion.

Oth­er organ­i­sa­tions lin­ing up to enforce stricter home-work­ing stan­dards include those in sec­tors that have his­tor­i­cal­ly espoused dress code con­for­mi­ty, such as Sleep­ing Giant Media, a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing firm. “If you would­n’t do it in the real world, going casu­al because you’re on Zoom isn’t accept­able,” says man­ag­ing direc­tor Antho­ny Klokkou. 

But are we all get­ting our smart shirts and blous­es in a twist? Doesn’t Zoom encour­age recog­nis­ing staff for their out­put rather than their image. Isn’t it the long yearned for eman­ci­pa­tion work­ers have need­ed?

What standards are businesses setting for their workers?

Some agree. “It’s hard to pre­tend you’re not in a domes­tic set­ting, even if you have a dif­fer­ent back­ground on,” says Jason Cob­bold, chief exec­u­tive of cre­ative agency BMB. “For me, nat­u­ral­ness and authen­tic­i­ty mat­ters. The more we air­brush our­selves, the less real we are. Video calls are already hard­er to trans­mit ener­gy, so wor­ry­ing about what you wear is a dis­trac­tion.”

But for Lis­ter at X‑Press Legal Ser­vices this sim­ply won’t do: “We want peo­ple to be in work mode and we are, I’m afraid, still judged on our appear­ance,” she says. “If we think attire is inap­pro­pri­ate, we will now be men­tion­ing it. Peo­ple can be indi­vid­ual, but still be smart.”

What’s clear is many organ­i­sa­tions need to con­scious­ly think about stan­dards and decide their course of action. At out­sourced recep­tion­ist com­pa­ny Mon­eypen­ny, staff used to be able to hide behind the anonymi­ty of a phone. But recent­ly, the busi­ness has moved into video recep­tion calls. 

“Our cul­ture has always been about being your­self, which means we’ve been fine about peo­ple wear­ing sneak­ers and T‑shirts,” says chief exec­u­tive Joan­na Swash. “But we will seek to rep­re­sent the brands we work for. What some­one wears for a Mag­ic Cir­cle [law firm] client should be dif­fer­ent to anoth­er, per­haps younger, dig­i­tal brand.” 

While it remains to be seen just how far oth­er employ­ers will push back on their employ­ees’ dress code, Sab­ri­na Paniz­za co-founder of image con­sul­tan­cy PL Stu­dio, argues the tide will turn and embrace more for­mal­i­ty. 

She says: “Yes, it’s impor­tant we are seen for who we are, but more busi­ness­es will realise that being on a video call actu­al­ly mag­ni­fies a ‘first impres­sion’. There’s not the wider body lan­guage cues we typ­i­cal­ly rely on when we see some­one face to face. The first thing some­one will see is lit­er­al­ly if a per­son looks scruffy or smart.” 

At Glaisy­ers Solic­i­tors, Jones says staff will get a polite tick­ing off for being too casu­al. But accord­ing to Joan­na Dai, founder of women’s work-wear brand Dai, which has seen a 50 per cent drop in demand for “office” jack­ets and dress­es, the office-wear mar­ket was already chang­ing. Like so many things, she thinks coro­n­avirus has just accel­er­at­ed the trend. 

“We’re see­ing the emer­gence of a new type of wardrobe, the flex­i­ble hybrid wardrobe,” she says. “It’s where com­fort reigns, because peo­ple are at home, but it’s where being smart can be com­fort­able too.”