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My last company was a technology mail order business. We had a lot of sales and services reps on the phone and over the Internet. As a result, few customers ever came to visit our office. After working at other companies (including IBM) where I had to wear a suit every day, I set a new policy for my company: no dress code. I told team members they could come to work in anything they liked! This lasted until in the summer when many of the staff members started to show up in bathing suits, bikinis and flip flops. My business started to look more like a club’s swimming pool than an office!

Companies for a long time had dress codes. When I started with IBM in the 1980’s, it was strict white shirts, dark suits and ties. Any day I wore a light blue shirt was one where I was open to scorn from my coworkers.  In 2010, it was disclosed that UBS had issued 44-pages of guidelines for employee dress that included instructions on “shoulder width and underwear shade”.  At first, there was a big movement toward “casual Fridays”. Then more Internet billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg started to wear gray shirts and hoodies to the office. Now, people that work from home might dress in exactly what they slept in!

What should and employer do? When I first started a “no dress code policy”, I wanted everyone to be comfortable at work. I thought it would help the entire team be more productive. When people started to abuse it, the pendulum swung the other way, where I started to believe that if people were more dressed up, they would act more “business like”. This was to distinguish their home and work behaviors. Now,  with mobile technology, this policy makes no sense as people have merged personal and professional lives.

It gets complicated says, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University and founder of the Fashion Law Institute. She believes there is a “strain of thought that says an employee represents a company, and thus dress is not about personal expression, but company expression. But there’s a counterargument that believes because we identify so much with our careers, we should be able to be ourselves at work.”

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This leaves me totally confused. There could be a big power shift brewing. Does it matter what people where to work? Should there be office dress codes? Tell me what you decided!