Have you ever had the experience, that while you are in the middle of a heated debate, you suddenly realize, they have a really good point. This happened to me recently when I shared a company’s no flip flop policy with an employee who wore flip flops to work. His debate points - meaningful. “How were his flips flops less safe and less professional then the open the toed sandals, stilettos or platform shoes worn by his co-workers?” When it comes to footwear and dress code policies you need to consider several areas to ensure your policy is effective. An effective policy supports a safe work environment, reflects your desired work culture and is consistent and fair.
Safety is the first and easiest consideration. Start with the environmental demands of your organization’s workplace and the specific physical demands of your positions. When you focus on the work environment and specific job safety needs you can quickly and fairly determine, is it or isn’t it acceptable footwear. For example, if the work environment uses heavy equipment and the jobs are performed in a variety of work environments including outdoors; then in this type of environment, all of the above shoes would not be acceptable. When job and workplace safety demands are the criteria for your footwear policy it is much easier to communicate and get your employees full support on a more restrictive footwear policy.
The next safety consideration should be to review your workers compensation policies and State Workers Compensation laws. Flip flops can be one area of concern with your workers compensation plan. Make sure you know the rules and if there any shoes that would impact a workers comp claim, those shoes should be included in your policy and again communicated and reinforced consistently.
The more challenging environment to evaluate an effective dress code policy is the typical office environment. Here is where you need to again consider basic safety and then look at the desired culture of your workplace. Do you want a casual or formal attire workplace? Are customers coming into the business office and what type of environment do you want to portray to them? If you are a casual or formal environment will your company attract more qualified candidates from your type of industry?
As a manager, you may have a bias toward an acceptable dress code, but be careful to weigh your preference with the desired culture trends in your industry. You don’t want your dress code preferences to negatively impact your company from being the employer of choice. Ultimately, the desired culture needs to be established and communicated to all employees and reinforced consistently, are you starting to sense a theme here.
It’s also important to consider my flip flop wearer’s point of view. How were his shoes less acceptable than his co-workers? When considering what is fair you should apply the guidelines above, safety and desired work culture, then use objective criteria to define the fairness your policy. If you have a normal office setting and you want a more formal environment then what types of shoes are defined as informal? I have seen a variety of objective criteria used to define the formality of foot wear. Such as, no open toed shoes, heel height, etc. My personal favorite is no barefoot employees. A possible future blog topic, “Uncomfortable shoes leads to barefoot employees in the workplace”.
Be cautious, when you are establishing your objective criteria - don’t go too far. I recall an interesting phone call with a “President” of an organization. He was expressing his concern that his staff had taken casual Friday too far. I realized he had also taken it too far, when he was asked me, “Which is the longer pant leg, capris or clam diggers?” Be careful that your objective criteria doesn’t require your managers to carry around a ruler to ensure your dress code is met.
As a manager and leader, your job is to create a work environment that supports company growth. Yes, that means defining the level formality in your work environment, but you are also communicating safety priorities and defining who you are as a workplace. As leader, you should consider how you want to define your culture and how you want to attract the best employees to come work for you. You would be surprised how much influence your dress code will have on your ability to recruit potential candidates. To a candidate dress code can tell them a lot about what it’s like to work for you and your organization.