As managers, we’re always on the lookout for new, creative, and effective ways to enhance the employee experience and improve the cultures that define our workplace. As a consequence, it’s important that we ask ourselves: what are the factors that actually contribute to optimizing workplace culture? There are several, but certainly one of the big ones is the degree of comfort and ease that your employees feel when they step inside their workplace. The more that we’re able to do to ensure that our employees feel relaxed while they’re at work, the better.
Allowing for a flexible dress code at the workplace can go a long way in this regard. By replacing rigid and uniform dress requirements with a policy that leaves a bit more room for personal preference and expression, we can help to ensure the comfort of our employees – and also encourage their best performance at work.
To help clarify matters a bit further, we’ve broken down the three major benefits that a flexible dress code can bring to you, your employees, and your organization:
Dress codes are representative of brand values.
When you allow for some freedom and individuality in your employees’ attire, you’re simultaneously communicating to your employees, to your customers, and to your industry at large that you’re an organization that values those qualities.
It will make your employees happier.
For one thing, flexible and relaxed dress codes let people save money that would otherwise go towards investing in a more expensive wardrobe. For another, flexible dress codes are a simple and effective way to let people “shake things up” while at work – which is a good thing, because we all know that too much rigidity at work can easily stifle creativity and productivity. It’s for these reasons (among others) that 50% of U.S companies have now implemented flexible dress codes.
Flexible dress codes encourage active lifestyles.
By allowing your employees to dress in a manner that makes them personally happy and comfortable (while obviously also dressing within the limits of basic professionalism), you’ll also be making it more likely that your team will be active and social during breaks, at lunch, and after work. And as we know, healthy social lives and plenty of exercise are two factors that are crucial to the success of any workplace culture.
Here’s the bottom line: there are lots of strategies that can be employed to strengthen workplace culture, but only a few that benefit employees, managers, and the face of an entire brand at the same time. Allowing for more flexibility in your dress code strategy is one such strategy that can provide you with all of those priceless benefits simultaneously.
To learn more about how you can build a stronger workplace, contact us here.
