Washington Post workplace columnist Amy Joyce warns that as the weather warms up, "our dress code and clothing sense sometimes are thrown out the open window."
She adds that the boundaries of what's acceptable to wear to work are also being tested by some employees--particularly younger ones--who see trendy clothes on celebrities and assume they're acceptable as work wear.
Cindy Morgan-Jaffe, a career counselor in Bethesda, Maryland, who mostly counsels new workers, told Joyce: "They're not used to rules. It is definitely a reentry into another world."
"I always learned to dress for the job you want and to look to the boss to figure out what to wear," a manager at a Northern Virginia nonprofit agency told Joyce. But recently, this manager, who is in her early thirties, noticed she was one of the few in her office to wear actual shoes, and not the beachwear so common on college campuses.
"I do think the college generation and under is more casual to begin with," observed Pamela Burns, a personal shopper who often works with recent college graduates. "It's kind of that old dot-com thought that you can wear whatever you want to work and it doesn't matter. But unfortunately, it slaps everyone in the face."
But Burns also said: " I do feel that years ago I would do seminars where people were wearing Tevas [sandals] in financial institutions, and now they're wearing suits."
Sometimes, according to Joyce, new employees just need their employers to explain what they're expected to wear. "With our new grads, it's understanding what's business appropriate," said Jay Fernandez, vice president for human resources with Terros Inc., a Phoenix-based behavioral health network. He acknowledged to Joyce that his company's dress code is pretty generic and that when the local temperature reaches above 90 degrees, the office dress can get pretty relaxed.
After a board meeting recently, an executive asked Fernandez if he "found it disturbing" that a new female employee was wearing a "rather low neckline." Fernandez said he asked a female vice president to speak with the employee.
Most recently, however, Fernandez's company has been dealing with a different dress code issue. It has been hiring a larger population of Latino workers who come to work and interviews in guayaberas--open-collared dress shirts that are sometimes embroidered and worn un-tucked. The shirts are formal in Latino culture; in fact, they're often worn to weddings. Nevertheless, the shirts caused a bit of a stir among non-Hispanic employees who wear suits to the office, Fernandez said. They thought the shirts looked too casual.
Instead of asking the employees to forgo their traditions (and clothing that is quite a bit more comfortable than suits), Fernandez, who also wears the guayabera, is trying to educate his workforce, according to Joyce.
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