Is Corporate Clothing a Good Thing?
When you think about corporate clothing, do you remember the days of being in school and putting on your uniform, only to merge into a sea of a thousand other kids who all looked just as you did? Well, many businesses use corporate clothing for the same purpose as your school did, adding some form of professionalism to an environment and ensuring that there was no disparity based on clothing.
But should corporates be doing this? Do the benefits of rigid clothing standards outweigh the disadvantages? Or is this a way of controlling your staff? Corporate clothing has a number of benefits that cannot be refuted, including the way in which they add an air of professionalism to any environment. Can you imagine a car dealership in which everyone was in his or her own clothes?
Not only would this make it impossible to for you to discern a salesperson from a customer, but it would break down the sense of unity staff in that environment had. For those of a lower socio-economic standard, this also means no worries about competing with another employee’s designer threads. Many people have said, over and over again, that if the company they worked for instituted a uniform, they would leave.
This is because for many, clothing is the one form of self-expression they have in the day-to-day grind and the strict enforcement of corporate clothing could mean cancelling that outlet. Also, what happens when the clothing starts to wear out and looks tatty? The environment in which you work will usually dictate the type of corporate clothing, or lack thereof, that employees wear, and if you stick to what has been done in past, you may be able to avoid debates. Conversely, if you don’t try out what’s new, how will you know what will and won’t work?