(twicepix)
Are you dress-SOX compliant? Swiss bank UBS has passed out a 43-page book to employees at 5 of its branches telling them what to wear and what not to wear.
Do:
- Wear a stylish haircut as studies have shown them to increase your popularity
- Wear dark grey, black, or navy blue suits, as they “symbolize competence, formalism and sobriety.”
- Wear black knee-high socks if you’re a man, as you want to avoid showing any skin when you cross your legs.
- Wear a watch as they suggest “reliability and great care for punctuality.”
Don’t:
- Eat garlic and onions
- Wear black nail polish or nail art
- Wear short skirts
- Have visible underwear
If successful, the style guide could be implemented bank-wide.
Have you ever gotten in trouble at work for breaking a dress code? How did you deal with it?
Dress to Impress, UBS Tells Staff [WSJ]
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I’m paid for my brain, not my attire. Fuck dress codes.
I’m always weary and angry with dress codes that have different standards for men and women. Bigotry is never fun from your employer.
Funny, when I worked the same job as la jipiteca (scheduling for a hospital) about fifteen years ago, we could only wear scrubs or a suit. No T-shirts, no jeans. Didn’t matter that nurses would come in to pick up their schedule or paychecks in clothes stained by blood or poop… if we didn’t wear scrubs, we had to wear a suit. I got bawled out for wearing a sweater with knit pants, particularly because the edge of a T-shirt could be seen underneath the sweater.
The nurse manager in charge was a walking invokation of Godwin’s Law, and people were terrified of her and her flunky. They would scream – literally scream – at employees at the drop of a a hat. We were forbidden to eat anything at our desk, we would have to go in another room and lock the door… we were forbidden to speak to one another outside of shifts – if you arrived a minute late, you were screamed at, if you arrived early, you were to sit in the lobby and wait until the precise moment your shift started, and then you were only to trade essential information and not make any conversation. We were forbidden to go to the bathroom between 4 pm and 7 pm during our shift, even though we carried pagers, because that was the critical time to staff the hospital floors.
Anyway… We had a meeting for which we were all called in on pain of death. We were not paid if it was our day off. (I’m not sure the meeting was actually legal in another way; they were pressuring us to vote a certain way in the election, and also to write our public officials). Several people asked me whether I thought it was safe for them to wear jeans since technically it was their day off. When we all showed up, no one was wearing jeans – except the nurse manager and her flunky.
When I quit, it was another six months before I found a steady job, but it was worth it!
I worked as a bar cart girl at a golf course for several months. I had to wear a little polo shirt and plaid mini skirt as part of the gig. Since it was autumn in Colorado, I was allowed to have a blanket to put over my knees while I drove. They never addressed footwear, however, so I wore my bright orange golf shoes. About a week later I was pulled into the office and told that I was dressing inappropriately (a mini skirt in October – I agree!), and that I needed to get black shoes. I ended up getting away with dark red shoes (I didn’t own black shoes and $3.13 an hour didn’t buy them for me), but it was still rather goofy.
Everyday, I’m more grateful that my company allows us to wear jeans on a daily basis. The only exception is that we have to dress better if a client is to be on site.
The only time I ever got in “dress code” trouble was when I worked as a stockperson in a drug store, and the manager said I had too many holes in my jeans. My defense was that the job (lots of heavy lifting, truck unloading, and kneeling) was destroying my clothing anyway, but she kept threatening to send me home.
This drug store, by the way, had a goofy dress code that required all male employees to wear a dress shirt and tie, while women could wear t-shirts. Of course, wearing a shirt, tie, and blue smock in a drug store made little old ladies assume I was the pharmacist and ask me questions about their prescriptions. I ended up growing a goatee (not against the dress code) so that I’d look less trustworthy.
Typically dress codes work in this way. The closer you are to the money, the stricter the code. No one wants to lose a $10 million deal because the sales person looked like they just walked out of bed. The point is, if you’re asking someone to give you a lot of money, are you going to give it to a well, clean dressed person, or a downtrodden hobo. People ARE judging you and that’s just the reality. Dye your hair purple with more ear-rings than a you have fingers, and people are making assumptions about you, and that impacts their decision. You can whine about ‘individuality’ and whatever. But that’s the reality of it. If you want to dress however you want, go into the arts/marketing/design/etc. Banking is not the place for you.
I’m going to give it to someone who looks a lot like me, so that’d be business casual, more or less.
The CEO of UBS looks like a zombie, though…
wow, now I feel silly for complaining that Starbucks couldn’t tolerate the tattoo on my wrist that says “patience” in plain English. Clearly it gets worse.