When I worked for a state agency there was no formal dress codes, a lot of the techs and journeyman engineers wore jeans but most of us engineers in the middle ranks wore dress pants and shirt. Managers wore ties with or without jackets.
Now working at home for a consultant, I can wear whatever I want which at the moment is sweat pants and sweatshirt.
Yep, I teach in jeans. I wear a collared shirt for the classroom, but field classes (I teach in a Geology/Hydrology program) are as casual as it gets. I’m actually on the formal side of the faculty - there are more than a few who wear shorts and t-shirts to work regularly. We’re primarily a research institution though, so they’re seldom in front of students. For meetings with project sponsors (the academic equivalent of clients), we all tend to dress the way they do.
Support staff here vary. Financial services and HR are relatively formal; but the departmental admins who interact directly with us most often generally dress like the faculty.
One of my clients is a law firm and behaves like this. The managing partner is a stickler for dress code, and we all make sure we’re suited and booted when he’s in town. But he’s the only one of my (many) clients who’s so traditional.
(I’m a creative, and female, so get away with more. Our strategists tend to lean more towards ‘scruffy professor’ than older cool guy. Not that I’d say that to their face, as clearly they think they’re super cool).
I’m a software developer. I don’t meet clients that often, but I don’t dress up when I do. The first time I went to a client’s office, I asked my manager if I should wear a suit. He said “No. Wear jeans, or we’ll lose our geek cred.” I’m not meeting with the business guys. I’m meeting with the technical guys. And they (generalizing wildly here) tend to distrust people in suits and trust those jeans and tshirts.
Yep, I’m self employed as well, and wear whatever I damn well please. I once had an employee “turn me in” to my business manager because I wasn’t following the dress code.
I work in the video game industry. I usually wear slacks and a dress shirt to work - no tie. When I started my current job, a producer took me aside and told me that I didn’t need to “dress up” every day.
Several former colleagues of mine are now at another ad agency down the street from us; one of their big clients is a major hospital. Apparently, hospitals are another industry where senior management is often still very old-school (and most of them are doctors); the CEO at their client is a stickler for suit-and-tie. Anyone at that ad agency who works on that account learns to keep a jacket and tie in their office just in case they have to go to the clients’ offices for a meeting – they have told me about instances where someone didn’t have a tie on, and they ran into the CEO, who unfailingly would then make a comment about, “that must be one of those new invisible ties.” You would think that the CEO of a major research hospital would have better things to worry about… 
In my function, when meeting with outside parties, I’m typically the client, so I wear pretty much what I want. We have no official dress code. I expect my team to dress in clothes that are not ratty, worn out, a collared shirt for men, etc. If I’m meeting with bankers and I’m asking for money, I typically will put on a blazer, etc.
Would you have the authority to tell your interviewees that they don’t have to dress up when they come to interview with you? If so, may I make so bold as to invite you to change your practice and, instead of dressing up better when interviewing people, to wear what you normally would, and to inform candidates before the interview that they can wear whatever they want, or that it’s OK for them to wear jeans, or whatever? If you were willing to do that, you would, IMO, be doing them more of a favor than if you dressed up for the interview. If there’s no serious dress code, then why not explicitly release them from the artificial societal duty to “dress to impress”? OTOH, by dressing up yourself, you may confuse the interviewees into thinking there is a strict dress code and it may take them longer to figure out afterward that there is not (this actually happened to me once. One of the few interviews for which I didn’t wear jeans, for my last summer job before I left home, probably beacuse my mother made me dress up, my future boss did dress up quite visibly, whereas she would wear, at times, jeans and a t-shirt later when I was actually working for her. I actually found it a bit intimidating. As I saw other people at the workplace wearing jeans, I came in jeans on the first day, hoping I wouldn’t be censured for it. No one said anything, but I was confused for a long time afterward if I had acted appropriately and wondered if I shouldn’t have asked whether there was a dress code). If “dress appropriately” is the sum total of your dress code, then I think it would be a nice gesture on your part to inform interviewees of this in advance and let them know how they may come dressed to the interview; dressing more formally than you normally do yourself when interviewing may confuse or intimidate some interviewes.
This is exactly what I did years ago. I had a brief stint at a part-time HR position in a language school I worked for about 13 years ago. I helped hire other native speaker teachers, and would always tell them before they came to interview with me that I didn’t care if they dressed up or not. Interestlngly, one French-Canadian girl [I’m Canadian, by the way] nevertheless came well-dressed, in a skirt, boots and with her hair pulled back. I deliberately asked her what she thought of my comment to her that she could come dressed as she pleased. She replied that she thought it was appropriate to dress up for the interview (which IMO she was at complete liberty to do - I hadn’t told her that she had to wear jeans 
). I proceeded to ask her if she would refuse to hire someone who came to an interview conducted by her casually dressed. She replied that she would care at the person’s qualifications rather than their dress, but that speaking for herself, she thought it appropriate to dress up for an interview. I did hire her one way or the other.
LOL, that still sounds like a dress code. You’re adapting your dress to what you think will impress the client, not to what you want to wear (that said, probably more people today would want to wear jeans than a suit and tie anyway).
Indeed. When I was knew a partner asked me why I had a suit on in the office. I said a new client was coming in. An injured Alaskan fisherman. He asked if the guy fired his old client for wearing a suit.
Sometimes I’ll wear jeans to a deposition at a big defense firm, just because I know the big firm gang will be jealous of my freedom.
Having worked in 2 major Boston teaching hospitals, I can confirm that this is true here. It was a huge deal when guys were allowed to ditch ties in the office, even if they rarely or never saw another soul. Jeans were not allowed except on charity days (pay $5 to this charity and you can wear jeans on the specific day) or maybe a skeleton crew day like the day after thanksgiving.
Other ways that I found the healthcare industry to be behind the times is a reluctance to evolve learning and development to online classes as opposed to in-person (people by and large struggled with new technology. I once tried to do a webex class and spent 25 out of the 45 minutes taking people through engaging with the platform. It was a disaster). Also, working from home was the exception and not the norm in the two hospitals I worked in, and this was as recent as January of this year. If there’s a blizzard and you can work from home to avoid using PTO (all hospital employees are considered essential personnel and are expected to get to work, even if the governor had called a state of emergency), then ok. But otherwise, it’s a very butts-in-seats culture.
:rolleyes:
Pretty sure that means support staff have a dress code and they’re adhering to it.
As a “support staff” person myself (IT at a very, very large law firm), I get a bit more leeway than most people at law firms (khakis and button-downs are basically the uniform of the IT drone), and nobody (meaning lawyers) notices me. But I guarantee you that if I showed up to work in violation of the dress code, I’d get noticed.
I was the managing editor of a weekly newspaper, and everybody on the editorial side wore jeans. Everybody in the composing room wore jeans. One reporter dressed in a suit on occasion, I think because his jeans were all dirty. On occasion when we went to things like governmental press conferences we were encouraged to dress a little more formally but there wasn’t blowback if we didn’t. Like, one day a reporter was supposed to go and meet with a congress person, only that reporter was sick that day so I went, and I was dressed in jeans. I might have dressed up a little bit, had I known, but maybe not, because I feel it is not really the job of a journalist to suck up in any way to a politician.
The advertising people dressed up. The publisher came to work in fancy velour sweatsuits.
However, in my last job, as a book editor, we rarely–and by “rarely” I mean once in three years–faced one of our writers, or our suppliers, or anyone except the UPS driver, and yet we had a dress code. No jeans, not even on Friday, and no open-toed shoes. Weird.
My experience with several large law firms is that jeans are/were ok on casual Fridays at places that otherwise require suits during the rest of the week, but when firms switch to a “business casual” dress code they are prohibited even on Fridays.
I work at a B2B job where client meetings are almost always conducted remotely. We have a main office, of course, and I wear jeans/jean leggings every day. While there is a dress code, I’ve never actually seen it. Everyone dresses pretty
business casual’.
A client is looking at stopping in sometime in the next couple weeks. So far no one has said anything to me about needing to step things up, so I assume how I dress is just fine.
Really I just try to stay away from graphic tees (I love gaming, so for me that means mostly geeky/nerdy themed shirts, lol) and sneakers. Although I did wear a pair of funky pink tennis shoes the other day and no one batted an eye.
Since moving to Oregon I’ve noticed that the big grocery chains let employees wear blue jeans, or whatever kind of long pants they prefer, along with their vests and/or aprons, while back in Southern California they always had to wear ugly black Dockers or the like. (Why do I say “ugly”? Only because dark Dockers don’t really break in, they just start to look puckered and frumpy.)
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I work in tech. We where whatever we want. Dress codes are fucking idiotic.
When the Board of Directors come to our site once or twice a year, we are told “no shorts, no flip flops”.