Dress Down Friday
blogYesterday, despite all my scruples, I took part in a charity ‘Dress Down Friday’ at work. I had thought about following the advice of Guy Browning (no.12) to dress up, not down, but feared the social consequences of isolating myself from my colleagues at this early stage. One fellow jeans and T-shirt wearer didn’t understand why we – in the IT department – couldn’t dress down every day: we rarely get visitors and rarely visit others, so why not?
Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse. Dressing up is one of the key psychological tools we use to get ourselves in the right frame of mind for an activity. As Browning says: “If you are wearing a welder’s helmet people expect rivets, if you are wearing a suit people expect business.” It is worth noting at this point that Keats always put on his best clothes when he was going to write poetry. Work – from writing poetry to writing code – is a performance.
The question for any employer, given that work is such a psychological activity, is how do you get your employees motivated? The answer falls into two categories: carrot or stick. The stick approach is generally used in low paid jobs where employees are expendable and in the public sector, which don’t tend to reward performance. The carrot is the preserve of the private sector, particularly those which are sales based. It is the stick approach that I am most familiar, so I was delighted to get a carrot, which was getting to see the Glasgow premiere of Casino Royale. At the time I thought this was just a kind gesture, but on reflection the choice of Bond was a masterstroke of motivational management. For what could be more aspirational than James Bond? A lavish lifestyle of girls, champagne, caviar, and fast cars, a sense of purpose, despite Tony Blair’s dubious foreign policy, and immense, truly immense self-confidence; if the workers are imbued with even 1% of James Bond’s qualities, their performance would improve by leaps and bounds. It was a very canny move and the film was superb.