Company scraps dress code so that its employees can be more creative
If you've ever felt stuffy and uncreative because of the clothes you're wearing, employees at professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) know how you feel.
The company's Australian operation scrapped its dress code on Wednesday to help increase the creativity of its employees, and also to remain competitive in the race for top talent. That's right, no dress code. Get your wild t-shirts out.
It's a complete about face from an incident involving a London woman, a temporary receptionist at PwC, who was sent home for not wearing heels in May.
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The company denies the incident is related to its dress code announcement. "The two are not linked but I don't mind the timing," PwC Australia's Human Capital Leader Sue Horlin told The Australian Financial Review.
The move ditches the "modern professional" dress code that required male employees to wear business socks, and female employees to wear tailored dress trousers or dresses. All the company asks is employees wear what they feel is appropriate.
"We want to give [staff] a bit of latitude to be themselves," Horlin told the AFR. "We hire really smart people and teach them to do really hard things, I'm not sure how you can then overlay that with a set of rules about something so basic about telling them how to dress."
It's the expansion on the company's "trust" theme, according to the report, where they've also implemented flexible working hours. The company also has a ban on internal staff meetings from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., to help demonstrate that PwC's culture is different to other corporate environments.
Thankfully, the strict business dress code is becoming a threatened species. But if you are unsure whether you should wear your board shorts to a meeting with the CEO, here are a few tips to get you through. In bad news, it still doesn't mean you can wear your tracksuit pants to work. Yet.
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