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It seems like practically everyone works from home at least part of the time these days. Whether it's a ‘regular' worker who just wants to get away from the clamour of the open-plan office cacophony, or someone who fell out of the dotcom disaster and into freelancing, hardly a week goes by that I don't get an email from someone which includes the phrase “ ...and it ”s so great to work in my pyjamas...”
But one sometimes wonders: if their body is in pyjamas, where is their mind?
There’s no question that working at home can be far more productive than working in a more public environment – in a big office, sometimes it can be impossible to work quietly at one’s desk without being interrupted every five minutes. But the office is a supervised environment: even if you’re the boss, you at least have to look busy. You have to haul your behind out of bed and be at your desk by a certain time, looking reasonably presentable, and making at least a show of working assiduously. We all know the adage “put a smile on your face and happiness will soon follow” – is it too much to think that if you put your “work face” on for others, doing the actual work will soon follow? Does what you wear have a measurable impact on your productivity?
Somewhere someone is probably doing a study on this very thing, but rather than limit ourselves to facts here (all right, here’s a link if you want some statistics on telecommuting: http://libres.curtin.edu.au/libre6n1/eden.htm), let’s let our minds drift in to the world of the anecdote.
It used to be that 95% of the people I knew, both personally and professionally, worked in a normal office, ‘normal’ here meaning office hours which were approximately 9am to 5pm, desks or offices which were assigned long-term, dress codes, workstations instead of laptops – you get the picture. Now, however, probably half the people I know work in some kind of ‘alternative’ office environment, whether that means that they work a lot at home, run a business from their home office, work on a contract basis only, or travel with their office in their knapsack (the laptop-cell phone-Palm triumvirate). I myself have sold and then completed large projects without ever having to see the client in person. How important can your office attire really be if you never actually see the people who write the cheques?
Old-school theories maintained that workers were more productive if they ‘dressed up’ for the office. But the 9-to-5 job has become notional, at best, in a world where more and more of us are freelancers, contract workers, or otherwise independent, email, cell phones, and wireless devices mean that the workday begins well before 9am and extends well past 5pm, and in many fields, job security is only as good as the numbers you posted in the last quarter.
Thanks to these non-traditional work environments, most of us are more cognizant of our individual productivity than we used to be. Not because of The Boss – who, after all, may only be our boss for a few weeks or months – but because we know that sooner or later (and probably sooner), we’re going to have to justify our time to someone, whether it’s to the client, to our next employer, or to our accountant. We don’t all work the same way. For some people, working at home in their pyjamas is highly efficient: they can get out of bed, turn on the computer, and work without distraction. Other people seem to think that ‘working from home’ is synonymous with ‘mental health day’. But it’s funny how, when our livelihood is at stake, we learn how to work most efficiently: the person who is not efficient at working in his pyjamas soon learns that freelancing is not profitable, and the salesperson who doesn’t close her deals has to eventually face the fact that maybe clients don’t want to write big cheques to someone who wears a jean jacket to meetings.
When everyone is responsible for their individual productivity, employers soon find that enforcing an arbitrary dress code is not only a time-waster but can also have a negative impact on the business: Mary Kay, for example, recently had to change its long-established ‘No pants to be worn by women at any time’ dress code. While this had, presumably, been perceived as a reasonable rule at some point, the company found that it was losing good employees – and, more importantly, good potential employees – who felt that this was no longer a reasonable request, especially if they were also required to work more than 8 hours a day.
Does what one wears have an impact on one’s productivity? Of course – an uncomfortable worker is an unproductive worker. Are the rules the same for everyone? Of course not – in the New New Economy, the best worker is one who knows how she works most efficiently, and behaves accordingly.
Sarah Welstead
After several years in advertising agencies and internet consulting firms, Sarah started her own ad agency, StayAwake, last year. A member of DigitalEve since 2001, Sarah has written white papers and articles on user experience and networked communications for a number of publications, including Broken Pencil and Harcourt Canada.
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