Dress for Profitable Staff Performance

The clothing you and your staff wear when serving shoppers affects not only the shoppers’ impressions of you, but also your impressions of yourselves. Both those can influence your retailing performance.
     Researchers at Northwestern University had people put on a white lab coat and complete tests of perceptual attention. Those people told it was a “doctor’s coat” did better on the task than those told it was a “painter’s coat.” Another set of people, who only looked at the “doctor’s coat,” but didn’t put it on before the task did not do better than people not shown the coat. The wearing of the coat combined with the symbolic significance of the coat changed people’s thinking and behavior.
     The test of perceptual attention consisted of looking at two photos which were slightly different and identifying those differences. This specific task is different from most of what you ask yourself and your staff to do when serving shoppers. In addition, the research study didn’t look at whether the effect wears off when a person wears on and on the same clothing day after day.
     The general principle still holds, though. What we wear affects how we act. A couple of years ago, the British Broadcasting Corporation got static for allowing female newsreaders to show lots of leg and the men to wear turned-up jeans. Older viewers recall that when Lord Reith was in charge, even the newsreaders on radio had to wear dinner suits. The objective was to give the news reading the proper gravitas.
     There’s an indirect effect, too. What we wear affects how people respond to us, and that influences our retailing behavior. Desmond Morris, whose career work is central to the field of evolutionary psychology, wrote, “It is impossible to wear clothes without transmitting social signals. Every costume tells a story, often a very subtle one, about its wearer. Even those people who insist that they despise attention to clothing, and dress as casually as possible, are making quite specific comments on their social roles and their attitudes towards the culture in which they live.”
     And their attitudes towards the culture in which they work.
     Employee dress standards are part of the service we offer customers. Take a leadership role in deliberatively designing dress codes for your stores, offices, warehouses, and outside sales teams. Think through the functions dress serves for you and incorporate those in the standards.

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Design Dress Codes Deliberately 
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