Looking Ready for Business? ...at Home!

With a seismic shift in work culture and the abrupt shutting down of the business places, offices seem to be a place strictly for birds.

At first, it began like paid leaves for the most (not the accountants, they are actually running extra laps), as nobody knew where this was going. Every day was easy like a Sunday Morning. Fast Forward a few days, and its still school in the morning and workdays are still workdays. Suddenly, “No Casual Fridays in a Crisis”. As things started panning out, it became even clearer that the necessity to hit the showers and dress properly had finally arrived.

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, people were forced to work from home and those corner rooms became work places in no time.

However still, the WFH arrangement was a slouching job for the folks. Meetings were largely carried out on Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and people commemorated it with “A Mullet of a Dressing” or what can be better described as “conference call dressing” or “news anchor dressing” (while a few were still rubbing sleep off their eyes, as the calendar event popped up).

The ritual of "Power Dressing" has swiftly mutated to "Smart Dressing" (formals top up and party down below).

For those to whom wearing a suit would seem like an alien in clothing, a nimble obligation would be to restore the contour and structure of the meeting, now that everybody’s just an individual picture box on a monitor grid.

“I don’t have the office or the desk around me” or “Nobody’s seeing me” are mere excuses for not performing a profound and civilised act.

Trying every shade of Levi’s each day of the week, or putting a blazer while leisurely shaking off slippers, isn’t something you want to stand out for. Dressing makes you feel ready and shows that you have put value in that time. The long lost truth is that dressing helps demarcating boundaries between professional and personal, fine lining work and home.

When you manage to preserve professionalism in a non-formal environment, you appear to be in control, even if everything’s out of it.

With the state of confinement most likely to be prolonged, conventions of daily grooming and dressing routines need to be reinstituted.

Now that we are getting there with the unfamiliar modes of working, the functional norms of dressing need not be shed.

Rather, it’s reassuring to put a game face and the marching shoes on!

Have any WFH grooming dos and don’ts? I’d love to hear them in the comments.