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Timpson Blog
What matters most isn’t what they wear
Q Last year all our young male office staff started wearing cardigans on a cold day. This year we have already seen tight knitwear, and even more frightening, roll neck sweaters. Why can’t they stick to a suit? At a push I can cope with a smart tank top.
A I can understand why you want to keep up appearances – casual clothing is sometimes a sign of a slack workplace, but it depends what business you are in. Bankers are expected to stay fairly formal, especially if they are meeting customers, but it is fine for an advertising office to dress down all week.
Dress codes have changed a lot over the last few years, I just wonder whether you are keeping up to date. When I started work 50 years ago every man had a suit (that is why John Collier, Burton and Hepworths sold made to measure suits on every high street) and most men wore a hat. But today plenty of top executives don’t wear a tie.
If the cardigan craze has already caught on it is probably too late to expect your office to go back to a suit and tie. Unless all the knitwear fans are work shy troublemakers I would go with the flow.
What matters most isn’t what they wear but how good they are at the job. We insist that our branch colleagues wear a uniform because they are meeting our customers. But colleagues in our office and the workshops behind the scenes turn up in whatever clothes they want to wear.
I would much rather have a casually dressed hard-working guy with a pleasant personality than a poor performing person in a smart suit.
Q We have one member of staff who is turning up late in the morning and it is beginning to become a problem. How do you tackle such issues?
A You say in your letter this guy’s lateness is becoming a problem – turning up late is a problem the first day it happens. Stamp it out straight away with a blunt face to face chat. You must not let poor timekeeping became part of your culture.
A lot of our people are on flexitime so they have chosen their working week but we expect everyone to turn up early – ready to start work at their chosen time.
If you let a colleague swan in several minutes late, without saying anything, you are asking for trouble. When you eventually decide to clamp down they will complain with some justification “you never said anything before!”
We apply the same zero tolerance approach to sickies – with us sick leave is not an entitlement it is only available for people who are too ill to work.
To bring home the seriousness of lateness or regular sickies, Gouy, our people support director always draws an analogy with employing a decorator, “If you hire a decorator and he goes off sick with the room half finished how long would it be before you bring in someone else to finish the job?”, he asks.
We are pretty lenient employers but there is only so long you can sit in a half decorated room. If your guy keeps turning up late he will have to go.
Q Why do you consider it worthwhile to put “Estab 1903” on your fascia boards?
A When we changed the look of our shops in 1995 we wanted to keep up to date but still retain a sense of tradition. We decided to display the date we started trading on the shop fascia but there was a problem – we didn’t know what date to put.
My grandfather started selling shoes in 1865 but the shoe repair service came much later. The old pictures of our original shoe repair factory and the horse and cart delivery service were taken in the 1900s but we had to guess the exact year. 1903 provided the perfect answer because it meant we could celebrate our centenary in 2003, when we had a big party, presented lots of awards and gave everyone their birthday off to celebrate (a perk that was so popular it now happens every year).
The “est 1903” on our fascia not only underlines the long tradition of experience we have in the trade it also shows that we are members of an exclusive club. A multiple business with hundreds of shops that has been on the High Street for over a century.
With so much current talk of retailers going into administration it is perhaps surprising that a number of other well known names like Boots and WH Smith are well into their second century of shop keeping – something well worth shouting about on the front of the shop.
