In yesterday’s Globe and Mail, I read yet another article suggesting that if you work from home, you should dress for important calls as though you were at the office. The idea is that this bit of role-playing will help you to focus on the business at hand and act more professionally.
Well, whatever works. I suppose. But I know that such role-playing doesn’t help me one bit.
Whenever I try such a suggestion, instead of being focused, I’m distracted by the falsity of what I’m doing. Like pretending to agree when I have reservations, or to be in a good mood when I want to dig a hole and fling myself in, dressing for a phone call feels forced and pointless to me. Such efforts do me more harm than good, because I keep thinking I’m being a phony instead of concentrating on the business at hand.
As a result, after trying to play dressup once or twice, I quickly gave up bothering. Now, I happily take calls in my usually working attire: a T-shirt, shorts, and bare feet. A sentence or two into a call, I’m too busy thinking about the issue at hand to waste any worry on what I’m wearing.
Business experts who echo each other on this subject (I’d say “parrot” except that, as the owner of four, I know that they don’t say things mindlessly) would probably say no good could come of my casualness. Yet I think the record speaks for itself. In my casual but sublime outfit, I’ve successfully negotiated the price of a series of ads. I’ve arranged bundling deals for commercial software. I’ve aced job interviews. I’ve successfully interviewed leaders of the free software movement, as well as countless managers and CEOs of national and international corporations. Not one of these people — who must amount to several hundred people over the past eight years — has ever complained that I was anything less than professional and competent.
Under the circumstances, I fail to see why I should spend time ironing a shirt and pants or knotting a tie before a professional call. I could better use my pre-time call making notes of the points I want to cover, or drinking a cup of peppermint tea to help calm myself as I think about strategies.
It would be another story, of course, if I were doing a visual teleconference. But I think that, although the technology for such conferences is now more or less ready, there’s a reason why the idea has never caught on since I first saw a demo as a four year-old-child: few people really want such a thing. Given a choice, most of us, I think, prefer dressing or sitting comfortably while we talk on the phone to whatever minor advantages being seen might confer. Not worrying about such trivialities as our clothes help us to concentrate on what really matters in our telecommuting calls.
That’s not to say that some people might not find dressing up for a call is helpful. I’ve seen too much to believe that everybody responds the same way, so I expect there are people who find that putting on a suit and tie or a pair of nylons helps them when they take business calls from home.
Yet, at the same time, don’t feel that dressing up is compulsory, or a piece of magic that will automatically work for you. In some cases, the effort may only be a distraction.
Off the Wall 