Friday dressing is now an established part of corporate culture, but companies have started introducing a dress code for office casual-wear as well.
About a decade ago, when the concept of Friday dressing became fashionable, executives who ignored the diktat had to be sent home to dress down and out of their formals. Now, HR departments and section heads find themselves doing the opposite - asking employees to dress up.
The effort to introduce casual dressing ahead of the weekend - to get staffers in the mood, so to speak - appears to have worked so well that HR and section heads find themselves having to advise employees on the "rules" of Friday dressing.
Recently, for instance, the HR head of one of India's largest BPO service providers found himself sending out a Friday dressing advisory to associates - no T-shirts with legends written across them, no shorts, Bermudas or cut-offs, no frayed jeans and so on.
Indeed, most companies that allow for a relaxed dress code on Fridays, have instructions indicating just how "relaxed" it can get.
IT giant Infosys, for example, has an advisory for its employees on the rules of Friday dressing. Collared T-shirts and jeans define the limits of informality and women can wear skirts - of an "appropriate length".
And even if companies' norms are not set in stone, employees are expected to follow the unwritten rules and the overall dress code remains mostly formal, with the exception of jeans and collared T-shirts. So T-shirts with one-liners like "Make love, not war" are a strict no-no, as are floaters and sandals.
Even that is subject to the day's work. "We do allow our employee to wear casuals on Friday. However, those in services wear formals if there are any client meetings, even on Friday," says Mukund Surange, CEO of eGestalt Technologies in Bangalore, a cloud-based information security services provider.
So, with most companies adopting guidelines, Friday dressing has come to acquire a dress code of its own. "Fridays now are really just another day of the week. The only difference for us is that we can wear half-sleeve shirts and darker colours. So it doesn't make much of a difference. And unless you want to be reprimanded by your boss, you pretty much follow the rules," says Ayush Poddar, an analyst working in a global audit company.
Even as companies tighten norms on dress code, women still have it relatively easy not just on Friday but throughout the week.
"Women can wear kohlapuri chappals and kurtas to work and get away with it," says Arjun Mehra who works in a US-based consulting firm, adding, "We have to wear closed shoes at all times and anything other than a shirt is out of the question. And of course, they have a lot of options in terms of accessories too, while the maximum choice we can exercise is with cufflinks and ties."
Ask him about dressing down on Friday and Mehra doesn't understand why one has to wear formals at all. "Personally, I think only if your profile requires you to face clients should you be dressing formally, for the rest of us it should be causal everyday of the week," he says.
Now this maybe wishful thinking, considering that employees in some sectors don't even have the luxury of dressing down on Fridays. Priya Kumar, a corporate trainer and CEO of Mumbai-based Priya Kumar's Training Systems, which has over 500 clients, feels that though Friday dressing has caught on, it's mostly prevalent in the finance sector and in multinational companies.
Sectors like the pharma don't have the comfort of wearing jeans even on a Friday. "You can easily recognise someone working in the pharma sector; he would even sleep in a tie," says Kumar.
