At Google's Canadian headquarters, a strict dress code is enforced: employees must wear clothes.

The laissez-faire policy, emphasizing productivity and ideas over appearance, heaves a water balloon at more traditional guidelines requiring workers to conform to such austere standards as wearing shoes — which, incidentally, are optional at the search-engine's offices.

A spokeswoman describes the approach as a total success. But as with politics, religion and cilantro, dress codes are an issue over which people are destined to be divided.

Writing this month in the Harvard Business Review's blog, the founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy argues that the growing shadow of harassment lawsuits makes it more important than ever for organizations to establish detailed rules of dress for staff.

"There's a litigious atmosphere right now that makes men hesitant to get on the wrong side as far as addressing how women look," says Melinda Marshall, senior fellow with the centre. "Men will talk to men, but the women are in a vacuum."

To wit, a recent Center for Work-Life Policy study of more than 3,000 people found women rarely get guidance from their superiors on how to dress like a leader, while men readily experience such feedback.

Mike A. Cuma, a Canadian labour-relations expert, said a well-crafted dress code can help management avoid uncomfortable dialogue — for example, between a boss and an employee prone to wearing provocative clothing.

"I bet half the managers in the world, if they're male, ain't touching that issue," said Cuma, a partner at Legacy Bowes Group in Winnipeg.

"The laws are getting so tight now with respect to harassment in the workplace that both employee and employer have to be really cautious."

But there is such a thing as too much caution. Swiss bank UBS recently recanted a widely ridiculed, 43-page dress code that spelled out everything from toenail-trimming recommendations to permissible underwear colour.

Cuma said it comes down to a policy's reasonableness in the modern age. There was a time when tattoos and piercings would mean difficulty getting onto an organization's staff; today, eliminating employees with tattoos and piercings would make it difficult for many organizations to even have staff.

"If I show up with a tattoo on my forearm of a naked mermaid, it's harassing, abusing and a violation of probably every human-rights code in every jurisdiction," said Cuma. "But if I have a tattoo of a bear, I wouldn't expect it to be a big issue in most places."

Google, for its part, stands by the notion of trusting employees to dress themselves.

"You'll see anything from people in business suits — because that's what they're comfortable in — to people in ratty jeans and a T-shirt. Hoodies are very popular, as are flannel pyjama pants or track suits. And some of us are quite comfortable in our Lululemons," said Wendy Rozeluk, communications manager for Google.

"It's our perception that good ideas should stand out for themselves. It's not about the packaging; it's about the work."

Sandra Robinson, a professor at the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business, suggested the bottom line is to manage, but not to micro-manage staff.

"If management really has to change this level of detail in their employees' behaviour — shoes and lipstick colour — they have a more serious problem than dress code," said Robinson, referring to UBS's style bible.

"Effective companies . . . hire people that have the attributes they need, managers model appropriate behaviour on a daily basis for those at the next level down, and they make what they care about a central part of the actual culture of the business. They don't need manuals."

mharris@postmedia.com

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