For many of us there are jobs that have to be done outside in winter, whether it’s our full-time work in the outdoor weather or just a small part of our working day like taking the bins out to be emptied or walking to or from our car. It’s important to dress appropriately for the weather so that we are able to be healthy and safe and to face whatever the day throws at us.
The current long-range weather forecasts suggest an early winter, with snow in the UK predicted from November to January and with December having lower than average temperatures. Exactaweather.com, a non-profit-making organisation which has accurately predicted the last two harsh winters, says 2011/12 could be record-breakingly cold.
Hypothermia begins at much higher temperatures than most of us realise and is more common than many British workers recognise. While in the USA around 700 people die each year of hypothermia as a result of work conditions, figures for the UK are not broken down in this way – but a staggering 30,000 deaths a year are considered to result from exposure to cold. Hypothermia is a potential killer and often goes unrecognised in the early stages because the symptoms are fatigue, nausea, confusion, and sweating.

• Wearing gloves and a hat are important for outdoor work. Gloves insulate the hands but need to be flexible enough to allow a worker to manipulate tools or controls. A hat needs to provide good heat conservation and may also help with visibility – a peaked cap can keep rain and snow from the eyes, but some hats also impede hearing and it’s important to ensure that one form of safety is not sacrificed to another.
• For outdoor work it’s better to wear lightweight clothing in layers that can be adjusted to the prevailing weather conditions because it is as important to remove layers to avoid getting over-warm as perspiring can lead to chills that in turn lead to hypothermia as the cold moisture near the skin triggers a physical reaction – damp clothing is up to twenty times less heat retentive than dry clothing, so layers are vital to ensuring safe outdoor working.
• For those working near machinery, scarves are a particular hazard, as are the dangling drawstrings of hoodies – it’s vital to ensure that clothing that keeps us warm is also safe in the work environment and anything that can catch or entangle in moving parts is dangerous.
• Winter food is vital to productive working – complex carbohydrates and simple warmth are important to stop people, even those working at desks, developing the lethargy that results from becoming cold and using up calories to keep the body warm. Hot drinks can really make a difference to performance too.

There seems to be an increasing concern about the role of clothing in small businesses, particularly those that offer some kind of professional service. As companies downsize and out-source, it’s becoming important that the appearance of all those involved in a company reflect the company ethos, including the professional nature and status of the organisation. The loss of intervening layers of middle management often means that those at the front of the business, such as receptionists, are the figureheads for the business in general and so their appearance becomes vital.

However, it can be difficult for small firms to discuss, let alone impose, a dress code on members of staff who have got used to dressing casually or provocatively. One sensitive way of dealing with this issue is to hold a firm-wide seminar or lunch meeting on the subject of Appropriate Work Clothing using one of the many online guides to dressing for success. Divide the company on gender lines for this event and offer some light-hearted fun as well as serious exploration of what counts as professionally appropriate clothing.

You can, for example, invest in some clothing props: these could be anything from fridge magnets of famous figures with a range of magnetic outfits through to paper cut-out dressing up dolls, right up to shop window dummies and cheap clothing in the form of second-hand or discount clothing. These can be used during the session to create the most and least appropriate outfits for various situations: work, barbecue, going to the theatre etc – this stops it feeling like a lecture and gives people an idea of how to put an outfit together: not a skill that everybody possesses!  If you really want to invest in your staff, you can even get an image consultant to come in and suggest the best colours for each member of the team to wear.

Once the seminar has taken place, you can have one-to-one conversations with any team member who is sloppy or overly sexy in their dress habits, confident that you can hold a conversation on professional grounds without it being seen as a judgement on personal style.

Many people are finding the new focus on Halloween in the UK quite a struggle. Many of us do not naturally dress up and parade around, and we find the whole focus on costumes and sweeties (or candy, as the Americans would say) a bit like the worst kind of childhood party.

This isn’t the way to think about the day – by changing your mindset you can see it as a chance to boost skills, build team spirit and enjoy a completely different way of being involved in the workplace.

• Begin by making sure your costume is appropriate and allows you to work in comfort. Anything too provocative or topical may offend or upset others, so stick to a traditional costume or focus on something low-key like dressing as a cowboy, chef or vampire might help you get into the spirit. If you really can’t bear to dress up, then why not offer to photograph everybody else? That allows you to have a role and to take part in the fun without having to wear something silly.
• Take part in making plans – organise a committee of people who want to celebrate Halloween and ensure that all departments or teams are involved so that no one group.
• Plan the whole day – it’s too easy to spend ten minutes having fun and then the rest of the day feeling like a complete fool because nothing’s going on. Organise a little something for every hour of the work day, whether it’s putting photos of people in costume on the intranet and getting others to vote on who’s most scary, or a limerick competition with first lines based on famous horror stories, or a quick tour of the offices with some Halloween sweets for everybody.
• Charity fundraising can be a part of your day: either ‘fine’ people who haven’t dressed up, or charge those who have a small fee to have their photographs taken with some props you’ve purchased for the day, like a plastic skull and some black candles. Organise for somebody to tell fortunes (bad ones, of course!) and set a small charge for this with the money going to charity.

While a lot of employers are now allowing staff to dress up for Halloween as part of charitable activity, some have managed to turn the fun and fundraising into a workplace team booster too. As an example, one large company in Brighton limits the amount people can spend to create their costumes (and receipts must be produced) and every department competes to win a £500 donation to the charity of the department’s choice. A call centre in the north of England has a different approach: teams are each given a theme and have to come up with the imaginative and entirely recycled costumes on that theme.

If you would like to create Halloween costumes at home, whether for family or work fun, here are a few ideas:

Tourist
Find an old Hawaiian shirt or loud T-shirt and team it with some baggy long shorts, old sandals and thick socks. Wear silly sunglasses and carry a camera, map and translation book. Get people to take your photo in front of random things like pillar boxes and speak slowly and loudly.

Timekeeper
This costume literally costs pennies. Buy white foundation and a black eyeliner. Pull back your hair, paint your face white and draw Roman numerals like a clock face – then draw the hands originating from your nose (you may need help with the numerals, it’s difficult to draw them backwards in a mirror). Wear a black T-shirt and leggings.

Sweet Treat
Many offices have large clear rubbish bags. Grab one and cut arm and leg holes, keeping them on the small side. Then either buy balloons or a bag of small bright plastic balls (pound shops usually have these) and blow up the balloons until they are barely inflated. Write an M on each one to look like M&Ms. If you prefer a British sweet, small boxes can be painted white with a middle layer of black, black and pink or black and orange to look like Liquorice Allsorts. Put the sweets in the bag and sellotape it to your shoulders. Be careful when sitting down!

Siamese Twins
If you have a friend or colleague you can really bear to spend Halloween with, this costume always earns giggles. Buy two large or extra-large men’s T-shirts and cut the right side and sleeve away from one and the left sleeve from the other and then sow together so you have one shirt with two armholes and two necks. Wriggle in and prepare for fun!

The Accrington Stanley team have demonstrated their support for the East Lancashire Hospice by wearing specially printed T-shirts for their team warm up each Saturday.

The T-shirts are designed to help raise awareness about the services the hospice offers as well as raising money for it. Supporters are encouraged to contribute to the running costs of the Hospice during a collection held before the match. The season-long partnership will have events most weeks to raise funds for the hospice.

Over in Coventry, shoppers were surprised by office workers dressed as animals. The ‘beasts’ who work in Homeless Internationals office usually wear office attire but for one day they put on animal costumes and travelled the city centre to raise funds for the charity’s slum dweller programmes in Africa and Asia. Two of the staff even chose to wear their costumes on their cycle to work, rather than donning their usual casual clothing.

November is a great time to organise a clothing based charity event at work, as it coincides with Halloween. Many employers are now offering the chance to wear fancy dress for the day as a way of building team spirit in the office or factory along with giving something back to the local community or a nominated charity.

Apparently, British parents are going to spend nearly £7 billion on looking after and entertaining their children this summer. This breaks down to around £110 per child, per week, for the six week summer break.

A third of parents who responded to a survey on this subject said the costs were impossible to afford and one in ten relied on family members to provide free child care.  Nearly two-thirds of parents are expecting to use discounts and vouchers alongside free activities like museums just to keep the kids busy.

Amusing children

Children are rarely amusing, and difficult to amuse, when the novelty of a long holiday has worn off. There can be few things more annoying than a bored child so preparing some plan B activities can be essential to family harmony:

Old clothes

Using adult clothing as dress up is something that children like to pretend they have grown out of around the age of five or six. But a twist on this theme can keep them happy for hours. List famous characters: Napoleon, Hermione Granger, Dr Who, Boudicca, Eminem, Lady GaGa in sealed envelopes and put old clothes in a huge hamper. Let each child pick an envelope and then, when they all know who they are ‘playing’ go through the hamper and make costumes. They have to stay in character for a preset time, speaking and acting like the name they picked and the winner gets to decide what to have for dinner.

Old paint

If you can bear it, give the children the inside of the garage, leftover paint and brushes. Designing and painting a mural can keep children amused for days, especially if the weather is bad. Make sure they wear suitable protective clothes though.

Work and Family

Employers can help by:

•    Researching the options available locally: a notice-board near the kettle can help parents identify opportunities to amuse their children and earn a little sanity for themselves.
•    Offering networking opportunities: allowing parents to share childcare ideas and even bulk-buy solutions such as a coach trip with qualified childcare workers as group leaders.
•    Providing a work-based solution such as a short-term crèche in the workplace for one week of the summer holidays – usually the first – so parents can feel sure they have childcare cover in the first few days and then have time to sort out other options: this can be really valuable for parents who are dealing with the first summer holiday.
•    Ensuring they have a plan to learn from each year’s experiences with holidays: for small businesses in particular it can be the case that all employees have children of a similar age and so there are new things to learn every year. If summer holidays don’t go well this year, make sure the same mistakes are never made again. Kids never forget a bad summer but businesses may not survive one!

Hilary Devey is the new female dragon in the Dragons’ Den and she’s launched into fire-breathing already by claiming that ‘Women want children, women crave the family life and you can’t ever have it all. Men can, women can’t’ in an interview she gave to the Telegraph newspaper.

While that’s a personal decision, every business has to ensure that women aren’t sacrificed to business imperatives, because it damages the organisation and may even lead to legal challenges.

Devey says her family may well have suffered through her determination, but both legislation and business logic dictate that making career progression difficult for women is bad business sense.

Adapting the workplace

Women with children or elderly relatives for whom they are primary carers need different work structures. This can actually add depth and value to a business: in Norway many women pool their resources, bringing elderly relatives to each other’s houses and ‘parent-sitting’ as part of job-share arrangements. This means that they become very loyal employees as they don’t wish to give up such mutually satisfying work-life arrangements. In parts of South East Asia, lunch rooms are turned over to women in the afternoons so they can feed babies and help children with homework before returning to their desks to work an extra hour in the evening to make up for their family time. And in Africa, many women who have to leave the formal workplace to care for children set up ancillary businesses to keep in touch with their old workmates. This can range from cleaning the clothing of their former bosses to making snacks that they sell to their former colleagues.

In the UK, the request for flexible working is a right that employers have to treat seriously but perhaps looking at the entrepreneurial instincts of women in the workplace would help us have more female dragons!

Oceanair International’s staff came up with a brilliant way to help the British Red Cross, and the people who travel on their flights.  They’ve agreed to store, sort and send on to the charity the unwanted possessions of emigrants. Many of Oceanair’s clients have piles of household goods and clothing that they don’t want or need and yet don’t want to throw away when moving abroad.

The unwanted items, ranging from clothes to children’s toys to kitchen equipment are often in very good condition and the charity is able to sell them to raise funds for projects. So far more than £4,000 has been produced by selling the items in the charity’s shops, allowing vulnerable people in crisis in the UK and overseas to be helped in their most difficult experiences.

The ten lorry loads of material that have been transferred from Oceanair’s terminal to the charity’s shops have been pretty varied – including three pianos!

Many people entering the workplace for the first time after school or college, or returning to work after a break, are finding it difficult to master buying and wearing a work wardrobe. It’s particularly tough when you have a limited budget, if, say you’re in your first job and juggling student debt and the need to pay for food, rent and other unavoidable bills.

Larger firms are giving advice and even seminars to new staff to help them through the first few difficult months but if you don’t work for a company that’s going to train you to buy the right gear, here are some tips to help.

•    Try to develop a sense of your new workplace before making an investment in workwear.  You can do this by wandering past the building at lunchtime and seeing what people are wearing as they come out, or by Googling a big firm on the internet to see what the people in news stories and on the company website pages are wearing. That stops you buying garments that are too casual, like vests for the office, or too formal, like shirts for the building site, and that are therefore never worn.
•    Get a friend to come and help you sort your current clothing out before you buy, often a fresh pair of eyes can show you how to use items you’ve barely or never worn, or shows you could sell barely worn and unwanted garments to help fund your new purchases.
•    When buying casual, check the washing labels as it can be annoying to have to use special washing machine programmes or even hand-wash work clothing.
•    Set and budget and buy online. Online retailers often provide discounts for multiple purchases so, for example, you can buy six polo-shirts and get one free, or get free delivery which allows you to buy another shirt! They don’t do that on the high street.

It’s actually called Team Green Britain Bike Week, and in 2011 it runs from 18th – 26th June. It’s the UK’s largest cycling event with nearly half a million people taking part in 2010 and the idea is to get more people cycling, more often. Cyclists are fitter and generally happier than the average commuter – and they have less days off work!

If your company or organisation wants to take part in Team Green Britain Bike Week Here are a few tips:

1.    Give your employees or team a chance to check their bike is in good working order, if not, have details of local bike repair firms handy.
2.    Think about providing space for bikes at the workplace – and maybe offering locks for sale along with other accessories such as helmets, gloves, lights, puncture kits and so on.
3.    Set up a commute club, offering people a free energy drink if they cycle to work.
4.    Have a fashion show with a local store or fitness centre, showing all the fantastic clothing that can be cycled in and still look good, such as sleeveless fleeces and poly-cotton mix polo-shirts.
5.    Set up a bike slalom in the car park and post You Tube videos of cyclists trying for the fastest run!