Many HR experts are highlighting the need to make Christmas events casual and low-key or risk putting pressure on staff who feel compelled to buy clothes or gifts to be able to take part in the workplace Christmas experience.

On the other hand, businesses need to show that they appreciate the hard work and sacrifices of employees and the contribution their hard work has made to surviving the global economic crisis.

Tailoring your party to the size of your business is important. It’s a good idea to ask people what kind of party they would like, and to appoint a member of the staff team to receive their suggestions, as it’s quite difficult for employees to make suggestions to the CEO or some other high-powered individual.

Ideas that are being implemented by a lot of organisations this year include:

•    Bowling parties with teams being given printed ‘team shirts’ in which to bowl.
•    Go-karting or mini-golf tournaments or a treasure hunt around a local place of interest (get permission if you are using a building or location)
•    A chocolate making or pizza building party – especially for those firms where many employees have children as this allows families to be invited along.

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.

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.

Ian Murray, MP for Edinburgh South, is hosting a Wear It Pink day on 28 October. He’s opted for a baby pink tank top over a pink striped shirt as his wardrobe choice and he’s hoping  schools, colleges and businesses across the UK will choose to ‘wear it pink’ too, with each individual who does, donating £2 to breast cancer research. Around 48,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed annually in the UK, with around 340 men being discovered to have the cancer.

Clothing for Charity days, as they are called in the voluntary sector, are becoming increasingly popular with schools and large businesses and are now starting to feature in small business units too. The idea, whether it’s to dress down in a formal business (solicitors wearing shorts and jeans) or dress up in a casual one (call centre staff coming to work in ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ attire, is to have fun and to raise funds for a nominated charity. Some organisations do this once a month, usually on a Dress Down Friday when staff are allowed to wear more casual clothing if they pay a small ‘fee’ that goes to fund the charity’s work. Others make it an annual event like school children being allowed to wear red to school on Red Nose Day.

It can be a great team-building idea, but it’s important to ensure that your dress code matches the aims of the charity or your good idea can backfire with bad public relations, as happened in 2008 to a major fundraising evening.

The two biggest issues that cause problems for employees and employers over the summer: heat and holidays!

The problem with heat is often an intermittent one, especially in the UK, which can make it difficult for employers to manage soaring temperatures for just a few days, such as in the recent heatwave. However when temperatures become uncomfortably high, and there is no set maximum, employers should consider improving conditions by:

•    Insulating heated areas such as pipes
•    Providing portable air-cooling systems
•    Ensuring window shading is effective
•    Offering fans and other air circulation
•    Relaxing clothing rules to ensure people can dress sensibly to take account of heat while still remaining safe
•    Moving work-stations and benches further from heat sources or rotating work roles so nobody spends all day subject to radiant heat.
In addition, those working outside should be offered hats and water breaks to ensure they don’t develop heat- or sun-stroke.
Holidays are often a bone of contention too. In 2010 ACAS took more than 100,000 calls about holidays and the working time arrangements. The most common questions include:

Can flexible working requests be made just to cover just the school holidays?

The answer is no, any request for flexible working, if agreed, creates a new work pattern with the employee who has made the request and that is a permanent change to their employment contract. However, many employers make other, informal, arrangements temporary or interim changes to work patterns to ensure that they can cover the businesses needs in the summer holidays and to allow them to treat all employees fairly.

Can employee legally take time off if their childminding arrangements break down during the summer?

Yes, employees have a legal right to ‘reasonable time off for dependants’- this means giving them time off to resolve family emergencies – usually this is unpaid and generally lasts around one or two days (or whatever you consider reasonable in the individual’s circumstances) giving time to put alternative arrangements in place. It is acceptable for the employer to suggest that the employee uses annual or special leave for this purpose and an employer can consider, but is not bound, to offer special leave with pay.

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.

The Institute of Fundraising’s chair, Mark Astarita, has made a forthright challenge to the value of Payroll Giving. He told the media some weeks ago that he thought, ‘the only people who really love [payroll giving] are those who make loads of money from managing the transactions.’ It’s a controversial viewpoint and one that many major charities would be wary of supporting, but for smaller firms it’s true that the cost of payroll giving can make it a burden.

The alternatives to payroll giving have different kinds of costs: the time taken to organise fundraising events like ‘dress down Fridays’ or corporate events, the cost of persuading people to pay up for sponsored activities and the difficulties of balancing the demands of the workplace with the desire to give back to society.

There can be simple ways to reduce the costs of workplace giving. One idea is to have team based activities with the winning team (either the one that raises most money or the one that donates the most time) being given a special printed T-shirt to wear for the day and rewarded with certificates and employee recognition in newsletters and on websites. This can seem a little too much like being given gold stars at school, particularly for undemonstrative British firms, so an alternative is to offer a volunteer bank where people can ‘bank’ the hours they spend working for a particular charity of their choice. When they reach an agreed level they receive back a dividend of Time Off In Lieu to give to the charity – in other words, their employer pays for them to have a day off, as long as they spend that day doing voluntary work.

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!

The Harris tweed jacket worn by Matt Smith as the current Doctor Who has caused a local storm in the Hebrides – the original tweed design was ‘swapped’ for a similar jacket that is made partly from an acrylic fibre.

The handwoven tweed was apparently not ‘warm enough’ for outdoor filming and the new jacket, which is an exact copy of the 1960s original, is both warmer and lighter.  But the weavers who make Harris tweed are deeply unhappy about this slur to their product and also somewhat confused that the copy is more expensive than the hand-made original! A replica of the replica will be available for fans to buy from October 2011, and to the complete confusion of the Harris tweed industry, it will cost £360. A genuine Harris tweed will cost … £250.

But there’s a wider question about what can be worn in the workplace. Inappropriate clothing causes accidents, which can sometimes be serious, and suitably designed and made clothing doesn’t just prevent problems, it can make the working day easier and more enjoyable.

Acrylic mixes may not be popular with the tweed industry but in school uniforms, for example, they provide a crease-resistant, stain-rejecting fabric that allows parents to spend less time washing and ironing and more time supervising homework and having fun with the kids!

In a recent study published by researchers at Tilburg University in Holland, it emerged that a highly recognisable designer brand like Lacoste or Yves St Laurent has a positive effect on employers, co-workers and friends, while logos for cheap brands don’t have the same positive effect. So far, research hasn’t shown whether cheap brands actually harm one’s prospects.

Behavioural scientists used photographs to examine peoples’ responses to logos. It was discovered that a high end brand logo, prominently displayed, could convince the viewer that the wearer in the photograph was richer or more influential.

And in real life, the same result held true. Two teams were sent out to raise money for charity – one team wore ordinary polo shirts, the other bore the Lacoste brand. By the end of the evening, the Lacoste team had collected slightly more money than the other one. Over a year, the researchers say, they would have raised enough money to pay for 25 heart transplants just by wearing the branded tops. Of course, that doesn’t take into account the cost of providing charity volunteers with top-end clothing!

The research didn’t explore any of the fake logos that mimic the famous brands, but they plan a follow up study which may include that question.