In the USA in particular, dressing for work is a political and social minefield. Increasingly this is becoming true in the UK too. It’s important to look right but also to feel right, and this is a constant debate between HR departments and others.

In many countries there are no legal restrictions on clothing, but this is not universally true. Some countries have religious and cultural clothing restrictions which are enforceable in public. In terms of employment, no dress code can be discriminatory – this means that an enforceable dress code, as opposed to guidelines, must be acceptable to all ages, genders, religions etc.

It’s notable that professional business attire has become more popular with both employers and customers – while a casual dress culture seemed to be developing right up to the millennium, it’s become quite common for a more restrictive dress code to be enacted by employers since then.

Many educational organisations are reinstating guidance on dress codes for students and alumni – once again the lead is being taken by the US but many British universities now have a support for those attending interviews that includes a clothing consultation.

It’s a safe bet that neutral colours, natural fabrics and formal fashion will continue to be the requirements for interview clothing in the decade ahead, but for men, polo-shirts have slipped under the radar and become the ideal garment for an ‘informal interview’ eg a breakfast meeting or a group interview, while for women, a long sleeved T-shirt, skirt and boots are considered to be the same dress for success uniform for the informal interview.

For many, and not just women of a certain age, winter offices can be a problem. Those whose metabolisms are fast will often find that the temperature of a winter office is kept uncomfortably warm and that they would be quite happy wearing their summer clothing in the depths of winter! But that isn’t always appropriate to the season and what looks okay when everybody is dressing for warmer weather can seem inappropriately casual when others are well wrapped up in polo-necked jumpers and cosy fleeces.

The answer is simple: clothing either insulates or refreshes, so choosing clothing that refreshes allows people to look as if they are in business attire but still feel comfortably cool.

Colours are important. You can wear sleeveless or short sleeved T-shirts that will look thicker and heavier if they are in winter colours like purple, dark green, red or mustard. Pop them under a lightweight shirt or silk cardigan and it will look as if you are layering your clothing like everybody else but actually you’ll be ventilating your arms by only having one thin layer between your skin and the air.

Avoid polo necks and turtle necks and all acrylic clothing. Stick to cotton or poly-cotton polo-shirts, and don’t button the neckline to allow maximum exposure of the torso (which sets the core body temperature) to the air. The more we cover up the chest and neck the hotter we feel.

For both men and women, crisp cotton shirts worn loose if you’re a man or belted low on the hip for women, are a good alternative to jumpers – women can pop a camisole top under the shirt and wear it largely unbuttoned and it looks like an extra layer but is in fact as cool as can be.

Scarves can be worn unwrapped. If everybody else is knotting a scarf around their neck, just lay yours under the collar of your shirt. It reduces the heat factor by more than 40% but keeps you looking like everybody else.

Wear a sleeveless fleece instead of a jacket – it looks appropriate to the weather but is much cooler than a sleeved jacket.

Casual clothes in technical fibres will wick away sweat in a really overheated environment so look out for sporting clothing that you can wear under smarter shirts.

According to Regus, who provide office services, more than half the working population whose jobs are desk-based will be at work, or will check their emails and do home-based work over the Christmas break.

Around a third claimed that this was going to cause ‘serious upset’ for family, friends or partners, or had done so in the past. For small businesses the stress of the festive season is likely to be even greater.

• 5% of business owners planned to work on Christmas Day and 10% will be working on New Year’s Day too.
• Nearly 40% of business owners will be working at some point over the festive period, despite the fact that their business is officially closed.

It’s a paradox, because 40% of the office workers travelling to work think they will achieve ‘very little’ between Christmas and New Year.

Employers should learn from this survey to explore how the same technology that allows for work flexibility can damage holidays and family life. Tiredness and family rows are unlikely to contribute to business success and trying to create proper home working systems so people can work from home in the night-wear if they want to, or, as a minimum, ensuring that staff working unusual hours are able to dress in casual clothing, take regular breaks and benefit in some way from their efforts. Some firms offer an in-office ten minute head and shoulder massage to any staff working the Christmas period and others provide a New You buffet of healthy foods so that workers can snack on fruit, nuts and salads as they work. It all contributes to a sense of worth and stops stressed, overfed and under-exercised individuals making workplace mistakes through tiredness, burn-out or simple resentment.

It’s a truism that you give a kid an expensive gift and they spend all their time playing with the box it came in, but there’s a certain amount of reality to that scenario that clever parents can recognise. The Christmas holidays can be stressful – while everybody’s talking about peace and goodwill, children have a lot of energy that they can’t easily expend in bad weather.

Long nights and short days limit the amount of time that can be spent outside, even with good winter clothing, so
it’s important to find ways to release the tension, both positive and negative.

1. Allow children to help with the preparations such as making gift tags for this year’s presents from last year’s Christmas cards. This teaches them how to recycle resources, and allows them to get creative with scissors, ribbon and glitter without it being as unmanageable as wrapping a present which can lead to tears and frustration when it doesn’t look ‘perfect. It’s also a good way to get them thinking about what suits somebody’s personality, and what colours go with which other colours, so that they start to develop a sense of aesthetics which will be valuable as they grow up to choose presents such as clothing for other people. Make sure they wear an apron and you’ve put down paper to prevent too much mess!
2. Invite a friend from school to come to your house and get active – suggest they make a Christmas sleigh and the presents to go in it from old boxes and plastic containers – this gives them something to do that is demanding yet fun and uses up a lot of energy.
3. Allow children to make a mess – dress them in old T-shirts or outgrown school uniform, or even dad’s old shirts so that they can get gloriously mucky and then let them loose with salt dough and paint to model Christmas Tree decorations.

Salt Dough Recipe

500 grams plain white flour
250 grams salt
500 ml cold water

Method

Mix the flour and the salt together and then stir in the water. Knead the dough together only adding a small amount more water, if necessary, to make a smooth dough. Knead for ten minutes so it becomes soft and pliable. Store tightly wrapped in a plastic bag in an airtight container and it will keep for a week. When the children have made their decorations, use the end of a plastic straw to make hanging holes in each decoration before baking. Cook for around four hours on 100 c or gas ¼ and leave to cool naturally. The dough can then be painted, glued, and/or varnished.

Party Planning

if you’re charged with organising an office party, ensure that all staff are invited, to avoid potential discrimination claims: this means choosing a venue and entertainments that will suit people of non-Christian faiths or no faith and that they should have the choice to opt out if they feel uncomfortable for any reason – and if partners of employees are invited, make sure you include same-sex partners.

Pacing and getting home

If you’re organising or attending a work’s Christmas party, remember that alcohol can cause more than merriment: and that you can lose a job through your behaviour if you drink too much during a work event. Employers need to be aware that if they contribute to an employee’s drunkenness by running an open tab at the bar and or providing booze at the dinner table, and then need to discipline that employee for their behaviour they could actually be considered to have contributed to the problem, and might find themselves facing an Industrial Tribunal. And remember that employers who let staff drive when they are under the influence may be legally liable too – a company has a duty of care to staff which includes ensuring people have sensible plans for getting home when alcohol is involved.

Dressing up

If you have a workplace party, make sure that the Christmas tree and decorations don’t present risks to health and safety – and when people dress up for Christmas events in the workplace it can be a risky issue too: Converse trainers instead of safety shoes, sparkly dresses instead of T-shirts and trousers and distressed denim instead of polo-shirts and chinos can all lead to accidents as clothing dips, dangles and drapes into machinery around the workplace.

Traditions

Watch out for habits and customs. It’s not just mistletoe that can lead to misunderstandings: when employees have been used to getting a Christmas bonus or days off, and the company has to change the set up for some reason, it can lead to discontent: promises made verbally can be considered binding in law, so ensure managers aren’t mistakenly telling staff that ‘traditional’ benefits will continue unless that’s actually the case.

When schools or nurseries shut through bad weather, parents need to have a Plan B, especially if they have to combine working with childcare.  It’s a good idea to make sure you have the resources to entertain stuck at home children whilst continuing to be work, as best you can, from home. But finding the balance between amusing the kids and being an effective worker can be difficult. Here are 3 ideas to make the process easier.

Swiss Family Whoever

When the weather is bad outside, getting the kids to play survival inside is fun and even educational. Set up a tent in the living room (it can just be blankets stretched over chairs for the littlest ones, whilst older kids can use their ingenuity to build a camp from bedding and furniture) and turn off the lights. Hand out torches, and get them to conduct ‘raids’ into various rooms to get the equipment needed (food, books, phones, games consoles etc) whilst remaining silent. Back at camp they can work out how to ration the food etc for themselves. Smart kids will even set up their own missions and treasure hunts.

Winter Wonderland

Simple science can be good fun in bad weather if you take a few precautions. Ensure your children are well wrapped up in layers of outdoor clothing and that you have warm, dry garments to hand indoors. Then let them try a few experiments: examining snowflakes under a powerful magnifying glass, for example, or raindrop races down a window. Perhaps give them some equipment to try and make a wind gauge or if it’s very muddy outside, send them out to discover and identify bird and animal tracks. Even in a city you can get the kids to look at the growth of moss and lichens between paving slabs and on city trees and try to work out how the plant got there and what it survives on. Back home, write up a science journal and drink hot chocolate to reward the budding scientist.

Artistic Endeavour

Teens can be encouraged to make snowmen or snow angels if the weather is really bad, or even to paint pictures in the snow using food colouring. If it’s really atrocious outside, get them to customise their own old clothing, or yours, using fabric paint, scissors and ingenuity – then hold a fashion show!

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.

In one Louisiana hospital, from 2012, smoky clothing will be outlawed.  Employees who turn up in clothes smelling of smoke will be sent home. Exactly this policy is already in place at the hospital, in the wings that care for women and children, as these are the groups where third-hand smoke and other smoking contaminants have been shown to have the most far-reaching negative effects. But from July next year, the whole hospital (Christus St Frances Cabrini) will come under the same rule.

Because employees are not allowed to smoke at all during their shifts, the hospital will offer smoking cessation services based at the hospital on a 24 hour basis. Under the program employees were sent letters explaining that they had nearly one year to make adjustments to their lifestyle and comply with the new hospital policy.

There are concerns about the fairness of hospital administrators choosing to institute these kinds of sanctions on staff who may be working double and triple shifts regularly but there are also clear indications that employers are starting to consider how the behaviour of employees may reflect on an organisation.

Alternatives that might be considered to this kind of approach are offering staff a clothing bank where they can swap an item of work-branded clothing for a fresh one between shifts, thus allowing them to go and have a smoke if they wish, or, as is more commonly done in Japan, organising a shift bath, where a local gym or bathhouse offers all the members of the same shift the chance to take a shower and sauna or steam room before changing clothes and either going home or going back on-shift again. This can be a good solution for companies wishing to invest in employee health, as it gives staff an incentive to swim or visit the gym when they finish work. For smaller firms, organising a five-a-side football side or other team activity and providing sports clothing for those taking part can create a healthier way to encourage people to stop smoking.

A recent survey by Peninsula, the legal specialists, discovered that over 60% of British workers have had a workplace affair.

For companies this is a dangerous issue: every employer wants staff who enjoy their jobs, like their colleagues and have fun at work, but when this good workplace vibe tips over into clandestine romance, it can lead to work-based rows, colleagues breaking up and others taking sides, people leaving the workplace to avoid a former lover and even to legal action.

Part of the issue is familiarity which causes us to get to know our colleagues better than anybody else – once we reach a point where the office, factory or shared workspace becomes our world, we start to expect to meet our emotional needs within it, and colleagues easily become sources of admiration, attraction and love. The team-building part of work can also lead to romances – when we’re encouraged to bond with our workmates, it’s easy for them to start looking like life-mates too.

It’s not all bad, around half the people currently working in offices have met a partner at work, according to the Industrial Society, but on the other side, around 20% of people regret work romances enough to leave their jobs, which can be damaging ot the company.

Some organisations try to control workplace romance by setting rules about appropriate clothing and ‘fraternisation’.  This rarely works and can lead to a different form of legal problem, when people object to being restricted in their behaviour. It’s better to try and widen the pool by bringing your workforce into contact with a similar workforce nearby – shared cafeteria facilities, organising sports such as 5-a-side football, running groups at lunchtime or gardening clubs to improve an industrial estate or suite of offices can all bring your staff into contact with people in a similar situation which sparks romance.