The corporate world in the U.S. is battling for talent as some sources of skilled and technical manpower, such as immigrant workers, are closing or drying up because of the tighter rules in the grant of H-1B visas. To retain and attract talent, banking giant Goldman Sachs just relaxed the Dress Code for the company’s computer engineers.
The new policy is one of the changes introduced by Elisha Wiesel, the new chief information officer of the fifth-largest U.S. bank by assets. He issued an internal memo in June that advised employees of Goldman Sach’s technology unit that they can exercise individual judgment when they should wear business attire, Reuters reported on Thursday.
Millennial tech workers
A lot of millennial tech workers prefer more casual clothing when at work rather than business attire. For them, the preferred working clothes are sneakers, jeans, and hoodies. Since more millennials are entering the workforce, their different outlook not only in work ethics but also the choice of apparel is felt in the corporate world.
Goldman Sachs is actually joining two other American banks that had introduced relaxed dress codes as financial institutions and tech companies at Silicon Valley - where Mark Zuckerberg reports for work daily in jeans and gray t-shirt – where business attire daily is no longer the norm. The relaxed dress code is just one of the perks that employees of tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, enjoy on top of better hours and other workplace perks.
Banks relax dress code
In 2016, JPMorgan Chase sent an official internal memo to its 237,000 employees that they could wear business casual attire on most occasions, Forbes reported. Barclay, since 2013, had allowed its workers to wear casual clothes on Fridays. The Goldman Sach’s new policy is expected to affect one-fourth of the bank’s 33,000 employees who are engineers.
The bank ramped up hiring of engineers since the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. The engineers developed a consumer lending platform, Marcus, which made trading more efficient and built new businesses for Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately for the remaining 24,000 plus bank staff, they still have to follow the company’s business dress code.
Since many senior managers in the corporate world are Baby Boomers, it is not surprising that a survey by OfficeTeam in 2016 found that almost one-half of senior-level managers thought their employees are dressed too casually. About one-third noticed that their young staff showed too much skin. It is also an issue recently in the U.S. Congress where female staff and reporters who wore sleeveless dress were banned from entering the House Speaker’s lobby.
