employee came to work with her butt cheeks exposed
A reader writes:
I work in a company with a lot of young employees and a completely optional hybrid working policy. We have an office, but they no longer enforce any in-office mandates. I am basically a middle manager, and there’s no consistent presence of senior leadership in person. The people who come into the office the most are a cohort of junior-level employees right out of college who seem to enjoy the camaraderie of the in-office life.
Of this cohort, last week there was one worker in her early 20’s who wore a skirt so short that I could see her butt cheeks. It was shocking, and I almost wondered if her skirt was folded up or if she didn’t realize. It didn’t get corrected all day, and she has at least five peers/friends in the office who could have mentioned it, so I assume it was intentional.
Our dress code is explicitly casual, but it also says to take caution with revealing attire. In my opinion, and I think any reasonable person’s, the skirt is in no way appropriate for any work environment. How would you go about approaching this, though? She’s not in my management chain, and her manager does not regularly come into the office. While I don’t have power over her, I fear my talking to her could be taken as a formal or official reprimand. While the attire is distracting, I more want her to know for her own professional career that this is not appropriate.
Do you have any relationship with her boss? Ideally you’d give that person a heads-up, paired with a suggestion that they give their team clearer guidance on the dress code.
It might seem like a dress code that explicitly prohibits revealing attire should be clear enough, but in reality people can have very different understandings of what that means, particularly recent grads who are new to the work world. It’s far better for dress codes to be specific about exactly what they mean, rather than assuming everyone will have the same implicitly understood frame of reference. You might think, How could someone not know visible butt cheeks aren’t okay? But here’s someone who didn’t, which is evidence that it’s not universally understood … or, more likely, she didn’t realize how revealing the skirt actually was.
Regardless, if a manager can see that people on their team are out of sync with their expectations, they need to issue their own clearer guidance about what is and isn’t okay.
But when managers and senior leadership are all off off-site, the reality is that they might not know about problems that are occurring on-site — whether it’s visible butt cheeks, someone setting toilet paper in fire in the bathroom, interns tattooing each other in the conference room, a thriving sex club on the premises, or something more mundane, like people routinely making so much noise that others can’t focus — and they need to manage in a way that accounts for that. That can mean making sure they’re checking with their team members often enough (and being approachable enough) that they’ll hear about problems, or it can mean checking in with other teams who have people on-site, or at least building relationships with those teams’ managers to establish channels for hearing about stuff that they’re not seeing firsthand.
So I’d rather you give her boss a heads-up and let them decide if/how to address it rather than feeling you have to take it on yourself, unless you’re in a role that makes this squarely your business or unless you have enough of a relationship with the employee that you can do it in a mentoring type way.
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