Work from home means pajamas all day!
Are you currently working from home, and you’re reading this with your legs up on the table? What? Never? Don’t tell me you haven’t once worn a blazer with a pair of shorts or pajama pants underneath too. Well, if you haven’t, good for you. But if you do, don’t worry. We’re here to address the issue, and perhaps, at the end of this article, you’ll learn a thing or two!
As a result of the pandemic, we’re all spending far more time indoors than we normally would. Furthermore, for many office workers throughout Malaysia, working from home has become the new normal. But, working from home can seem like a foreign (novel actually) concept if you’ve never done it before. The prospect of working from our couches (sometimes beds), having endless cups of tea and singing out loud whenever we feel like it seems fantastic. That’s not even taking into account the ultimate luxury: working in your jammies all day.
Pajamas are meant for sleeping
Is this, however, the best course of action? Sure, staying in your PJs for one or two days while working from home is probably fine, but when we face the prospect of working from home for at least a couple of months, years even, shirking the responsibility of getting dressed could actually have a negative impact on our productivity. Working in our pajamas can actually impair productivity. People like the concept of working in their pyjamas, but it’s a relatively bad idea. In most people’s perceptions, pajamas and sleep are inextricably linked. Since birth, we have been taught to identify our nightwear with a state of calm for our bodies to prepare for sleep. Unfortunately for us, this has become almost too effective; whenever we put on our pajamas, we unconsciously tell our brains to sleep, which is not ideal at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning. Wearing smarter attire that reflects your familiar working environment, on the other hand, can assist you in shifting your mindset to one that is more focused on work as a consequence of the inherent associations you will have made.
Poor image, poor performance
Getting dressed in the mornings can help you feel better by enhancing your self-perception, personal confidence, and professional performance. When working from home, it’s critical to create a pleasant work atmosphere; you want to have a setting that is both inspirational and motivating, and one of the most essential aspects of this is your clothes. The appropriateness of a worker’s clothes has been demonstrated to affect their mood and performance in studies (Kwon, 1994). When people are dressed professionally, they can adopt self-perceptions related to their attire and characterize themselves using more formal adjectives such as responsible and competent; conversely, when they are dressed casually, the opposite occurs (Adomaitis and Johnson, 2005). It appears that dressing casually may result in a more casual work attitude or a feeling of more inadequate productivity. As a result, the feelings we associate with different types of clothes might subliminally impact our behaviour, causing us to behave in ways that are consistent with what would be predicted based on our wardrobe.
Your outfit should be inspirational!
Obviously, looking good in your clothes can make you feel good about yourself and, more significantly, enhance productivity, especially with all of the temptations at home. But what should these clothes look like? According to research, it is more about personal evaluations. The appropriateness of an individual’s clothes for their employment function affects their evaluations of their role-performance quality (Badola, 2010). When properly clothed, you will undoubtedly feel more responsible, competent, and educated, ultimately leading to better work results (Peluchette & Karl, 2007). Employees react in accordance with how they dress, according to Franz and Norton (2004), and employees who dress professionally act professionally.
These aren’t always objective, either. Formal attire, like formal language, denotes the absence of a relaxed or familiar context. This promotes more in-depth, insightful thinking, which is a crucial talent for many people in the workplace (Slepian, Ferber, Gold & Rutchick, 2015). It also helps to achieve a better work-life balance by separating personal roles through clothing. When working from home, wearing differently can help you embody a professional position over a non-professional one, such as parent, wife, or husband, and help you dissociate from these responsibilities (Rafaeli, Dutton, Harquail, & Mackie-Lewis, 1997).
Final Thoughts
With this in mind, working from home might be most effective and even productive when you wear something different from your everyday regular attire but yet comfortable and makes you feel good. There's no doubt that this is a terrible era for everyone, therefore it's critical to look after yourself. Suppose you need a few days in your PJs to recover and process everything that's going on in the world. In that case, that's perfectly fine and OK - but getting dressed and establishing a ‘normal’ working from home habit may be more useful than you realize.
References:
Adomaitis, A. & Johnson, K. K. P. (2005). Casual versus formal uniforms: flight attendants' self-perceptions and perceived appraisals by others. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 23 (2), pp. 88-101.
Badola, S. (2010). Are you too provocative at work? DNA: Daily News & Analysis. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/607235787?accountid=34899
Franz, T. M., & Norton, S. D. (2004). Methodological issues in research on business casual dress. Journal of American Academy of Business, 5(1-4), p. 130.
Kwon, Y. (1994). The influence of appropriateness of dress and gender on the self-perception of occupational attributes. Clothing and Textile Research Journal, 12 (3), pp. 33-39.
Peluchette, J., Karl, K. (2017). The impact of workplace attire on employee self-perceptions. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 18 (3), pp. 345-360.
Rafaeli, A., Dutton, J., Harquial, C., Mackie-Lewis, S. (1997). Navigating by attire: the use of dress by administrative employees. Academy of Management Journal, 40, pp. 19-45.Slepian, M. L., Ferber S. N., Gold, J. M., & Rutchick, A. M. (2015). The Cognitive Consequences of Formal Clothing. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(6), pp. 661-668. Retrieved from http://www.columbia.edu/~ms4992/Publications/2015_Slepian-Ferber-Gold-Rutchick_Clothing-Formality_SPPS.pdf
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