Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2012. The figures date from around 2012, and attitudes to tattoos and piercings at work have likely changed since.
The first thought on this subject is: it depends on the job. In jobs that come with their own uniform, your style of dress hardly matters, but daily grooming becomes crucial.
For people whose work involves dealing with others, their image speaks for them, and if they work in sales, part of their success will depend on how they look.
Yet if we get all dressed up for our free time, why not put the same effort into our working life?
After all, we spend a large part of each day (at least a third) and of our lives working: in good circumstances, close to 40 years, 50% of our existence. For 83% of people, image at work matters, while only 13% think professional ability counts for more than the image that goes with it.
Image by occupation
Whatever the job, you work with colleagues, and they deserve our respect. Our image therefore conveys respect and team spirit toward others. It is a way of getting closer to the team and to the people we share a large part of every day with.
Employers read personal traits into their employees’ image. Someone who doesn’t spend enough time on their personal appearance can hardly be orderly, attentive to detail and meticulous. If their image isn’t detailed, meticulous and orderly, their work is unlikely to be either.
If your job puts you in front of the public, the question of trust or indifference becomes even sharper. The public are people, and as such they are selective. They will approach the employees whose image inspires the most confidence. That is all they have to go on: they don’t know those employees, and, being selective like any human being, they choose the ones whose image is closest to their own.
If you work in sales, it’s a given from the start that your image shouldn’t just be neat but impeccable. Customers are going to trust the salesperson with their most precious asset, their money, and those who project a poor image are considered not to inspire confidence.
Your image speaks for you
Your image says something about your lifestyle: modern if you wear the latest fashions; classic if, on the contrary, you dress in a classic cut; extremely careful if you look after every last detail of your clothes.
If the face is said to be the mirror of the soul, image is an X-ray of the individual. In one context or another, it makes certain individual behaviors explicit (active, youthful, individualistic, collective) based solely on the image projected.
This image becomes vital if you make a living from it. A TV presenter who wants to come across as serious can’t look casual. A comedian whose job is to entertain won’t come across as stimulating and lively if they walk on stage looking elegant and sophisticated. If we want to reach young people, the image has to be youthful, and so on through a long list of examples.
Decorated bodies
An estimated 85% of Spaniards have no “decorative” elements on their bodies. Even so, more than half think that piercings or tattoos do affect results in various jobs. What’s more, 34% see them as conveying negative values about the person, and only ten in every hundred consider them harmless to job performance.
Workers with tattoos or piercings have no problem at all in the 45% of companies that have no dress code for their jobs and no rules on the matter.
Featured image: Sven Krolczik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
