Dress for success whether in your home office or elsewhere at work.

Do Your Clothes Interfere with Your Job?

This is a guest post by Shawnee Bowlin, one of the featured writers on our work from home network.

If you spend more time worrying about your comfort during the day than your work projects, maybe it’s time you did something about your clothing. Uncomfortable clothing can distract from your ability to concentrate.

Dressing for success means more than looking respectable. It also means you must be comfortable with your choice of clothing. Squirming because of ill-fitting clothes will take away from your ability to get complete attention from other co-workers or from your superiors. Tight clothing that makes you feel restricted in movement can create body movements of which you may not be fully aware. How can anyone possibly take you serious when you can’t hold your body still while you speak to them? They may respond in a distracted manner and get odd looks on their faces from trying to remain polite.

Wearing inappropriate clothing may also make you more self-conscious. Trying a new look is a great idea if it is first sampled before you must return to work. The clothing that makes you feel like you must constantly pay attention to how you move will take away from job performance.

Clothing that is too loose will cause you to constantly readjust the way it fits. It can also get hung up at inopportune moments, such as in drawers or on chair arms and on door handles. If your sleeves drag across the items on your desk, you could knock over a bottle of liquid paper and slide your material across that important copy you absolutely must keep clean of any defects.

If you think that dressing for success only applies to those lucky souls who have jobs outside the home, you could be wrong. It has been said that work environment influences ability to be productive. Your choice of clothing can produce the same negative impact. Even if you work from home, you may need to dress like a winner to perform like one. While it may be true that you prefer the home office job over the outside types because of the relaxed dress code, your subconscious may pick up on your sloppy clothing choices and leak negative influence into your work.

Some styles and colors belong on that romantic date, but certainly not in the office setting. If you are trying to catch the eye of someone at work, it could be to your benefit to keep a tight rein on your choice of clothing. Trying too hard can just as well turn off the attraction as turn it on.

Do you go to work with stains on your shirt from your toddler’s morning breakfast? This could be the reason your supervisor passed over your name at promotion time. Do you wear wrinkled clothing because of failure to plan your wardrobe for work? This could be the reason the rest of the office crew avoided asking you to join them for lunch.

Even if you are successful in a home business, your image to others could make or break an important business deal should you ever need to meet someone in person. If your business is doing less than it could, perhaps it’s the careless profile picture you posted online while wearing your flannel pajamas? You may be surprised at the outcome of your performance, too, if you take your home office image more seriously.

You must respect yourself for others to respect you. Keep your clothes from interfering with your job. Dress for success whether in your home office or elsewhere at work.