Those without Makeup Need Not Apply

Recently my coworker Tam asked me if I had heard about the clerk who got fired from Harrods, the high-end department store in London. Harrods, Tam explained, has a strict dress code that requires female clerks to wear makeup. The woman refused and was let go.

I googled to learn more and found this article  on Inc. magazine’s website. It turns out the clerk, Melanie Stark, wasn’t actually fired but instead resigned. She says that though she had worked several incident-free years at the store without lipstick, blush, or eyeliner, last year managers began pressuring her to start making herself up. She refused to apply and, she says, started paying the consequences. Managers sent her home, hid her in the stockroom, and transferred her. Finally she quit, “exhausted, stressed, and upset.”

For its part, Harrods claims that employees receive the strict dress code (all 13 pages’ worth) before they sign on, and that though managers did talk to Stark about her appearance and lack of adherence to the code, she was the one who chose to end her employment, not Harrods. Regardless, the incident has raised eyebrows worldwide.

At FlashPoint we work with clients to develop policies, many of which pertain to employee behavior and end up in the handbook. The company dress code is often one of the stickiest areas, especially when it comes to professional or service-oriented environments, where the organization needs to portray a certain image to customers. It’s often hard to define just exactly what the “image” is, and if the company keeps things too general, employees often end up confused. Go to the other extreme, and the company can run into situations like the one at Harrods.

In this case, it appears that Harrods took a sensible approach, at least from an HR perspective. The company developed a very detailed dress code policy and gave it to employees up front so they knew what they were agreeing to. When Stark didn’t follow the policy, managers discussed it with her (though it seems they didn’t do so immediately, which they should have done; it might have prevented the situation from escalating). When she continued to shun makeup, they pulled her from the floor and assigned her other duties. For the most part, it appears they consistently played things by the book.

Yet something about this still seems wrong—that Harrods was being boorish. The reason, I suppose, lies in the 13-page dress code itself, and the fact that the department store tells women that they must paint their faces in order to be attractive and presentable to customers. While many people who shop at Harrods no doubt agree, others surely find this to be offensive (and even discriminatory) in the 21st century.

It is the right and responsibility of a business to know its customers and provide them with the service they want and expect—and this includes regulating how employees dress. But as society’s standards change, companies must always reassess and update their policies to stay current. Was Harrods being reasonable in this case? Or was it trying to force an employee to fit into an old-fashioned sense of beauty?

We know you have thoughts, so please share.

George Hanlin is a consultant at FlashPoint.

Image: Louisa Stokes