Formal Friday Follies
December 13th, 2006 | 12:43 pm
Several months back, I think it was a month or two after we expanded into additional space last January which would have marked the fourth expansion of our company in less than four years, Geof and I decided that while we did have informal, casual Fridays on which we allowed employees to wear blue jeans, we were kind of getting a little irritated with the sight of flip-flops with blue jeans. So, we rounded up all the troops and had a little conversation. We stated that now we were expanding again and continuing to grow the business, we didn"t want to go all the way in the other direction of becoming extremely corporate.
Having said that, however, we did think we needed to maintain a certain basic standard, one that did NOT include the sight of male toes at the bottom of their jeans. We promptly instituted close-toed shoes as a guy requirement in our offices going forward. At the time, Tony and one of our other loan officers decided they would rebel against this and – rebelling against authority – decided to institute what has now been called “Formal Friday.” They have probably maintained this for; I kid you not, eight months straight. Every single Friday, Tony and now Sean, Adam and Aaron all appear and work the entire day in suits and ties. Now, Geof and I will be the first to admit they all look extremely dapper, and if this is their way of getting back at us, then they can get back at us all they want. We have no problem with employees dressing up rather than down. Having said that, it"s quite ironic that it happens on every Friday, a day where we"re more casual and everyone else seems to be more casual.
But these guys seem to be, I guess, swimming against the tide and deciding they want to keep honoring Formal Friday. There have been some spin-offs from this as well, which predominantly have come from me as a way to sort of “mock” their rebellious Formal Friday ways. One has been a “Football Friday,” and when I say football, I usually am referring to soccer, not American football. So as somebody who collects lots of soccer jerseys, I and a couple of the other guys have appeared in our jeans and our soccer jerseys on Football Friday (the Orlando Business Journal just did a photo-shoot on this for their December issue of their bi-monthly Executive Living Magazine). We"re also thinking about instituting “Creative T-Shirt Friday” at some point, but we haven"t quite put that into practice yet — just to mix it up a little bit. But it"s a uniqueness in our corporate culture, where we have a group of underwriters who are clearly attempting to rebel against us, and we"re enjoying the rebellion, They continue to look good on Fridays, be defiant, and it probably “polishes” our image.
We"ve actually gotten quite a kick out of it – when I occasionally go to lunch with these guys on a Friday, I"m usually in my golf shirt and jeans and they"re all in suits (yes, they actually wear their suit jackets all day long). At restaurants, they"ve actually pretended to be interviewing me . . . usually the wait staff will bring the bill and try to hand it to one of them. Much to the waiter or waitress" shock, they then properly hand it to me.
Recently, Geof, Adam, and I attended the Golden Corral Franchise & Operating Partners Convention in Chicago. As you can see from the pictures, I think we may have one-upped our Formal Friday guys and set the bar a little higher with our “Black-Tie” Friday.
