If you want to move up, don't dress down.

• Author: Falconi, Robert R.

Ten years ago, if you looked out your window in the morning and saw your neighbor dressed as if he's going camping, you'd assume he's on vacation or perhaps taking one of those "mental health" days. No more. Today, he could be heading to work - and not to a construction site but to an office.

More and more firms are allowing some form of casual dress at work at least part of the time. Some firms call them "Casual Fridays," limiting the slovenly dress to one day a week; others call them dress-down days and may spread them freely throughout the year.

Workplace Vitality magazine recently reported that 67 percent of the hundreds of firms contacted in a 1995 employment survey now permit casual dress. But my informal survey of friends and family says the number is closer to 99 percent. And that scares me.

For starters, why should Friday be a day when employees dress down? It's not a day off, and I assume most executives expect the same amount of work from their employees on Friday as on every other day of the week. I know I do. I've never heard of a company that pays employees at a lower rate for Friday work. A quick calculation tells me that Friday represents 20 percent of the work week!

I admit that measuring productivity in an office by comparing one day to another is difficult, but I believe if dressing down has an effect on productivity, it's only negative. If you look sharp, you're more likely to act sharp. I suspect that's one reason our military requires a certain standard of dress. In New Dress for Success, author John Molloy supports that theory when he writes, "Research conducted by two companies independent of each other (one with blue-collar workers and the other with office workers) found that employees who were neat and well put together performed better than employees who were not. It may be due to the fact that [the neater] employees have a better self-image, and therefore perform at a higher level ... ."

I expect a host of people will come forward and say that dressing down actually improves productivity because employees are happier when they're dressed that way. After all, they're more relaxed. But I don't want my employees to relax. I want them to work. If wearing regular business attire makes them even a little bit more inclined to work, then I don't want them in dungarees.

Sure, some people will work at the same productivity level even if they're butt naked, much the way some people will work at the same intensity level...