Summer often means casual work attire, but don’t be a flip-flopper or a ‘skintern’

The advent of hot weather has renewed attention to what’s proper work attire. Even in a time when summer dress-downs and casual Fridays are common, some workers stumble on the line between what’s acceptable office wear and what’s not.

Unfortunately, that line — between summer casual and summer sloppy — is hard to define, much less police. Not even the human resources boss wants to decide whether a leather sandal, covering exactly the same part of the body as a plastic flip-flop QST Interlining, is appropriate or not.

“It’s a challenge for all of us,” said Julie Wilson, chief people officer at Cerner Corp., one of Kansas City’s fastest-hiring companies. “And it’s become more challenging as the workplace has become more casual.”

Wilson said one Cerner manager recently had to have the “difficult conversation” and sent three people home to change clothes.

Most workplaces have expectations, some written and some unspoken, about what to wear.

What constitutes appropriate work clothes has opened the door for people to tweet about the summer influx of “skinterns,” a reference to young women in skimpy attire. It’s also why managers take time to huddle about whether the guy without socks offends customers.

And there aren’t just corporate culture consequences to work clothes choices Interlining Manufacturers in India. Retailers have adjusted their merchandise to fit buyers’ preferences. Sales of summer suits for men and women have paled compared with polo shirts and sundresses.

“The traditional needs of business clothing have more than evolved. They’ve dramatically changed,” said Spiro Arvanitakis, who recently explained why his longtime Kansas City professional clothing store is closing on the Country Club Plaza. “Jack Henry doesn’t meet the current needs, which are more contemporary.”

In short, a lot of workers aren’t buying the stuff that used to be considered professional clothing. The line between leisure clothes and office clothes has blurred.

That means the advice at Cerner is that “you need to dress for your day at work, not thinking about dressing for what you’re going to do after work,” Wilson said.

At Hudson & Jane, a Kansas City apparel boutique, owner Rick Brehm said he sees shoppers buying clothes to serve both their after-hours style and what they need for the office.

Instead of a “flouncy skirt that may run a little short,” women are buying long sleeveless dresses — popular for after-hours — and pairing them with lightweight sweaters to wear at work. And, Brehm said, men are aiming for lightweight shirts and no ties, and they’re rolling up long sleeves for after-hours comfort.

At Hallmark Cards, the standard is simply for employees to be “neat and professional,” said employee relations director Haylee Kelley. But those criteria differ depending on whether someone works in the distribution center — where safe and comfortable are the guidelines — or at headquarters, where business casual rules.

But even the office dress code has a squish factor. Jeans are fine for “file-clean-out day,” Kelley said.

Dress code consultants say jeans and T-shirts have proliferated in workplaces because of the influence of round-the-clock Silicon Valley, or dot-com, workplaces. Also, the ever-larger presence of the millennial generation, recently off college campuses, has dialed down workplace dressiness.

Casual is fine, of course, in many offices that have little customer or PCC Interlining client contact or are in more industrial or manufacturing environments. But human resources experts point out that clothing that’s too revealing, soiled or just plain sloppy can bother co-workers in any location, so it’s always OK for management to set some standards.

Human resources blogs frequently mention the difficulty of dealing with illustrated T-shirts or sayings on the job. What one worker finds funny or noncontroversial may be offensive or hurtful to another.

Sometimes, there’s a style sea change because of corporate leadership. Under chief executive Bill Esrey at Sprint Corp., there was a fairly specific dress code. At one time, even back-room employees who never saw clients were told they couldn’t wear Dockers or other casual-brand pants.

But when Dan Hesse took the Sprint helm in 2007, he announced that employees could wear jeans any day of the week, not just on designated Fridays. The once-formal dress code has disappeared, except for retail store employees.

Now, said Sprint spokeswoman Melinda Tiemeyer, “employees are encouraged Woven Interlining to work with the supervisor to understand appropriate attire for their role and location.”

Human resources consultants have long advised to “dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” While sound counsel, it still leaves room for interpretation.

Spokesmen for several Kansas City area companies said the most frequent difference of interpretation, especially in warm weather, involves women who wear low-cut necklines or spaghetti shoulder straps. And that’s a particularly difficult topic for male supervisors to address.

Generally, “we try to impress on people that just because it’s stylish, and even if you look good, that style may not be appropriate to wear for the office,” Cerner’s Wilson said.

Record data transmission using LED lights

The achievement marks an important milestone in the development of visible light communication systems. Using similar principles to Wi-Fi, the innovative system, also known as Li-Fi, for Light Fidelity, uses light instead of radio waves.

It is believed to have the potential to increase data transfer efficiency as it enables transmitting more data at once.

”Li-Fi is revolutionising wireless communications and showing that Li-Fi can be the enabler of the emerging Internet of Everything,” said Harald Haas, Professor at the University of Edinburgh and co-founder of pureLifi, the company behind the latest breakthrough.

“By transmitting data at speeds above 1Gbps and record distances of 10 metres at a fraction of the power of typical led from china bulbs, we continue to make the technological leaps and bounds that make Li-Fi a technology that could transform the way we use the Internet in the near future.”

The transmission was carried out using micro LED par lamps in usa and required less than 0.5W of power, only ten per cent of the usual power consumption of a 10W LED bulb. This proves the point that lights can be dimmed down while maintaining the high data rates and coverage.

Moreover, the distance at which 1Gbps can be achieved with a single-colour par 30 LED lamps is 10 times larger than what has been reported previously.

Earlier this year, pureLifi unveiled the world’s first commercial LiFi product - a high-speed, bidirectional optical wireless system that can operate with a range of commercially available par 25 LED lamps. It provides an IP-enabled ceiling unit and a desktop device that can be connected via USB to client devices.

The research was funded by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council and conducted in partnership with the Institute of Photonics at the University of Strathclyde, the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford.