The time has come for all faded jeans to pass. For all torn tee shirts to seek shortest path to rag barrel. The time has come for UNIFORMS!

What work does your company do? Irrigation and sprinkler installation, landscape contractor, lawn maintenance, interiorscape plant care, nursery and growing grounds, waterscape, landscape design? These all have one common element, our customers and how they view us.

Many of you have probably noticed increasing frequency with which you see your competitor and his employees wearing some sort of uniform. Whether they are wearing a green tee shirt and jeans or work shirt with company name, employee name, logo and matching cap and pants, it all boils down to making you look like a businessman who doesn't really care about quality of his work.

It's all a matter of image and perceptions, both by your customers, present and potential, and employees. Landscapers and gardeners who wear uniforms generally get a higher dollar per hour labor rate from their customers than than those who don't wear uniforms or they get more work and sign more contracts than their competitors. This alone should be reason enough to convince you to start wearing some sort of uniform.

Uniforms do a variety of things all related to image. They tell your customer that you are professional, reliable, consistent, and organized. That you have a high sense of self esteem. That you care, because if you care about yourself you'll care about them. That you can be trusted, because you or your employees don't look like burglars. People who look like they know what they are doing are treated with respect. Uniforms separate you from your competition. They become an important sales tool as part of concept of "first impressions".

Uniforms also contribute to your employees sense of pride, of belonging to "the team". It reduces their clothing expenses, thus a uniform becomes a pay raise! Some contractors even have slight variations in uniforms of various crews working at large residential communities or their landscaping and maintenance departments to promote a healthy sense of competition.

Other considerations are that many government agencies require contractor employees be readily identifiable when working on public or government property. With increasing frequency homeowner associations and property management companies are requiring uniforms.

She quit her corporate job there, because she found work environment stifling, unethical and demoralizing. Now she wants to help businesses in Malaysia change to a more emotionally intelligent culture.

We agree that when they do, they won’t lose exceptional workers like Li-Yan.

Tom McDorman , managing director of Western Digital (Malaysia) Sdn. Blh.D, believes emotional intelligence-style management techniques” can bolster faltering Asian manufacturers, according to an article in Wall Street Journal. When he began cultivating ‘soft’ side of his workers, productivity at his Kuala Lumpur factory jumped 20%.

In England, Greg Syke, director general of BBC, was accused of being over confident and “lacking emotional intelligence” by a Labour peer. Lord Lipsey, then tipped as a board member of new media watchdog, Ofcom, said that Dyke’s instincts are “to colonise, to compete and destroy.”

Neal Ashkanasy, a professor at University of Queensland, Australia,is also a proponent of emotional intelligence. He says “It’s an easy target in terms of softness and fluffiness, but failure to recognize emotions in workplace [can] reflect in a demoralized workforce.”

In April, an Emotional Intelligence Conference is scheduled in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where IIR will challenge participants to “learn about most significant innovation in people management in last 25 years.” They’ll be showing a film where a commercial organization suffers a major business setback, not related to business strategy, but because people in key positions didn’t have appropriate levels of emotional competency.