In India, when the dust kills computers by clogging fans, you'll see workplaces with computers have a "leave your shoes outside" board. I'm not sure what happens today, but this was true when I lived there.
That's mostly because everyone coming in is usually spent the last half mile on foot and the shoes will basically flake-off indoors in the lowered humidity.
Also, for some reason my dentist's office has a "employees must change into shoes" notice, suspiciously in the bay area.
Maybe they had some contamination issues ("work shoes" that could be santized properly?) or maybe they had employees wear sandals into the office & they had to enforce the rule after someone dropped a sharp on a toe?
The place I worked at before also had a "shoes required" rule, but I don't know why. My assumption is that someone had stinky feet at some point.
If I take off my shoes but some of my coworkers still track icky crap in, then it is worse for me than if we all uniformly kept our outdoor shoes on.
One option is to have some office shoes or sandals, which will also help protect from culinary mistakes in the break-room.
> should apply equally to the workplace as in the home, no?
Probably. You should bring it up with your boss.
I do, and I switch to to my Birkenstocks at work, as my feet can breathe way better in them and it also gives my sneakers an ~8h rest to stay smell-free and cool until I have to go home and put them back on.
Continuously wearing the same pair of sneakers for about 10h per day is ... not great. My feet would be in a swampy sweat broth.
People who always wear shoes all day every day think tend to think that feet are gross. And that's because their feet are disgusting, and they project that onto everybody else.
They explicitly weren't talking about you.
My main reasoning is reducing cleaning effort on my end. If the office were to have a no shoes rule I'd be walking around in socks or barefoot as long as others do.
Sharing foot bacteria with my coworkers is also a different ballgame than sharing it with my wife and kid. The family is already sharing quite a bit of bacteria so what's a bit of foot stuff.
No, because I consider the office to be a shared public space, and none of the people working in the office actually live there. Office is not my personal space, it is a transient area.
At the office? It's about 50/50. Some people work in their socks, some have indoor-slippers.
In my previous two companies I'd take my shoes off every day when entering the office, leaving them in the handy shoe-racks near the entrance.
In my current job I admit I tend to keep them on, but that's largely because I'm smoking more than usually and putting my boots back on and off multiple times gets annoying in an office environment.