How to set up your employee parking administration system?

Does your company need a parking administration system? If your company office is located in a thriving urban area, chances are- finding parking space is pretty stressful for your employees. A 2020 study by the British Parking Association revealed that employees in the UK spent an average of 90.5 hours per year just looking for a parking slot.

While companies usually focus on work-life balance, monetary benefits, training and company benefits to improve employee turnover rate, an often-overlooked factor that can greatly impact employee well-being and retention is their commute experience, wherein the ease of finding a parking spot plays a big part. 

A poorly managed parking administration system, especially when employees feel that some people are given unfair advantage or some staff members need to leave their homes at the crack of dawn just to be ensured of a parking space, can lead to squabbles and resentment and even cause good employees to quit. 

Coming back to the workplace after COVID-19 shakes things up even more. More employees want to drive their own vehicle to the office, given that only 10% of respondents in a McKinsey survey stated that they consider shared mobility or public commute as safe options during this period. And with the hybrid work setup, parking slots reserved for certain company executives might be left empty on days when they are working from home, leading to losses in your real estate costs. 

How can you address these challenges? 

It’s time to build your employee parking administration system. Or in case you already have an existing one, then it’s time to update it. 

The first thing that you need to develop or upgrade is your employee parking policy. No matter how much you want to provide a convenient parking space for each and every one of your employees, this may not be possible simply due to the limited number of slots you have available. 

Your parking facility manager needs to gather the following information: 

• The objective of the employee parking policy- Is this to provide more parking spaces? Do you want to remove preferential parking allocation or you want to prioritize certain employees, instead? Do you want to make parking allocation more fair across everyone in the organization? Do you want to encourage employees to reduce their carbon footprint? 
• The number of spaces that can be allotted to employees versus the actual number of staff who needs parking.
• Your priority guidelines for employee parking- this can be based on seniority, job level, tenure, health conditions, the company’s need for the employee to be present on-site, the distance of the employees’ place of residence to the workplace, etc. 
• Parking operating hours. 
• The number of shifts in your workplace. 
• The method of getting a parking space- will this be via reserved parking, booking system or first-come, first-served? This may be a mix of all three too. 
• The rules that you want to implement in your car park. Make sure that employees use the parking lot responsibly like driving within speed limits, following directional signages, using a slot within a reasonable number of hours, and prohibiting certain activities in the area, such as throwing trash, sleeping inside the vehicle, using a mobile phone while driving, etc. 

Your employee parking policy will be your map on how to navigate your parking administration. But don’t expect that your parking woes will be resolved the moment that you have your employee parking policy. 

There is still a lot of work to be done in your daily employee car park operations– Parking slots must be allocated everyday and in real-time, access and usage must be monitored, available slots should be reallocated to maximize your space, and checking must be done to ensure that your policies are being followed. Weekly and monthly reports must also be reviewed to check if there are aspects that you can improve on to make your operations run more smoothly. 

How do you conduct continuous allocating, monitoring and reporting? Assigning an unfortunate staff member to oversee these activities manually with the use of pen, paper or spreadsheets is definitely NOT the best way to go about it. 

To save yourself from time and effort wastage, stress and headache, we strongly recommend that you automate your parking administration system. 

This is where parking management software comes in. 

A parking management software is a web or mobile application that automates tasks related to operating your car park: assigning slots, providing access to permitted vehicles, controlling traffic at the entry, exit and within the car park, monitoring usage, creating records, etc. A robust parking software partner can help you optimize your parking spaces, keep your operations efficient, and ensure the safety of individuals and vehicles in your parking lot. 

Wayleadr.com, the leading employee parking management software, offers an intuitive platform where companies can set guidelines for parking space allocation, and the app does the rest of the work by allocating and re-allocating available slots in real-time. 

To address issues of employees driving to the workplace, only to find that there is no available parking space for them, companies can opt to use Wayleadr.com’s booking system, where users can reserve a slot and receive confirmation immediately. This minimizes traffic in the carpark, as employees who are not given a parking slot for the day or certain hours will no longer line up at the parking lot entrance and possibly cause delay for permitted users. 

Choosing the right parking management software may be the most important decision you will make in setting up your automated employee parking administration system. 

In reviewing your options, check for the following: 

• Ease of integration with your parking access hardware, such as the parking gate and entry system. 
• Existing features and how they match with your requirements. Add-on services such as monitoring violations and banning users, digital entry and exit, forecasting and helping with revenue generation are great features that you might want to look into. 
• How often the provider introduces additional valuable and innovative features. Remember, you can actually get ideas on how you can further improve your parking administration system via the features that the provider introduces. 
• Accessibility (having a mobile app version is especially helpful) and user-friendliness (can a non-techie person navigate the software easily?).
• Data / reports that you can get from it. 
• After-sales service.
• List of existing clients and what they say about the product.

Parking space limitations may not be something that you can change immediately. But with a strong parking policy and administration system, you can make sure that you can maximize what you have and more happy employees will be able to avail of a parking space.

From a practical standpoint, managing your car park operations smoothly and efficiently can help you maximize your company resources by improving the occupancy rate of the car park, improve the safety and security in your workplace, and allow you to save time and money. 

From an employee’s perspective, a better parking experience can improve morale, increase job satisfaction and help them start and end their day on a more positive note. 

The good news is: Setting up your employee parking administration system is easy, with the availability of parking softwares that can help you solve your office parking woes, once and for all. 

Call in the expert and let Wayleadr.com help you with your employee parking administration.

Top companies like Sanofi, Indeed.com, CBRE have already made Wayleadr.com their parking management partner of choice. Schedule a free demo today and find out how we can help your organization too!