How to build an effective employee parking management strategy

Summary

• A parking management strategy is a plan that makes use of available parking resources.
• An effective strategy has many benefits when done correctly including increased efficiency, cost savings, maximized resource utilization, boosted staff morale and reduced environmental impact.
• There are 4 main steps involved in creating an effective employee management strategy.

What is a parking management strategy?

A parking management strategy is your master plan that should result in the more efficient use of available parking resources. This includes: 

1. Controlling, monitoring and pricing of parking facilities
2. Gathering better user information 
3. Improving allocation and optimizing space usage

Ideally all of these will be achieved with reduced human intervention and effort.

A parking management strategy sounds technical and tedious but when done correctly, an effective office parking management strategy should lead to the following benefits.

Benefits of a parking management strategy

• Efficiency: the parking facility operates like a ‘smart machine’ and basically runs itself, with minimal human intervention and stress.
• Cost savings: the company enjoys savings on real estate expenses, while the company or employees saves on parking fees (depending on who pays for parking)
• Maximum resource utilization: full occupancy for company parking slots during normal office days
• Higher morale: employees spend less time looking for a parking slot on a daily basis, parking-related squabbles between staff are eliminated, and people feel that the parking allocation policies are clear and fair. 
• Reduced negative impact to the environment: less congestion on the parking lot leads to reduced air and water pollution and reduced carbon footprint for your organization as a whole. Overall, this leads to a healthier physical work environment. 

With these advantages, it’s no wonder that many enterprises, whether large or even medium-sized, are realizing the need to invest time and effort in addressing employee parking issues, and building a strategy that can solve these problems once and for all. 

How to create a parking management strategy

Summarize employees’ commuting profiles

Build a database of your employees with their commuting and parking needs, including: 

• Who travels by personal car or company car? 
• Are there employees who share rides with others? 
• Who walks or rides a bike (manual or motor) to work? 
• Are there employees who live close to each other? 

Other information that you might want to consider as you create your parking management strategy and your organization’s parking slots allocation priority are location (distance from the office), job level or tenure. 

If your company is still adapting to the hybrid work setup, the schedule on when employees will be reporting to the office or working off-site should also be included. 

Unpredictability of employees’ schedules in the office can lead to empty parking slots, which was a problem for Alstom, a sustainable mobility leader, due to the nature of the work of many of their employees. With this in mind, they designed a parking management strategy to ensure empty parking spaces will be reallocated and put to good use.

Conduct a SWOT of the current parking situation

A summary of employees’ needs can be compared to the current parking situation when conducting a SWOT analysis. Factors to consider include: 

• What is the disparity between demand and available parking slots? 
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of your current setup? 
• Are certain spaces that are more accessible than others? 

In the case of more accessible spaces, there might be an opportunity to charge a premium rate for these, or reserve the use of these slots for employees who are more senior in age, or have disabilities and mobility limitations.

What are the opportunities for improvement? Something as simple as installing brighter lights and removing clutter might do wonders in making your parking space friendlier and safer to all. Do you have parking spaces for different kinds of vehicles, from scooters and bikes to bigger vehicles? 

You might even realize that there is an opportunity to open slots to guests and visitors and to increase your earnings (in case you are charging for parking).

Document company goals and priorities

This might be a good time to decide if there are certain behaviors that your company would like to promote. Are you looking into reducing your organization’s carbon footprint? If yes, you might want to incentivize ride-sharing or bringing a bike to the office. 

Check out this example of how Version 1, a software delivery company in Belfast, Northern Ireland, aimed to reduce their carbon footprint and was able to build a parking management strategy which helped them achieve this goal successfully. 

Do you want to improve the accessibility of your parking lot for employees with disabilities or physical challenges? You can allocate preferred slots for them. 

The younger workforce is more open to flexible, shared approaches and it might be a good idea to promote teamwork and camaraderie with your parking arrangements.

Overall, your employee parking management strategy should be aligned with your organizational goals and values. 

Utilize parking management tools

Spreadsheets and manual reservations or allocating systems can work on a smaller scale but it is very inefficient and stressful for everyone involved. 

Fortunately, parking management software, such as Wayleadr was created to help you automate this process and optimize the use of your parking slots. 

Once you have the information from the first 3 elements, you should document your strategy and work with your parking management software provider to integrate your preferences into the software. Once you set everything up in the software, day-to-day implementation should be done smoothly with minimal human intervention. 

There are differences in features included in each software, but parking facility managers agree that these are some of the most helpful features in automating their parking management operations: 

• Booking system
• Mobile: in an app version
• Dependable customer service support
• Multi-vehicle per user function
• Impact reporting
• Barrier integration
• Multi-location management
• Automated payment system

With the availability of parking management software and technology which can help you with handling your company parking, the process of building an effective employee parking management strategy does not have to be complicated at all, because you can automate a huge chunk of the more tedious work involved.

Monitor the results and make improvements

The final step is to monitor results and review the reports provided by your parking management software and see if you need to make further changes. Remember to evaluate your strategy every few months or whenever there are applicable changes in your company, industry or overall working landscape. 

Your parking management strategy should lead to your desired results: optimal utilization of your parking spaces, cost savings for the company, reduced carbon footprint for the whole organization, happier employees and increased efficiency for everyone concerned. 

Let Wayleadr.com assist you with your employee parking management strategy needs and schedule a demo now!