Does the size matter? – solving parking problems for small companies

Imagine you have a company with 15 employees and only 5 parking spaces.

You can’t change the location or enlarge the car park. People are frustrated as parking is one of the essential benefits they need. It costs up to 20% of an employee’s salary to replace a person that quits. Those parking challenges small companies need to face every day. Big company, big parking problems – bigger parking to manage, more people and more rules to follow – one could think. On the contrary – what parking problems a small company may have?

Does the size of the business matter when it comes to parking frustration? Working with our clients and helping them solve their everyday parking problems makes us aware that smaller companies face different parking challenges. Still, solving them is equally crucial to make the whole team happy.

Hierarchy

What are you going to do if you can’t enlarge the car park – it is 5 places, and you have 15 people? The most common scenario: you assign the 5 parking places to 5 of your management staff, and 10 people are left without a place to park. The rule sounds clear and shows a hierarchy in your company. But what happens if people don’t use their assigned places? 10 employees left without a place to park come to work every day, and after having a battle in the city to park their car somewhere, they see a parking place empty and unused in their own company. What do they think? They get frustrated. They question the rule. In worst-case scenario, they believe they are not appreciated, and they leave.

Democracy

You can also try to be more democratic. You assume that 15 people are not a huge group, and you will manage to communicate and share parking places. And here it starts. One person needs a parking space every Thursday; two people are going to use a parking space once a month. You need to have one parking space always ready for guests. Then somebody goes on vacation or works from home. One rule (for example John always needs parking place on Thursday) is already difficult to remember. When you make it three rules – it becomes chaotic. And then when you add some changes (somebody on vacation or taking a day off) – it becomes impossible to manage.

Parkalot can remember all these rules for you. For smaller companies, it takes a lot of effort to manage parking rules by the administrative staff. It can be time-consuming, it requires a lot of judgement and may cause lots of misunderstandings.

While you can’t change the size of your car park, you can show your staff that you care and see the problem.

By implementing Parkalot, you can use what we call ‘Advanced ownership’. It means that one parking place can be owned by several employees, and the administrator can implement the set of rules for them, for example: use a parking space on different days of the week. Everyone is included and you can control the usage of the parking places. There is no judgement involved and when the rule needs to be changed, it is easy to implement. Good relationships – essential for little businesses where people need to work closely together – are not affected.