When you have more employees than parking spaces, you need a way to assign the latter. That’s the easy part. The real challenge is determining how you do it.
Whether you’re looking to maximise parking space usage or just improve the employee commute at your workplace, there’s more than one way to assign parking spots.
In this guide, we’ll explore the reasons for assigning parking spaces and the various approaches you can take, ranging from fully manual spreadsheets to dedicated parking management software.
Why Should You Assign Spaces in Your Car Park?
Without assigned spots, company car parks operate on a first come, first served basis. Given that most workplace parking has far more employees and cars than available spaces, this has some immediate drawbacks.
Here are the main reasons you should move from a free-for-all car park to an assigned strategy.
To manage multiple locations
If your company has multiple locations, and therefore multiple car parks, assigned parking is often essential.
Let’s say a team from one site is spending a week at another office, where will they park? These kind of things need to be planned ahead of time, so companies need a way to allocate car park spaces.
To support visitor & guest parking
Similarly, visitors also often need somewhere to park. Since they’re not part of the company, there needs to be an easy, internal way to allocate spaces.
Leaving visitors to figure out your parking lot and hope that space is available does not make a great impression.
To manage multiple shifts
Nothing impacts a company car park more than multiple shifts. How you business schedules shifts directly impacts the car park:
- If the 2nd shift starts before the 1st shift has ended, the car park is likely full, impacting the former.
- If shifts change exactly as the first team finishes, later teams need to wait for earlier staff to leave, and few companies can execute that kind of exact precision.
- If one shift stays late, then that entire day’s parking system is quickly broken.
Without assigned parking, there is too much inconsistency and confusion for staff. Aside from the employee experience, it directly impacts how shifts are able to start, which has a direct influence on business productivity.
To prevent knock-on parking problems
Outside of the above concerns, there are also a broader range of issues that can happen when employees can’t access their office parking effectively.
- First, it either encourages staff members to get to work earlier than normal, in order to acquire available parking spaces. Alternatively, this might simply favour employees who live closer.
- Naturally, this creates discord amongst other employees, who then have to deal with their own parking problems.
- Additionally, without directly assigned spaces, staff need to spend more time seeking out a parking spot for the day, wasting their time.
- Finally, the simple uncertainty of not knowing if parking spots are available causes a lot of problems. Employees don’t know whether to work from home, take public transport, or seek other options, such as expensive commercial parking zones.
Allocated parking operations, where employees know which parking space is reserved for them on a given day, primarily help by removing these headaches.
Types of Assigned Parking Management Solutions
If you think of car park spots as a resource, you’ll quickly find there’s more than one way to assign and manage them. How you do so depends on your specific needs and how pressing a concern your parking lot is becoming for your company.
You can also think of it like a scale, ranging from simple manual solutions to dedicated office parking management software. As you go up the scale, costs may increase but, on the other hand, your time and effort is going down.
Manual Car Parking Management & Assignment
The first approach that most turn to is to manage the car park themselves. At a glance, a shared spreadsheet seems like a good idea at the time.
But such systems are either easily exploited, or require an administrator to review and control the system to ensure fairness. Or both, in most cases.
Either way it’s a lot of work for an office manager to deal with amongst their other tasks.
Pros: No costs, immediate implementation and full internal control.
Cons: High admin requirements, no real-time visibility or usage data, and it’s difficult to enforce fairness.
Can Manual Car Park Management Work?
The fully manual approach is generally not the best parking system for a typical company, but that’s not a hard rule. There are a few unique situations where this can work:
- If most employees commute and/or you have more parking spaces than are needed, you’re in a very lucky situation.
- If you have a very small team and you all work the same hours, then you could manage parking space with just a little extra time and effort.
In these cases, such a parking management system might work, but please remember that it’s your own time and effort that gets taken in return.
Dedicated Reservations
As a small amendment to the above approach, you may want to give specific spots to key individuals.
- In fact, many companies do this alongside other financial incentives. Many companies use dedicated parking spaces as key employee benefits. It’s not uncommon for senior leadership to have their own parking spaces.
- Similarly, teams that are required to be on-site 100% of the time (especially in companies with a strong hybrid culture) might also be given such broad car park access.
However, there are a few factors that make this less than ideal. If the leadership is out of office, ill or otherwise not using their parking spaces, other staff simply see unused spots that are still denied to them.
Perhaps most importantly, this approach isn’t actually helping in terms of car parking management. If you reserve dedicated spaces, removing them from the pool, even removing 5-10% of sots from circulation can significantly increase demand, and thus competition, for remaining bays.
Yes, you could free those spaces up on an ad-hoc basis to make the most of your parking lot, but that puts a lot more extra pressure on your facilities managers and admin staff. If you’re using a manual approach, you have to also verify who is or is not coming in.
Does an empty parking spot mean it’s available, or is someone simply coming in to work later than normal? What seems like a simple task quickly adds up to a lot of extra work.
Pros: Highly predictable, simple to understand and doesn’t require complex software or solutions to implement.
Cons: Unused spots are wasted, doesn’t respond to real demand, and can create perceived inequity amongst other staff.
Policy-Based Allocations
The next approach is to implement an office car park policy into your business. This can be as simple or as complex as necessary, but most companies determine the following:
- How far in advance parking spaces can be reserved.
- How often employees can reserve parking spots in a given timeframe.
- If employees need to confirm their parking spots before they come to work.
- Likewise, what employees should do if they have allocated spots but aren’t coming to work that day.
- Consequences when employees don’t follow the rules, such as using unreserved parking zones.
Additionally, if your circumstances require it, you can consider:
- If staff charging electric vehicles need to make charging spots available after they’ve charged their car.
- How long a reservation lasts, and how late cars can stay in assigned spaces after this period. This one is highly important for shift-based businesses.
- Special exemptions for senior staff, employees visiting other locations, or visitors coming in from out of town
Outside of parking allocation itself, you can also reinforce maximum speeds, how passes are assigned and other obligations that are written elsewhere. This simply ensures one, singular document that all staff can turn to.
Pros: Introduces structured fairness, reduces disputes and can adapt to internal company culture.
Cons: Subject to interpretation if not enforced, requires manual effort, and has challenges adapting to real-time changes.
Office Parking Management Software
The most effective option is to use dedicated office parking management software. As the name suggests, these are purpose-built products designed to help companies manage their limited parking resources.
An effective parking management system should be easy for employees to use, but offers office managers a dedicated admin panel to set shifts, rules and other guidance.
Pros: Real-time visibility and control, enforces policies automatically, can adapt to rapid changes, and transparent for all employees.
Cons: Comes at a cost, and requires some initial setup.
What to Look for in a Parking Management System
When considering any digital solution, it helps to know exactly what you’re looking for:
- Can your parking policies or rules be automated? This is an easy way to free up your own time.
- Is the app employee friendly? If it’s not simple to use, it won’t make a big impact.
- Are unused reservations released back to the pool? This is vital for maximising capacity.
- Does it give you real time availability? Such data is important for using up all available spots.
- Can it be customised to your unique needs?
You’re looking for an automated system to manage employee parking reservations. Therefore, your biggest priorities are to save time, keep all staff informed, and provide an accessible system that can’t be exploited.
How Parkalot Can Help
If you’ve decided that a digital system is right for your business, Parkalot was built specifically to help companies manage limited parking resources efficiently and fairly. Our app helps companies manage their car parks, avoiding empty spots and growing employee satisfaction.
Here’s how Parkalot solves your critical parking management challenges:
- Admins retain full control. They can limit how often employees can reserve spaces and ensure a fair, consistent approach that can’t be exploited.
- The admin panel also gives you direct data about how your car park is being used, informing future decisions.
- Employees use the app to reserve parking spaces, and confirm their attendance the evening before. Any spare spaces are given back to the wider pool for the day, ensuring maximum usage.
- Custom groups enable businesses to set different rules, ensuring different teams can meet their unique requirements.
- Staff can also reserve EV chargers for electric vehicles, as well as other unique features your car park might have.
What’s more, Parkalot can also help with wider business operations. All our packages include reservations for EV chargers, desks, rooms, meeting booths and other allocated assets that staff need to access on a day-to-day basis.
Get Started With Assigned Car Parks
At this point, we hope one thing is clear: The best assigned car parks don’t permanently reserve spaces for individuals. They manage your parking lot as a shared resource, dynamically adapting to demand.
Whichever option you choose, you’ll know it’s working when employees stop complaining about parking availability. They’ll know when they have an assigned parking spot for the day, or if they need to make other plans, and can better integrate the commute into their day-to-day planning.
When parking becomes predictable, employees plan better, shifts run smoother, and facilities teams regain valuable time. That’s when you know your assigned parking strategy is working.
And you? You’ll have much more free time to focus on other pressing matters outside of car parking management.
