What makes a company car park “good”? When it comes to workplace parking, it should reduce headaches, help employees find parking spots quickly, and ensure nobody turns up to discover space isn’t available.
Modern car parks can do this with a key few additions. Unlike a retail car park, like that of shopping centres, your business has direct control over who is parking and when. It’s predictable, and can be planned around.
Here’s how modern businesses optimise their parking spaces, improving the employee experience, ensuring full usage, and making it effortless to use.
The Problem With Your Current Parking Facilities
How can we distinguish a modern car park? Physical car park design and road markings haven’t changed much, save for the introduction of digital solutions, such as cameras and gates.
Instead, it’s better to look at the actual challenges a typical car park has to face. Then, we’ll explore the inclusions and additional processes that can enable better parking management, in turn creating the better employee experience that is expected of modern businesses.
Finite Parking Spaces
In most workplaces, the number of parking spaces is highly restricted. The denser your office, the more in demand each spot in your car park becomes.
It’s this core issue that often feeds into all of the other headaches that come with car park management.
Ineffective Parking Management
With limited parking spaces, how do you decide which employees get which parking spaces?
- If it’s a free-for-all, staff can arrive, find parking spaces are already taken, and have to find alternatives.
- Public parking is typically commercialised, directly costing employees money.
- Reserved spots that sit empty can also anger and irritate drivers.
- If the day to day management for your car park is a “first come, first served” policy, this typically leads to the same staff arriving early to grab unused spaces, further exacerbating the problem.
This is why shared spreadsheets almost always fail. They rely on manual updates, constant monitoring, and goodwill. As soon as one person forgets to update it, or chooses not to, the entire system breaks down.
Even just one employee manipulating the system in their favour pushes the downsides onto others.
Modern Car Requirements not Supported
First, there are your direct legal obligations, namely catering for disabled employees. Most car parks have dedicated parking spaces so, in terms of office administration, your only job here is to ensure these spaces stay available for respective staff.
However, the vehicle market is diversifying and, whilst there are no legal requirements, hybrid and electric vehicles can also have their own challenges. If these vehicles are increasing amongst your workforce, it’s worth taking steps to better integrate their needs with your car park.
How to Implement a Modern Parking Management System
Before we begin, it’s worth noting that you likely won’t be able to implement all of these. Maybe you don’t directly own your parking facilities, or maybe you don’t have the budget or need for the more advanced solutions.
But don’t worry! We’ve got a cost-effective parking management system that will still greatly improve space utilisation and keep your staff happy.
In truth, you don’t need a vast multitude of digital solutions or to completely overhaul your car park. You just need a few choice additions.
Private Parking Codes and Security
If possible, adding various security features to control access can immediately reduce misuse of your spaces. Some combination of keypads, access cards, fobs or other forms of entry can help protect your parking spaces.
As an added benefit, they also provide effective data on the day to day traffic flow of your car park.
And if you wanted to take this even further, you could take a look at cameras or automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) solutions. They can help ensure the right cars (and thus, people) are in the right parking spaces.
What if you can’t implement this? ANPR is expensive and, in many situations, not necessary. Access control is more important for your parking management. If you can implement some form of access card or fob, this will prevent misuse.
Even if you can’t do this, a simple app can help reserve parking spaces in advance, whilst also helping maximise utilisation. But we’ll touch upon that later.
Clear Signage in Your Car Park Design
Having dedicated parking spaces for your company won’t help much if staff can’t tell which ones they should use, or even where they are.
Think about large office complexes with multiple companies. Your company’s available spaces may all be in one car park, in multiple areas or on different floors.
For example:
- A simple company name or logo will show exactly which parking spaces are staff-only.
- It’ll also help visitors, especially if you have dedicated bays for them.
- Some sort of numerical system will also ensure everyone knows where to park, so nobody is fighting over a singular spot.
- Clear directional signs can also show in which direction those parking spaces are.
Never underestimate the power of a few numbers and directional arrows.
Even in a small car park, it helps to have clear signage.
What if you can’t implement this? Car park signage may be out of your control. This happens in various office parks, or even offices that share parking facilities with the likes of retail parks.
If the signs aren’t as clear as you’d like, create an internal counterpart. Create a map of your company’s car park, and assign numbers to each space. This way, nobody can claim they didn’t know which space they’re meant to park in. You can even use our free parking map creator online – give it a try!
Better yet, if you can combine this with an automated reservation system, you’ll have real operational efficiency. We’ll get to that.
Parking Policy with Clear Rules
When you have more people than parking spaces, you need a fair approach. Whilst it’s not a physical element of modern car parks, a well-designed workplace parking policy will two do things:
- It maximises space utilisation, rather than limit.
- It distributes your car park spaces fairly.
In other words, an internal parking policy is the guidance that influences your employee’s parking behaviour. Properly understood, such a parking policy takes care of itself.
If it’s fair, employee satisfaction will increase. There might not be available spaces for everyone each day, but staff will know the process isn’t impacting them more than anyone else.
What Should Your New Parking Policy Look Like?
The best solution is to use a shared pool where appropriate. In many cases, there will be employees that need their own, dedicated spaces, such as those that come to the office every day or simply have dedicated employee perks.
However, even these reserved spaces should be made available if you can confirm their owners aren’t coming in to work that day. This ensures optimal use.
Secondly, your new parking policy should also require employees to reserve and confirm the day before.
The reason for this is simple: other employees that don’t have a parking space for the day know ahead of time. This lets them make other plans, whether that’s public parking or coming to work via public transport.
Optimising for Vehicle & Employee Requirements
We mentioned already that disabled parking spaces are one of the key legal obligations that your car park needs to include.
More than just clear rules, you need a way to enforce these policies. Let’s take a look at the two most common challenges:
Disabled Parking Spaces
When setting up a parking policy, you still need to ensure you can provide parking spaces for disabled employees.
This means ensuring that they’re able to reserve such spaces, and that those spaces don’t go into the general pool. In most cases, the law requires that these spaces stay unused, as they could be used in emergencies or if someone unexpected visits the building.
Electric Vehicle Charging
If you are able to support electric vehicles with chargers, this is another valued resource that you need to take care of. EV charger management can differ from regular parking spaces as, based on the number of EV charging points you have, you may want to split the day into sub-shifts.
This way, you could maximise the usage of your EV charging points, ensuring each driver gets some time to charge their vehicles.
Alternatively, you can simply keep available spaces booked for the day like any other shift. Instead, you can implement rotations into your parking policy, ensuring that no singular employee can reserve charging stations more than a set amount every 2 weeks. This exact amount depends on how many electric vehicles your workforce drive, divided by the number of EV charging points.
The Hassle-free Answer to Car Park Management
The most effective way to modernise is to get digital. At its core, a car park is just concrete and asphalt. Clear directional signs and access controls help, but it’s your parking policy that enforces operational efficiency and makes a car park feel organised.
And since you likely don’t want to spend most of your day organising parking schedules and addressing conflicts, an automated system is the way to go. Parkalot, for example, is an affordable workplace parking app that can turn your clear rules into effective parking management that takes care of itself.
- With Parkalot, you can set up custom groups with clear rules. This enables both dedicated spaces for specific individuals, and larger groups that can draw from a pool of available spaces.
- This can be further finetuned to limit how many times one individual can reserve a space, enforcing fair usage.
- Employees need only reserve spaces in the app, and then confirm the night before. Unconfirmed spaces go back into the pool, ensuring maximum car park usage.
Parkalot is a very business-friendly solution. In addition to the app, we offer integration with Slack, Microsoft Teams and other common business tools, making it easily accessible for staff during their typical work day.
Improve Your Car Park Today
A new parking policy and a few more signs can work wonders for office parking. It doesn’t necessitate planning permission, and neither does it need a bank-breaking budget. Instead, it’s a few small improvements that turn car park chaos into a clear and structured system that everyone understands.
Don’t underestimate the impact car parking has on daily operations. Ineffective parking can cause delays for many businesses, with employees spending more time parking in the mornings, or simply being disgruntled throughout the day.
On the other hand, When a car park runs smoothly, it becomes invisible. And in workplace operations, invisible usually means successful.
