Did you know that ⅔ of office workers stress over workplace parking? As a research study from Chaucer Direct showed, employees often consider their workplace parking lots to be insufficient or pushed to the limit. This is unfortunately a common problem—most offices have fewer parking spots available than employees who want to use them.
This can cause many issues. Workers who commute to their offices by car can be exposed to situations that put them at a disadvantage at their workplaces due to parking-related lateness or tension between workmates over parking spots. According to the research, over half (54%) of office workers are risking job prospects because of such incidents. Furthermore, a quarter of them feel like their relationships with their colleagues are damaged by tension related to such parking incidents. This doesn’t even include the additional costs that come into play when, due to the lack of spots available at their workplace, a worker has to look for other solutions.
So, what can be done to solve these problems? The obvious solution that comes to mind is for companies to get more parking spaces, but this is often not possible and almost never cost-effective. The biggest issue might not be the lack of spots, but the way they are managed and how there is no channel for parking-related communication in the company itself.
What is Parkalot and why did we decide to create it?
We encountered the aforementioned parking problems in our own workplaces and decided to do something about it. We created an app called Parkalot—a communication channel solely dedicated to parking. It allows you to create a parking lot in a virtual environment by simply creating spots and naming them in accordance with their real-life names (numbers etc.). After the users of a particular workplace parking lot are invited to the app, they can start booking spaces for themselves from the shared pool of spaces or receive an assigned spot from the parking administrator due to their special needs or seniority.
When developing the app, we focused on implementing rules that ensure fair-use and give everyone a chance to book a spot. If somebody does not respect the rules and takes a spot that wasn’t theirs, or parks in such a way as to block other spots, he or she can be easily reported through the app to the parking administrator and identified by their licence plate.
How does Parkalot help employers?
So, how exactly can Parkalot help employers? The parking situation is an important part of employer branding—not only among current employees, but also new ones, when the company wants to hire top talent. For some job-seekers, the parking situation is a factor they consider when choosing their new workplace. Parkalot is a low-cost solution for all employers who want to create a better parking situation at their company—maximizing the parking lot’s utilization while reducing tension between employees over parking spots. The app doesn’t require any hardware either, as it’s sufficient if the parking spots are numbered or named in another manner, and it can be set up and implemented in a few days.
What benefits are there for employees?
Implementing Parkalot can be very beneficial, especially from the perspective of employees. It reduces morning parking-related stress over not being able to find a spot in the company’s parking lot and the associated risk of being late. Releasing spots for booking usually happens in the evening, so, if somebody doesn’t manage to book a spot for the next day, he or she can plan his or her trip to work accordingly. Also, employees who need the spots the most (e.g., due to disabilities or age) can always be sure that there will be a spot waiting for them. Parkalot also ensures less parking-related tensions between work colleagues by providing fair-usage rules and the ability to report all incidents directly to the person responsible for the parking.
If you would be interested in trying out our app for your company’s parking, go to app.parkalot.io and create an account. You can use it for free for 30 days. In case of any problems, our support team is here and available to help you.
By Lukasz Patecki, Founder of Parkalot.io
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