A s companies grapple with how to manage their office space post-Covid, over a quarter of businesses are actively in the process of reducing their employee car parks according to a new survey The State of Employee Parking 2021. The study from parking management software firm ParkOffice.io polled 105 corporate leaders who manage employee parking across 15 countries.
Of businesses surveyed 7.3% are aiming for a large reduction in employee parking. While 19.5% of employers are looking to implement small reductions. Interestingly it’s not all one way traffic, many companies are expecting parking demand to spike when employees return to the office with 15.9% of companies looking to increase their parking allocation.
Other interesting takeaways from the research include:
- 30% of companies believe that employee parking will be considerably harder to manage when employees return to the office due to increased flexibility.
- 47% of employers identify employee parking as a problematic issue for their business. It is particularly challenging for companies with over 1,000 employees.
- 57.5% of businesses are more conscious of the negative impact of employee parking on the environment than they were 5 years ago.
Speaking about the research ParkOffice.io’s Daithí de Buitléir remarked: “Covid has been a real watershed moment for employee parking. Employees don’t want to return to the commuter chaos which used to dominate their lives. For lifestyle, cost and environmental reasons, we are going to see companies aggressively downsize their parking lots over the next few years.”
He added: “According to the 2016 Census in the USA, 76%of workers drove to work alone. Obviously, these figures were dramatically reduced overnight with the onset of COVID-19. However, large questions remain as vaccinated communities begin to return to offices. Mainly, how can employers create new cultures around commuting to ensure congestion and air pollution don’t become apart of everyday life again? Efforts to change commuting behaviours have largely focused on encouraging and in centivising employees to travel to work in other ways. There has been a reluctance to discuss the elephant in the room, employee parking.”
As per the survey, in spite of much progress being made in the area of commuter transportation over the last decade, employee parking is still proving to be a problem child for almost half of businesses.
Interestingly the digital divide is starting to emerge here as a cause of parking problems.
Of respondents who had implemented a parking management software, only 25%reported still experiencing any parking issues. Meanwhile, companies who were managing parking manually over-indexed as having parking problems with 52% of businesses reporting issues.
Interestingly large employers tended to have the most problems with employee parking. 62% of all business with over 1,000 employees reported having parking problems. This dropped to a mere 41% among companies with less than 50 employees. Assigned parking designation proved to be the most troublesome parking management policy for companies.52% of businesses with this model reported problems. This was followed by 48% of employers who reported issues with a first-come, first-served model. With 42% of companies with mixed policy reporting issues.
Finding places for employees to park is the primary concern for business. 41% of those surveyed reported a lack of parking spaces at the office as their biggest parking problem. Interestingly, 32% reported an inability to source additional offsite space at their primary challenge, which means almost three-quarters of all parking issues are space related. A lack of space is being felt most keenly by large scale employers. 89% of business with over 1,000+ employees reported space related issues.
Perhaps worryingly, environmental concerns didn’t seem to be at the forefront for most businesses. A mere 5% of respondents mentioned reducing the negative impact of employee car usage on the environment as their primary parking management focus.
Budget doesn’t seem to be an issue when it comes to parking management. With only11.6% of employers hinting that money was an issue when it comes to solving parking problems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, companies with less than 50 employees heavily over-indexed in this segment. With 20% of smaller employers reporting budget as being a big issue. The administrative burden of employee parking was noted as the primary issue for 10% of employers.
Covid-19 has proved a sea-change moment for many companies in their approach to parking. In fact, 43.7% will be making some changes off the back of Covid. Perhaps unsurprisingly, parking space reduction seems to be the order of the day for many employers.
With many businesses forecasting that employees will never work five days a week in the office again, it makes sense that they would be looking to decrease their footprint.
- 20% of employers are looking to make small reductions. With a further 7.5% looking to make large reductions.
- 45.4% of companies looking to make reductions have in excess of 250 staff, which appears to be an early indicator that larger employers are concerned that their real-estate footprint is no longer fit for purpose.
- Companies with less than 100 employees are more likely to be looking to increase parking capacity. 61.5% of companies looking to boost parking space count are in this category. This may point to SMEs feeling the work from home pinch a little stronger than their larger counterparts and hence a desire to get back to the office faster and safer.
- One stand out figure is 54.9% who see no change coming down the tracks. It will be interesting to see does business as normal resume for the majority of the market as they expect.
One thing everyone seems certain about is that the world of work will never be the same again. While people won’t continue to work from home from here to eternity. Most experts agree that flexible working will be the way of the future. This will see employees work from home a few days a week and from the office for the remainder. This is going to make it a lot harder to manage space in all aspects of real estate. Unless a company has the cash to burn they will be looking to adjust their footprint to suit the needs of their new reality.
Many companies are going to introduce a host of hot-desking and car park sharing software to ensure they are maximising the use of space. What is interesting is it appears a lot of companies don’t appear too worried about this challenge. Only 30% reported being worried that flexible working is going to make employee parking harder to manage. Maybe the digital revolution which has occurred during Covid has made the prospect of sourcing and implementing solutions a little less daunting. Or perhaps companies haven’t got around to thinking about what their car park looks like in a post-Covid world. It will be interesting to see how this evolves moving forward.
As mentioned earlier the negative environmental impact of employee parking is only a major driver of change for 5.4% of employers. This paints a relatively bleak picture for the future of responsible commuting. The good news is that attitudes are changing. When asked if they were more concerned about the negative environmental impact of employee parking than 5 years ago, 57.5% of respondents answered in the affirmative. Interestingly larger employers are considerably more concerned about the environmental impact. 80.4% of businesses with over 100 employees reported a growing sense of environmental consciousness.
Better news again is the attitudes of the largest employers. 96.4% of companies with 1,000+ employees reported an increased level of environmental concern. Some countries are a lot more advanced when it comes to legislation and supports to encourage businesses to diversify commuter methods. Take the USA for example. They are slightly over-indexing with 60% of businesses more concerned about the environment. This is probably due in no small part to the legislative approach of many leading US cities which encourage transport quotas for employers. In contrast, mainland EU countries who would have less sophistication in their legislative frameworks in relation to commuting would under-index with only 55.5% of companies growing more concerned about the environmental factors associated with employee parking.