The easiest way to improve your team’s morning

If you want to boost staff satisfaction and reduce morning stress, it’s worth looking at how your employees are getting to work.

Painful commutes and bad parking experiences are common issues, particularly for those working in busy CBD and city fringe areas where parking is scarce and expensive.

Insufficient employee parking is not only frustrating, but it can also affect employee engagement and satisfaction, which is bad for business. Staff dissatisfaction can affect productivity, profitability, and retention. Luckily, technology has paved the way for parking software to ease the problem. It is providing new ways for companies to provide adequate staff parking and improve the mornings for your employees.

The morning commute is a major pain point for staff

According to the OECD, commuting to work is “the daily activity that gives the least amount of enjoyment.” Even if most of your staff only have a 25 or 30 minute commute, which is around the average for Americans, Britain's, Australians, and New Zealanders, that means 9 or more days of driving to and from work each year.

Commuting doesn’t just waste time that could be spent on something better; it’s also expensive, tiring, and stressful, especially when people are driving into work and aren’t sure where they will be able to park.

Searching for a park compounds the problem

A significant portion of commuting pain comes from parking, which is often costly and time-consuming:

• Between thirty and forty percent of CBD congestion in major cities comes from people searching for a place to park, with workers easily spending five to fifteen minutes looking for a park every morning
• In the UK, the average driver spends nearly four days each year searching for parking, and it takes 8 minutes on average to find a parking spot in London
• In New York City, drivers search for more than half a kilometre, on average, before finding an available parking space

Spending five or ten minutes searching for a park not only costs staff time; it also pollutes our environment. Much of this problem comes from the lack of transparency over parking availability, as the only option is for people to drive around until they see an available parking spot.

If your workplace offers first-in-first-served staff parking, but doesn’t provide an easy way for staff to check parking availability or reserve a parking spot in advance, this could be a significant source of time-waste and frustration.

The cost of parking is frustrating

If all or some of your staff are using on-street or public parking, they could be spending a big chunk of their paycheck just to get to work - and that certainly doesn’t contribute to a good start to the day.

• Australian and American cities have the most expensive short-term parking in the world, with the average rate in New York and Sydney at $30USD per hour
• In Australia, this trend is only increasing: the number of car parks charging a daily rate of AUD$89 tripled between 2016-17 and 2017-18
• Parking in Auckland’s CBD is also increasing in price, with some car parks charging up to $40 per day

Most workplaces provide parking that is either free or more affordable than public parking, so one way to reduce parking costs for employees is to make sure that your parking space is being fully utilised. We’ve found that on average, 20-35% of commercial car parks sit vacant during the workday, often because car parks are allocated to people who are away from the office.

Instead of letting your space sit empty while staff search for expensive parking elsewhere, Parkable's parking management solution lets employees easily share and book parking spaces.

Why you should care about your team’s commute

Not only is the time and money wasted on the commute bad for employees - it’s also bad for businesses. Staff satisfaction is crucial for attracting and retaining excellent employees, creating a great work ethic, and increasing profitability. In fact, companies with happy, engaged staff are 22% more profitable than those with unengaged staff.

Improve staff parking and satisfaction

Parkable’s parking management solution reduces commute times by letting people know exactly where they can park in advance, and can create cheaper staff parking by enabling more people to access your on-site car park. This will stop your employees feeling stressed when they arrive at work, so they have better days and do better work.

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about implementing stress-free staff parking at your workplace.