I bet you’ve cursed your luck while looking for a space in the office parking lot. Almost all of us go through this every single day—what a mess!
However, if you’re planning to improve the situation to accommodate both your and your employees’ vehicles, it’s time to apply some efficient steps.
Upscaling a parking lot is a complicated job if it wasn’t done ergonomically during the initial construction. Even so, you can follow some easy yet effective steps to turn things around, or at least, make things more comfortable for everyone in the office.
Enhance Your Office Parking with These 6 Easy Steps
You can achieve much better parking positions for your employees and workers by establishing parking policy, managing space, and controlling safety and vehicle access.
One of the most efficient ways to enhance your office parking is doing asphalt paving. It’s an industrial-grade pavement system to surface roads, parking, runways, etc.
What makes asphalt paving more reliable is its production setting. This dark, sticky pitch is carefully made in an asphalt plant for the construction of roads and pavements.
Now, let’s walk you through the six easy steps for improving your office parking lot:
1. Create and Implement a Parking Policy
You don’t want to confuse your officials, employees, and workers with vague parking rules. It’s better to create and communicate a concise parking policy so people can learn and implement the rules correctly.
Include these aspects in your workplace parking policy:
- Your company’s safety profile
- Your company’s work culture in plain language
- The nature of your business operation on each premise
- Your premises specific location
- Available commuting facilities to the workplace
- Alternative commuting to private car
Be smart to integrate a parking lot image (real or 3D) with the parking policy consisting of specific signs, indications, and instructions. You can utilize BIM software to get a vivid layout for this.
2. Start with Managing Parking Space
Managing your parking space is all about utilizing both empty and occupied spaces. If you can handle the empty spaces of your office parking lot smartly, it may reduce parking hassles significantly.
Integrating parking management software into your office system may increase parking availability by 30-40 percent. Such software allows the company’s senior or junior employees, workers, and other staff to set up their parking requirements.
You can regularly update your parking priorities and date and time on the app. This helps you get updates about the available parking time and space.
However, the cost of installing parking software may be high for small to medium businesses. If you’re an owner or senior official of an SME business, consider manual parking management where everyone can be connected, informed, and updated on parking spaces through Whatsapp, Messenger groups, etc.
3. Establish Proper and Regular Maintenance
Apart from managing the space, cleanliness is equally important in a parking lot for better accommodation and safety. Remember, your business image relies a lot on the visual impression your parking gives your guests and visitors.
Maintain your office parking lot regularly with the following:
- Install trash receptacles wherever required around the parking lot to keep the space clean and tidy.
- Paint the walls and ceilings if needed as it presents an aesthetic image to the parkers.
- Install and fix lights wherever necessary. Dim lights can cause unsafe driving and accidents.
- Put and maintain mandatory signs like entry, exit, reserved, fire lane, speed limit, etc.
- Keep shovels, snow blowers, road salt, and other required tools at hand in case of bad weather and emergency.
4. Ensure Parking Safety
Although it’s essential to work out your layout before construction, you must decide on it now if your office parking is giving you a hard time.
Separate the private car, truck, van, motorbike, and pedestrian lines to reduce the risks of accidents. Arrange the signs and lights properly so cars and walkers don’t collide.
Conduct risk assessment at regular intervals so that you can minimize potential losses of lives and properties. Regular assessments will help you evaluate what improvements are required. You can work on prioritized parking like disabled parking, bike parking, private or industrial parking, etc.
5. Prevent Unauthorized Parking
You may get a lot of random people pulling into your lot and leaving their cars there for hours although they have nothing to do with your business.
One way to prevent this is to apply an ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) system to your parking lot. It quickly scans and confirms each car’s license plate before permitting it to enter.
ANPR also makes the entry and exit of vehicles much quicker. It would’ve taken much longer by manual checking.
6. Implement a Guests and Visitors Verification System
You can double up the ANPR utility by monitoring your daily guests and visitors at the parking entrance besides tracking cars’ license plate numbers. It is possible for pedestrians to enter your premises and harm your property either intentionally or accidentally.
To avoid such occurrences, strengthen your guests’ verification system. It’ll help you restrict uncharted people from entering either on foot or by car.
A robust verification system may save your organization from potential criminal activities and damage or liability.
How a Low-End Office Parking Can Cost Your Business
If you’re still pondering the efficiencies of upgrading your office parking lot, learn about what downsides you may incur for not doing so:
- There might be conflicts between management and employees regarding parking spaces causing hard feelings and a hostile work environment.
- Lack of maintenance may cause accidents, which will eventually cost your business more.
- Insufficient parking spots can contribute to employees’ late arrivals, causing low productivity.
- Visitors and guests may develop a negative impression of your business if your parking lot isn’t in tip-top condition.
- Unauthorized access into your office parking lot may cause unlawful activities, which poses a risk of losing your business reputation.
Bottom Line
It’s wise to handle your office parking lot condition before things get out of hand. This comprehensive article should enlighten you about the easy and cost-effective steps of upscaling your parking area.
We’ve run down six steps that actually work if you put things together with proper planning and resource implementation. Make sure you don’t go overboard while planning for your office parking lot.
Consult with expert engineers and contractors to come up with a clear and viable reconstruction or development plan. We’re sure you’re going to pull this off.
