Furloughs and Staff Reductions: Impacts on the Parking Industry

The past two-plus years have been difficult for every industry – especially the parking and mobility industry. The impact of entire communities and organizations shutting down, people working from home, events being canceled indefinitely, and more, have resulted in a significant reduction in parking demand. As a result, many organizations have had to furlough much of their parking staff, or even eliminate positions altogether.

As the country begins to open back up, some organizations are bringing their people back slowly. This isn’t as easy as it sounds considering their revenues have been significantly reduced and they may not have the finances to bring everyone back just yet. This has led to a struggle to perform not only their daily parking operations duties, but also to support their customers in ways they would prefer.

Also, during this time, customer expectations have changed. Many seek a more touchless parking experience that not only lines up with their continued transition to a more mobile-dependent lifestyle, but also as people prefer to interact with fewer (or keep at a greater distance from) people as they go about their day.

The customer/parking staff relationship will look different moving forward. Ideally organizations will be able to bring back as many people as they can to perform the “personal touch” of effective customer service and parking operations and management. Fortunately, the past few years have also seen a dramatic increase in the solutions and technologies available to help parking staff do their jobs.

These tools and resources will help returning employees support their customer base more extensively throughout their parking portfolios, on-street and off-street, providing these customers with the mobile experience they’re looking for, while maintaining a high level of service and accountability.