Kick-start your corporate mobility programme with a mobility scan

An ever-growing number of HR and Comp & Ben specialists are embarking on a journey to offer employees a wider range of mobility solutions, either in addition to or instead of the traditional company car. Whatever solution you choose, a mobility scan is a useful tool to get started.

This shift towards alternative employee benefits is being driven by multiple factors, including the desire to reduce the carbon footprint, legislative pressure to improve employee health & safety, practical issues such as accessibility or parking issues, the talent shortage and the accelerated adoption of the hybrid working model as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whatever combination of reasons applies to your case, a mobility scan is a great way to kick-start your journey towards smarter mobility within your organisation.

First and foremost, a mobility scan provides objective data about your employees’ commuting and company-related travel activities. Additionally, it gives you valuable insights into their desires which you can use as input to develop a new approach to corporate mobility on your path to saving costs, reducing CO₂ emissions and/or boosting employee satisfaction. In recent years, the mobility scan has become a professional and widely applied tool amongst corporates and the public sector for identifying, understanding and solving mobility and accessibility issues.

The 3 building blocks of the mobility scan

1. Quantitative analysis: insight into the current actual usage and potential future usage of mobility modes such as cars, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, carsharing and public transport, including the travel time, costs, emissions, safety issues and so on per mode.
2. Qualitative analysis: a survey giving employees a voice to elaborate on their (future) mobility needs and to increase their engagement.
3. Scenario analysis: insight into the relationships between employee needs and corporate needs, mobility options, use of space and the environment.

Professional support for your mobility

The best mobility scans are fact-based and offer a dynamic interface for scenario analysis or what-if analysis. Conducting a mobility scan can be a complex matter, especially when performing scenario analysis, such as by calculating the impact of the use of public transport in terms of time, costs and CO₂ emissions based on postcodes. Therefore, although some aspects can be executed in-house, a comprehensive mobility scan requires relevant expertise and effective tooling in addition to good preparation and high-quality data.

Today, numerous established mobility management providers plus an increasing number of tech start-ups offer excellent digital platforms for capturing data from connected vehicles. Such platforms make use of algorithms that combine publicly available data with data from your own connected vehicles and employees.

By creating multimodal mobility scenarios, the algorithms give you insights into opportunities for a more effective usage of public transport, ridesharing/carsharing platforms and micro-mobility solutions such as e-bikes.

If you would like to know more about how the mobility scan can help to accelerate your transition towards corporate mobility, sign up for the 3-hour power training from the Smart Mobility Institute (SMI) on 16 September. The SMI provides a platform to exchange best practices, discover new mobility solutions and participate in workshops to collaborate on innovative ideas with some of the biggest organisations and the most tech-savvy start-ups in corporate mobility.

Photo copyright: Shutterstock

Author: Saskia Harreman