5 tips for enhancing mobility as part of your Compensation & Benefits policy
Ever more HR specialists and Compensation & Benefits experts are recognising the need to initiate a new corporate mobility approach. Below are five practical tips that will help you to enhance mobility as part of your Compensation & Benefits policy.
Get more knowledge and inspiration at the first Smart Mobility Conference, organised by Smart Mobility and Frost & Sullivan on 10 June. Discover the programme, with a dedicated focus on HR related topics, and register here.
1. Develop employee mobility profiles
It is important to first establish a clear picture of the existing mobility situation within your organisation and define the parameters. What is your mobility target group – the entire workforce, or only those employees who are currently eligible for a company car (or cash alternative)? Should the approach differ between employees with a status-related benefit car and employees who need a company vehicle to do their job? Should you include commuters? What about employees who travel for work only occasionally? And how do you define ‘occasionally’?
Once you have clarified the target group, you can start analysing the data to create standardised mobility profiles or ‘personas’ for each of the various mobility behaviours, based on:
- frequency of travel
- average distance travelled (mileage)
- mileage outliers (i.e. the maximum deviation from the average and the frequency with which deviations occur)
- location (e.g. urban, suburban, rural)
- current mode of transport
- mobility spend (preferably specified as benefits versus essential corporate travel).
If you work for a large corporate or you have operations in numerous countries, it can be wise to start by selecting a pilot group and focusing on one specific market or employee group. Use online surveys and/or existing telematics solutions to enhance your insights.
2. Onboard your stakeholders
Since mobility is such an all-encompassing category, your stakeholders may include colleagues from Operations, Sales & Marketing, CSR, Finance, Procurement and Facilities – not to mention the fleet manager as well as your own HR department (including Compensation & Benefits and Health & Safety).
Different stakeholders will have different interests, and they all deserve to have their say. Make it clear that you understand each stakeholder’s perspectives and needs but focus on their capabilities and how they can contribute to making mobility a value-added solution for the organisation as a whole. Support this by communicating a common theme that is related to your overall company purpose and strategic goals.
3. Start small and digitally
Today ‘mobility’ often refers to multi-modal-mobility solutions, characterised by flexible usage and a combination of different transport modes according to the situation and the available transport means and it is still very locally driven.
Start with a small number of local initiatives and gradually expand them. Transforming corporate mobility doesn’t mean abolishing company cars – and definitely not overnight! Instead, it is about introducing tailored, flexible and smart mobility solutions as an addition to the company car in order to support your company’s strategy and sustainable growth whilst ensuring corporate social responsibility.
Starting small and starting local also makes it easier for you to get budget approval, set smart targets and monitor progress. Additionally, you should ensure that the new mobility solutions are backed up by digital processes and services to optimise the user experience, ensure connectivity (e.g. integration in IT systems for HR, expenses and reporting purposes) and support re-useability and the sharing of solutions.
4. Celebrate success and stay agile as you scale up
Once your first mobility policy is live (such as bicycle or e-bike schemes, corporate car sharing, shuttle services or a company car combined with a season ticket for public transport, to name but a few), it is time to communicate the results and, above all, celebrate your successes.
Make sure that everyone understands that an affordable and sustainable mobility solution supports the organisation’s overall business goals. Providing employees with tailored, flexible, convenient and smart mobility benefits will strengthen your HR strategy by helping your company to attract and retain talent.
Expand your efforts gradually, continuing to focus on small, local and digital, ensuring your mobility project remains agile. This makes it easier to scale up into other markets, business units or employee profiles.
5. Share best practices and gain new inspiration
The ever-changing mobility landscape means that HR specialists have to keep abreast of the latest industry developments – and the upcoming online Smart Mobility Conference on 10 June is an ideal way to do so. This international conference for all stakeholders involved in corporate mobility is aimed at stimulating the development of corporate mobility solutions. It will feature a strong focus on real cases and applicable mobility solutions while highlighting innovation.
This is an excellent opportunity for you to engage with other HR and Compensation & Benefits specialists, like Ferenc Hegedus of IBM, Vibona Som-Bonnard of AkzoNobel, and Peter Van de Velde of KPMG, as well as corporate mobility experts like International Smart Mobility Manager of the Year Pim De Weerd of Philips and Eva Lawless of Mercer in order to share best practices and gain new inspiration from one another.
Author: Saskia Harreman
