How to set up carpooling in business?

In the current context of rising fuel costs, many employees are asking their employers to better cover their transportation costs.
Among the various alternative mobility solutions put forward by the Employer Mobility Plans and the Sustainable Mobility Package, carpooling meets the needs of employees furthest from their workplace and poorly served by public transport.
What are the advantages of carpooling?
Carpooling has many advantages, both for the employee, for the company and for society as a whole.
It reduces self-driving (moving alone in your car). As a result, this allows the company to reduce the environmental impact linked to its activity and thus meet its CSR commitments. As a reminder, transport is the source of 30% of a company's CO2 emissions. Using this lever therefore represents an effective way to reduce your carbon footprint.
On the employee side, carpooling significantly reduces daily transportation costs and improves purchasing power. Encouraging carpooling is therefore also a way of acting for the purchasing power of its employees.
Among the other advantages to highlight in terms of HR, carpooling also helps to strengthen meetings and solidarity between employees. It also helps improve well-being, health and quality of life by reducing stress.
Finally, it helps reduce parking problems and even optimize spaces dedicated to parking.
How to encourage employees to carpool?
The company can have a strong incentive for the development of carpooling among its employees. By subscribing to a carpooling offer in the name of the company and implementing actions to promote this mode of travel, it allows its employees to identify themselves as members of the same company and to benefit from conditions advantageous use. In return, the company has access to carpooling data concerning its employees: number of journeys made, reduction of carbon impact, etc.
The employer's incentive can also have a financial aspect, either through covering all or part of carpooling costs via the sustainable mobility package (FMD), or through co-financing journeys directly via the carpooling site. Up to €700 per year per employee, tax and social exempt, can be allocated to financing this mode of travel via the FMD. This sum can now be combined with the employer's participation in the collective transport subscription, which allows carpooling to also present itself as a complementary mode to the use of public transport or an alternative in the event of a strike in particular.
How can we put in place the optimal conditions to ensure the success of the approach?

The effectiveness of a carpooling offer lies in the volume of carpoolers available in the same geographic area. To promote the proper functioning of the offer launched within a company, it is therefore important to create a mass effect by encouraging all volunteer employees to register at the same time. Conversely, if registrations are spread out too much over time, the first registrants will be discouraged by the absence of a real offer and will leave the application, which will result in the constant maintenance of a low offer and the weak efficiency of the system.
Organizing events around carpooling to encourage employees to register on the same carpooling site is particularly effective for startups. The organization of challenges and user testimonials then help to disseminate this mode of transport within the company.
Finally, extending the approach to neighboring businesses or to an entire business area makes it possible to increase the mass effect and the number of carpooling possibilities.
How to choose your carpooling application?
In order to ensure the greatest success of a carpooling incentive approach, it is important for the company to recommend to its employees the use of a particular application, or even to subscribe to it in order to create an effect. network linked to the company.
Several carpooling applications are available on the market. They are characterized by offers that are slightly different from each other.
Among the important points to observe when making your choice, we note the following elements:
- The number of registered carpoolers in the geographic sector concerned: the more carpoolers there are already registered, the more possibilities there will be beyond just the company's employees;
- Provision of a monitoring platform for the employer;
- The existence of “guaranteed return” insurance;
- The cost of the journey;
- The possibility for the company to finance journeys through the FMD directly via the application, which makes the management of the system transparent.
Some applications also offer support systems for launching the process or long-term support. Depending on the resources available internally to facilitate these procedures, it may be interesting to subscribe to this type of contract in order to guarantee the success of the operation.
Finally, in certain territories, urban areas have entered into specific partnerships with certain applications, which allows companies in these sectors to benefit from preferential or even free membership rates.