Company cars, travel benefits aid in employee recruitment, retention

• Leasing or purchasing employee vehicles. Hard-to-fill positions requiring considerable regional travel definitely qualify for this choice. Examples of jobs for which a car would be a perk include sales representatives, insurance adjusters, managers responsible for stores or offices in several locations, and technical workers going to customer sites for equipment installation and repair.

To be effective, policies must be clearly communicated, and a flexible, wide selection of safe cars should be available. If maintaining an open pick list, be sure to provide extensive facts and figures about the models.

A 2007 survey by Employee Benefits noted that the top changes to fleets consisted of introducing a cash allowance, creating a health and safety policy, restricting choices to diesel-only cars and making available additional equipment, such as satellite navigation systems.

When handled properly, offering company vehicles as a benefit is integral to an engagement strategy. On the flip side, managing this benefit poorly will result in ongoing team member dissatisfaction.

• Reimbursing staff for car-related expenses. With this option, the company would pay for gasoline, insurance, depreciation, maintenance, car repairs, car washes, garage rent, parking fees and tolls, and/or registration and license plate fees.

• Tax-deduction education. There are two choices for auto-related tax savers. One is using the 2007 standard mileage rate of 48.5 cents, which is easy to calculate and only requires a detailed log of miles driven for the deduction. Generally, this rate may be used even if the person also was reimbursed by the employer. The employee also may choose to deduct job-related vehicle expenses, as outlined in the previous paragraph. A tax credit is also allowed for hybrid and alternative-fuel motor vehicles.

• A work bus. If evidence shows that jobs remain unfilled because of candidate transportation problems, purchase a bus and hire a bus driver to pick up and take home workers. The cost of overtime, lost production, decreased morale from overwork and the inability to fill customer orders due to a lack of staff more than justifies the expense of this solution.

• On-site maintenance. Companies with demanding, long hours in an extremely stressful environment or industry should consider on-site oil changes for employees.

Everyone must take time to have this service performed or change the oil themselves. Having the service on site would save time, hassles and the exhaustive “one more thing to do” feeling. These types of businesses cannot afford any nonwork-related energy drains on associates. This solution is inexpensive and easy to implement and manage. In fact, an increase in energy, production and morale will be noticed because all laborers will see how much the organization cares. Actions do speak louder than words.

Organizations have several choices in using vehicles as part of their recruitment and retention strategy. Take a moment to research each idea and decide the most viable.

Lynne Haggerman, M.S., is president/owner of Haggerman & Associates, a firm specializing in management training, retained search, outplacement and human resource consulting. She can be reached at lynne@haggermanandassociates.com.