Your parking space may be relegated overnight

Office car parks could soon be allocated by a live ranking of staff attendance and output, with the best spaces reassigned each morning. Under a scheme proposed by one regional parcel firm, the walk from your car to your desk would become a performance metric.

Many employers have returned to requiring regular office attendance and use badge-swipe and building-access data to see who is complying. Office parking is a scarce and contested perk, and it is increasingly managed through apps that allocate, reserve or release spaces day by day. Gamification, meaning points, streaks and leaderboards, is a standard feature of workplace software, from sales dashboards to wellness programmes. Data-driven, dynamic allocation of scarce resources such as desks, parking and meeting rooms is a growing practice in facilities management.

At 7:42 on a Tuesday, Gareth Pomeroy, a payroll administrator at a regional parcel firm, would be sitting in his hatchback at the barrier with the engine off, watching his phone. Behind the barrier, 140 spaces would carry no markings except a number. At 7:45 the app would refresh, and Mr Pomeroy would learn that he had fallen overnight from fourteenth to thirty-first, which under the scheme means Row D, beside the recycling cages. He would put the car in gear without comment. Behind him, three colleagues would be waiting to find out where they stood.

The scheme, described internally as merit-linked proximity, would rank every space from one, beside the glass doors, to 140, beside the fence, and every employee from one to 140 by a composite score of badge swipes, hours logged, tasks closed and what the vendor calls engagement events. The two tables would be matched each night. A person's parking space would therefore be neither fixed nor chosen but earned, daily, and visible on a screen in reception, in the lift, and on the app of every colleague. The firm would describe this as removing the politics from parking. The politics would instead be published.

Rows A and B would be a short walk under a canopy. Row D would be beside the recycling cages, and anyone ranked below 140, which the scheme allows for, would be directed to the overflow, which is a field. “I'm not bothered about the walk,” said Denise Akhtar, a warehouse team leader who would have spent most of March in Row C. “It's that everybody watches you do it. You walk past Row A, they've got their coffees, and they know your number, because it's on the wall behind them.” The firm would call this transparency. Ms Akhtar would call it a very long car park.

Points would be earned by arriving before eight, leaving after six, attending optional briefings and completing wellbeing modules, and would decay at a rate the vendor would decline to publish. Sick leave would not count against an employee. It would simply not count. A week of flu would therefore cost roughly twenty places, and a fortnight in hospital rather more. Tomasz Wierzbicki, a customs clerk, would return from an appendix operation to find himself ranked 138th, in the field, in February. “I'd have parked in the field anyway,” he said. “I just would have liked to be asked.” His climb back to Row C would take eleven weeks.

Behaviour would adjust. Within a month the car park would be full by 6:40, since the earliest swipe of the day would carry the most points, and most of its occupants would be asleep in their seats until the canteen opened. The firm would respond with a rule that a swipe must be followed within twenty minutes by verified activity, which would produce a great deal of verified activity at 7:00. Lift-sharing would emerge as a market: a Row A regular would drive a Row D colleague in for a coffee a day, until the scheme's terms were updated to describe this as rank laundering. The field would acquire a portable toilet, and then a second one.

Senior managers would be excluded from the table for what the scheme's documentation calls operational reasons, and would park in a separate row nearest the door, which would not be numbered. Asked about this, the firm's head of workplace experience, Miriam Castellane, said the row predated the scheme. “Parking has always been a hierarchy,” she said. “What we have done is make the hierarchy legible, fair, and daily.” She would drive a company car. Under the scheme, company cars would not be scored, on the grounds that the firm could hardly rank itself.

Two facilities consultancies would already be offering the model to other employers as a module, with an option to extend the table to desks, lockers and the order in which people are served in the canteen. At home, Mr Pomeroy's wife, Alison, would notice that he checked his position before he checked the children. “He says it's just parking,” she said. “He said that about the step count as well.” On the Friday, Mr Pomeroy would refresh the app at 7:45 and find himself twenty-ninth. Row C. He would text her from the car to say it was progress.