employee parked in parking lot outside of work hours — and it’s costing us money

A reader writes:

I am the plant manager of a small manufacturing company. Production hours are 10-hour days, Monday-Thursday. The office works Monday-Friday 7:30-4. There should be no reason any employees should be in our parking lot on a Saturday.

Last Saturday, the parking lot was restriped and the disabled parking spots repainted. No general announcement was made to our employees because, again, no one should be here except me and maybe another manger and we already knew this was going to happen.

Monday morning when I came to work, I discovered one of the disabled spots wasn’t painted. I called the company and found out there was a vehicle parked in one of the spots so they couldn’t paint it. The striping company called the general number for the business to get the vehicle moved, but of course no one was there to answer. They even called the police to run the plate to try to find the owner, but they wouldn’t as it wasn’t for “lawful purposes.”

After investigating and looking at the security cameras, we found that the vehicle’s owner was Chad. He told us he parks there every now and then on Saturdays as it is a convenient meeting point for his family when they will all fit into one vehicle instead of taking two. His vehicle does have disabled plates so he was legally parked in that spot.

The dilemma is that in order to get the company back out to paint this one spot (it does need to be repainted), it will cost almost two-thirds of the original bill as they have set travel and set-up costs no matter how big or small the job is and it would be an “unscheduled” job” with an added fee.

Is this expense something we could charge Chad for? There is a section in the employee handbook about hours of work and not punching in more than 15 minutes before or out 15 minutes after your shift, along with a statement about excessive loitering on company grounds before or after work. That was added so the snow removal company could do their job, as people were showing up an hour before their shift. There’s nothing about being on company grounds outside of your general work hours. Our contracted HR company told this really wasn’t “in their wheelhouse” to decide what punishment, if any, should be given, as part of their service.

How would you go about handling this situation? Chad said a notice wasn’t posted so how would he have known? Our answer is why would you be on company grounds if you’re not scheduled to work?

No, you should not charge Chad for this. That would be wildly unfair; this is a business expense, not Chad’s expense.

If you don’t want employees to park in the parking lot over the weekend, that’s absolutely fine — but then you need to clearly tell people that. Otherwise, it’s possible that someone could decide to do exactly what he’s been doing, figuring it’s available parking that no one will be inconvenienced by him using.

It’s also smart to make a general announcement if there’s a time when the lot absolutely cannot be used, even if you don’t expect anyone to be there. Otherwise you could get someone deciding to come in to catch up on extra work over the weekend or picking up something they accidentally left in the office or leaving their car there overnight because they had plans after work that they didn’t need to drive for, or so forth.

Consider this an expensive lesson in always announcing facilities restrictions to everyone.

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