Farmers Insurance

Eight years ago Farmers decided to consolidate the two offices located in Austin into one office. These offices were on opposite sides of the city so the decision to move to the office on the outskirts of Round Rock was discouraging to the south office employees. Along with this consolidation some duplicate positions were being eliminated and the parking lot at the north building was 200 places short of the total employee population. We needed our employee’s help to resolve this issue.

We got with Capital Metro who have gave us invaluable advice and gave us the opportunity to start vanpools to ease the parking lot dilemma and make the commute to the other office more palatable. With the information and guidance provided by Capital Metro we went to our employees and presented the vanpool program. We had rallies to introduce the programs and to provide the information to people who were interested. The people that were interested were provided information about other people who lived close to them and who were also interested in using a vanpool to commute to work. The zip codes were so large in some areas that it made it hard to combine people, but with Capital Metro’s help and our employee willingness to try the program we were able to get the program started. We helped our employees through the entire process and kept it in front of them thorough continued rallies and drawings with prizes such as free car washes, oil changes, and other car related benefits. Making the program fun is a good way to get employees to join. The program took some time to coordinate at the beginning, but it is easy to maintain once it gets going.
	By keeping the advantages of van and car-pooling in front of our people stressing the economic advantages along with the environmental impact they started buying into the programs. We addressed their concerns as to what would happen if they had an emergency by having a “guaranteed ride home” program. The program was two parts either they would be able to use a company car or if one was not available, than their supervisor or someone else in management would take them where they needed to go. This has been used 7 times over the past eight years. This program helped to reduce the fear of being stranded. A by-product of the van and car-pooling is the relationships that have grown between the participants. They are like small family units.
We give the vanpools front row parking and our car pools are in one of the front lots by the building. As you can see from the photos we have 13 vanpools, one of the new hybrid Prius cars, and 45 car pools with a total of 191 people riding together. This represents 34% of our total employee population. I am very proud of our employees and the commitment they have made to commute to reduce car emissions that affects all of us.