Benefits of Carpooling

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Car pooling, daily commute

If you are going nuts navigating the city traffic, here’s a solution you might like to try. Car pooling or ride sharing. It reduces your stress of driving as also has other benefits for you and your society at large. Car pooling benefits its members in many ways including saving money, saving fuel, reducing global warming and easing traffic.

The Indian Carpool Survey conducted by Indimoto gives interesting details about the demographic, social and economic profile of commuters who have adopted carpooling as a mode of commuting. Over 500 commuters who have used the internet (carpool listing/classified sites including Indimoto.com) to enter into carpool/rideshare arrangements across India since 2006 were surveyed.

The findings indicate that carpool as a concept has been embraced primarily by educated commuters from major metros with well paying jobs. This trend can be attributed to high internet penetration in the metros and greater awareness of carpools and its benefits amongst such individuals. Not surprisingly, it is more popular in cities where the traffic situation is the worst like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

The maximum car-poolers belong to New Delhi (57 %) followed by Mumbai (23 %) and Bangalore (8 %).  Only 16 per cent of the car-poolers are female who however believe the concept to be relatively safe.  70 % of car-poolers are in the age group of 25-40 years (70 per cent). They form the most active working population and commute to work daily.

57 % of car-poolers are highly educated with most holding a post graduate qualification. 99 % of respondents carpool for an income generating activity and majority (84 per cent) are salaried employees.

It’s not that the car poolers surveyed were short of funds. 57 % earned over  Rs. 50,000 per month and 10 % upwards of Rs.100,000 per month. These are well paid private sector employees, car-pooling to their offices in various metros. Only 6 % of the car-poolers do not posses a private vehicle while 86 per cent own one or more cars and share driving responsibilities with fellow car-poolers.

As expected, majority of car-poolers commute over long distances each day, 84 % commute over 26 kilometres everyday with 17 % travelling over 76 kilometres on a daily commute. Despite this, 38 % car-poolers are able to keep their commuting costs below Rs. 3000 per month by carpooling.

Car-poolers say the primary accrued benefit is the reduction in CO2 emissions which helps them reduce their carbon footprint in the race to save the planet from global warming. 67 % cited this as the main benefit of carpools. Indeed highly environmentally conscious.

62 % appreciated the money saving opportunity through carpooling while 53 % were glad that they were reducing traffic on choked city streets. Saving of precious fuel was cited as another benefit by 41% of the car-poolers.

Contrary to popular belief that carpools are a social challenge, 38 % opted for it to increase social interaction with like minded commuters working or living in their vicinity. Reduction of stress due to driving/commuting alone encouraged 31 % cent of the respondents to carpool.

The benefits of car pooling are many. As far as I can see the biggest drawback is it cuts flexibility. You are on your own if you miss the bus…er, in this case the car !

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Coaching Fundamentals

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A Step A Day, coaching

“What’s with this coaching stuff?” asked a young manager the other day. ” Can you tell me briefly what it’s about?” I explained that firstly a coach is not necessarily an external expert. As a manager, he too has responsibility for coaching his team.

Coaching seeks to close the gap between the current and desired performance of an individual or team. Help develop your team members by :

• mutually assessing goals and current performance
• understanding the present situation
• exploring possible solutions
• drawing up specific, achievable goals
• supporting them in their action plans

I clarified that as an external coach, it is not necessary to know everything about people’s work to coach them well. It is indeed advantageous to take an objective view of an employee’s goals without being bogged down by details.

Coaching succeeds when you help employees learn from their mistakes, identify their performance targets and take responsibility for implementing corrective actions.

Good coaching avoids telling people what to do. The worst word a coach can use is “ Don’t”. Instead help them understand consequences of their actions. Instead of saying ” Don’t be late” try “ Have you seen the benefits of coming on time?”

Look at the effect of coaching on delegation. If you don’t take the time and effort to coach, the capabilities of your team and the trust you have in them will be limited. This results in your doing most of the work yourself. You feel under stress and you cannot delegate.

On the positive side, by coaching for skills, you make your team members more competent. This makes trusting them to deliver more easy. You are able to delegate more to them resulting in higher challenges for them and less stress for you. It frees your time to concentrate on more important tasks.

“All said and done” I said “Coaching is a practical and useful way to develop skills and talents in your team”.

 

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