Overarching principles

These should reinforce your company objectives, needs and corporate values. By defining and agreeing such principles, the key stakeholders are creating a solid base on which policy can be designed. They are likely to be statements such as "We will ensure that our policy minimises the risk to our employees and others when colleagues drive on business" or "We will embrace all of the latest technological and fuel developments that are available that will assist XYZ plc in minimising CO2 emissions".

Keep the statements at a high level; they are there to provide a steer to your future policy. Get buy-in from the Board on these principles.

In the future, you can use the existence of such principles to make decisions and test whether the car scheme is heading in the right direction. You may be able to reduce decision-making processes in some areas of fleet as you will already have a clear direction provided from the leaders in your business.

Objectives

Developing short-term to medium-term objectives is about asking what your company specifically needs over the next 12 or 18 months from the car policy. These objectives should flow from the principles but be more practical and could embrace such areas as

• CO2 emission targets.
• Duty of care measures that can be incorporated into the policy.
• Cost targets (e.g. maintain current costs over the next 18 months or maybe reduce them).
• Fuel management (e.g. removal of free fuel benefits, fuel management/monitoring)
• Feedback from employees (e.g. from any employee surveys conducted).
• External stance versus key labour market competitors (e.g. more generous or innovative scheme versus the top four labour market competitors).
• Manufacturers (e.g. move to different badges or different number of badges

Try and ensure your policy objectives cover the key elements of policy - as shown in the diagram above. The dark green segments show the 'content', with the light green ring indicating that you need to ensure that the policy is well communicated (many good policies are poorly communicated thus losing much of the value they could deliver - employees may view the car policy as unexciting and may not fully realise the value of this employee benefit. How does your company communicate pensions, healthcare or flexible benefits? The car scheme communication should take account of this).

At this stage it would be worth checking whether there are any aspects of car policy that maybe cannot be changed due to past agreements formed with employees (e.g. as a result of company acquisitions or employment contracts).

• What objectives can you place a tick by? Be tough here - too many policies simply roll over from years ago and if the current policy does not directly do what it should, take note.
• Are some relatively minor tweaks needed? Or does it feel like the policy needs to radically change? The latter could have fairly major cost and manufacturer implications so ensure that your stakeholder group (e.g. finance director and procurement) are fully on board and supportive

If you feel there are no gaps, then no change is needed - you have proved that your car policy is aligned to business needs.