Keeping crews well when they work away from home

Working away from home is a normal part of construction, engineering and maintenance work, and plenty of people do it for their whole careers. That does not make it easy. Long shifts, long drives, early starts, a house full of colleagues and a family a few hundred miles away all add up, especially over a contract that runs for months rather than weeks. The industry has become much more open about the toll this takes, and the accommodation is one of the few parts of it that a contractor can directly control.

None of what follows is complicated or expensive. Most of it is about specifying the right house in the first place.

Sleep comes first

Tiredness is a safety issue on site, and the most common cause of poor sleep in crew accommodation is the room itself. Shared rooms, thin curtains, a bedroom next to the kitchen, or a housemate on a different shift coming and going all night — each of these chips away at the hours a worker actually gets. The fixes are simple: a bed each, blackout curtains or blinds, and rooms allocated so that day and night shifts are not sharing walls if it can be avoided (night-shift housing covers the detail). A proper bed and a dark room do more for a crew than any extra on the listing.

Somewhere to cook and eat properly

Hotel crews end up living on takeaways, service-station food and whatever the bar serves. It is expensive, and after a few weeks it is miserable. A proper kitchen with enough fridge space for the whole crew, enough pans and plates, and a table big enough for everyone to sit at changes how a long stay feels. It also changes the cost of one (what a hotel week really costs). Crews who cook together usually eat better, spend less, and get on better too.

Fatigue and the drive

The commute is part of the working day, even when it is not paid as such. A crew based forty minutes from site on valley roads is adding well over an hour of driving onto a twelve-hour shift, often in the dark and the rain. That is where tired-driver incidents happen. Booking close to site is not just about saving fuel; it is about the last drive of a long day being ten minutes instead of forty. We zone every booking by drive time for exactly that reason (the M4 corridor by junction).

Space to switch off

Living with the people you work with is fine for a fortnight. Over three months, everyone needs somewhere that is not the site and not the same room as five colleagues. A lounge big enough for the whole crew, a garden or yard, and ideally a single room each make a real difference to how people cope. For supervisors and engineers who need to do paperwork or join calls in the evening, a desk in a quiet room is worth asking for. Sometimes the right answer is two smaller houses rather than one big one (one property or two).

Staying in touch with home

The thing crews mention most about working away is missing their families. Reliable broadband is not a luxury in a crew house — it is how people video-call their children at bedtime. We check the connection on every property we place crews in. The same goes for practical things: being close to a station or a main road for the weekend journey home, and a key arrangement that copes with someone leaving early on a Friday and arriving late on a Sunday.

A house that works when things go wrong

Little problems feel bigger when you are a long way from home. A boiler that fails in January, a shower that runs cold, a lock that sticks — if there is nobody to call, a tired crew just puts up with it, and that wears people down. Every crew we house has one number to ring for anything, and faults are fixed rather than left (how crew houses run day to day). The same applies to warmth and drying kit through the winter: coming home soaked to a cold house with nowhere to dry your boots is a fast way to lose good people (why drying rooms matter).

Small crews and lone workers

Welfare is not just a big-gang question. A lone engineer on a three-week commissioning job, or a two-man crew in a town they don’t know, can be more isolated than a crew of twelve. For them, the basics matter even more: a decent room, a working kitchen, somewhere safe to park the van, and someone who answers the phone. Two people for a fortnight is as welcome as two hundred for two years.

What we would specify for any long stay

• A bed each, with blackout in every bedroom.
• Day and night shifts in separate rooms, ideally separate floors or houses.
• A full kitchen and a table that seats the whole crew.
• Short drive time to site, measured in minutes, not miles.
• Reliable broadband, checked before arrival.
• Drying space and working heating through the winter.
• One number to call for anything, with faults fixed quickly.

Good accommodation will not make working away easy, but bad accommodation makes it much harder — and the cost of that turns up as tired crews, sick days and people who don’t come back for the next phase. Tell us the job, the dates and the crew, and we will specify the house around the people living in it.