Staff housing at a seasonal hotel: rooms, house rules and safety in the lojman

A lojman is the staff housing a hotel provides for its team, usually a separate block of shared rooms. Run it like a small hotel: set the number of people per room in writing, publish one page of house rules staff sign, inspect monthly, and check fire and electrical safety before the season opens.

A staff block that stood empty for five months is reopened in a week: beds, lockers, a group of people who have never shared a room before, and a building nobody has inspected since the season ended. What happens in that first week is usually decided by what the hotel wrote down before it. This guide covers the room standard, the house rules, the fire and electrical checks, the inspection routine and the boundary between managing the block and watching the people in it.

Why does the staff lojman decide who stays for the whole season?#

Because the room is the part of the job the worker lives in, and its problems surface in the first week, when replacing that person is hardest.

A seasonal worker weighs four things: the wage, the shift, the distance from home and where they will sleep. The hotel controls the fourth one completely, and often plans it last. A mid-season departure costs the operation in ways that never appear on one line: retraining, rota gaps, overtime carried by the people who stayed, and a service standard that slips in the weeks nobody is watching.

Staff read the block in the first hour. Was the room cleaned before arrival, does the locker lock, does the bathroom door close, does the water run hot at 07:00, does a phone work in the room. The common mistake is treating the lojman as a facilities problem rather than the last page of onboarding. It belongs in the first-week conversation, next to the uniform and the shift rota, as covered in a seasonal staff onboarding checklist.

Name one person accountable for the block. Housekeeping can clean it and technical can repair it, but without a single owner the faults circulate between departments and close nowhere. Be honest about the trade-off: money spent on the block competes with money spent on wages. A good wage with a bad room still loses people, and the two are judged together, not separately.

How many people should share a staff room, and what belongs in it?#

National building codes do not specify a fixed number of people per room for staff housing, but occupational health and safety rules require adequate space and hygiene. The specific number is a decision for the hotel, guided by your occupational health and safety expert and local municipal bylaws, and it should be written down, applied to every department and explained before contracts are signed.

Without a written standard, allocation happens under pressure: the newest and least confident staff get the worst room, and the pattern becomes visible to everyone within a month. The raw count matters less than what sits around it: bunk or single beds, floor area per person, a locked locker per person, bathroom and shower capacity at peak times, drying space for uniforms and towels, and somewhere to sit that is not a bed.

Separate areas need a written policy, not a negotiation at 23:00. Gender separation is the simplest rule to state and apply; couples, families and managers living on site need a written rule of their own, one the hotel can state in a sentence and apply to everyone. Plan by shift where the building allows it: a night-shift worker sleeping at 10:00 shares a wall with day staff getting ready, and no quiet-hours rule survives that layout.

What should the lojman house rules actually say?#

One page, in plain language, covering the ten things that cause the arguments, signed by each worker at onboarding and posted in every corridor of the block.

Keep it to one side of one page. A rulebook nobody reads is worse than no rulebook, because it looks like enforcement while settling nothing. Cover the recurring causes: visitors and overnight guests, alcohol, cooking and appliances in rooms, smoking, quiet hours, the cleaning rota for shared areas, damage and who pays, keys, and the date and condition for leaving the room at season end.

Write consequences as steps, not threats: a first conversation, a written note, a decision by a named person, and the same sequence for every department including the ones with the longest-serving staff. Shared kitchens and bathrooms fail first, so a named cleaning rota with a signature per day beats a general instruction to keep the block tidy. Sign-off is the mechanism: signature at onboarding, a copy in the personnel file, a copy on the wall. Rules that were never signed are opinions.

Season end needs its own paragraph: a dated room handover, a condition check with the worker present, key return and any deposit settled in writing on the day. The rules must also be readable by staff whose first language is not Turkish; how the hotel solves that is its choice, that everyone is held to the same text is not.

Signed: name, signature, date.

What does fire safety require in a staff block that stood empty all winter?#

The fire regulation treats dormitory-type accommodation as a lodging building, and the risks that matter most in staff housing are the ones the hotel never sees in the guest building: heaters, chargers, cooking appliances and a corridor used for storage.

In outline, the Binaların Yangından Korunması Hakkında Yönetmelik (Resmî Gazete, 19 December 2007, No. 26735, last amended 1 July 2025) requires lodging buildings to separate bedrooms from corridors with walls resisting fire for at least 60 minutes and doors resisting 30 minutes with self-closing devices. It requires at least two exits on every floor of lodging buildings with more than 20 beds or more than two floors, emergency lighting for at least 60 minutes, automatic detection in buildings taller than 6.50 m or above 1,000 m² of enclosed area, a voice alarm above 200 beds, and sprinklers above 100 bedrooms or 200 beds and in all lodging buildings taller than 21.50 m. Whether the staff block falls under the dormitory-type lodging class, and whether the guest building's fire report covers it, is a decision for the fire-safety consultant and the authority; do not assume it is covered because the main building is. The wider hotel fire checklist is covered in a separate guide to fire safety rules before the fire report.

The real electrical load in staff rooms is heaters, kettles, chargers and extension leads. Provide a safe alternative, such as a supervised kitchen and a permitted heater type, or people will improvise with whatever the shop sells. A bank of sockets away from bedding, and a rule about what may be plugged in where, prevents more fires than a prohibition nobody can follow.

Law No. 6331 (Resmî Gazete, 30 June 2012, No. 28339) requires the employer to identify possible emergencies in advance, prepare emergency plans, appoint enough trained people for prevention, evacuation, firefighting and first aid, and have drills carried out (Article 11), and to provide occupational health and safety training before work starts and at intervals (Article 17). The empty season is the risk: dust in detectors, batteries removed, doors propped open for ventilation, a heater serviced by nobody. The block needs a documented reopening and a documented closing, both signed.

Who inspects the lojman, how often, and what goes in the record?#

One named person inspects on a fixed schedule, every finding goes into a dated record with an owner and a closing date, and that record is what the hotel produces when something goes wrong.

Split the roles and keep one signature: housekeeping cleans, technical repairs, HR handles conduct, and one person owns the block and signs the inspection. The record holds date, inspector, room or area, the finding, how serious it is, who fixes it, the date it closed, and a photo where a photo settles the question.

The record changes behaviour. It turns "we told maintenance" into evidence, and it shows patterns: the same shower leaking three times is a repair problem, not three incidents. Set a repair rule the block can rely on: safety findings close before comfort findings, and the block has a budget line it can draw on without a fight each time. Give staff a way to report a fault that is not a complaint about a colleague, and a response time the hotel actually meets; a form nobody answers trains people to stop reporting. Keep the inspection inside the wider safety routine described in the department-by-department OHS checklist, so the same person who walks the kitchens walks the block.

What else does the lojman plan have to cover: meals, transport and laundry?#

Meals, transport and laundry are part of the same offer as the room, and each one fails in a predictable way: a meal service that ignores the night shift, a shuttle that leaves before the late shift ends, and a laundry rule that leaves uniforms wet.

Plan meals around shift times, not restaurant service times. A night shift needs a hot meal at a fixed hour or a kitchen it may use; dietary and religious needs are a written question at onboarding, not a surprise in week three. Meals are a cost decision the owner makes, but whatever is decided should be written down, so the canteen is not renegotiating the arrangement every week.

Transport is a rota problem before it is a bus problem, and it interacts with how shifts are planned across the desk, floors and nights. If the last shuttle leaves before the late shift ends, staff will find another way for a while and then leave. If the block is off site, transport is not a benefit, it is the condition of the job, and it belongs in the same conversation as the wage.

Laundry needs three decisions: uniform washing, drying space and who pays. Wet uniforms drying in a shared room cause damp, disputes and, over a season, a building that smells of it. Hot water is where a staff block most often fails: test capacity at peak shower times, 07:00 and 23:00, not at three in the afternoon. Connectivity matters more than most managers expect; staff keep in touch with families from that building, and a room with no signal loses people quietly.

Where is the line between managing the block and watching the people in it?#

Staff housing is a workplace building and a home at the same time, so the hotel needs a written line between running the building and monitoring the people who live in it.

Room lists: decide who holds them and what they contain. A list on a corridor wall with names and room numbers is a personal data question, not a convenience. Keys: a signed key register, a lock change when a key is lost, and no master key left in a drawer where anyone on a late shift can take it. Entry to rooms: a written rule that staff are told before the hotel enters, except in an emergency, and that the exception is logged when it is used. Health and personal data: a sick note, a medication or a family problem is not corridor information; name the person who holds it and the reason they hold it.

The principle is simple to state and hard to keep: the hotel manages the building, and the person living in it keeps the same privacy they would have in a rented flat.

Before the season opens#

Put four documents on one desk: the room allocation standard, the one-page house rules, the reopening checklist and the inspection schedule. Give each one a named owner and a date, then walk the block yourself, from the entrance to the last shower on the top floor, because that walk is the only inspection that tells you what a new worker will see in their first hour.