An on-call schedule forms the backbone of your incident response system in the event of an outage or when an issue is raised. This type of schedule does not keep end-users waiting and helps maintain the reliability and availability of your software. However, on-call management practices often induce worry and anxiety in team members. In extreme cases, it can even be a contributing factor in employee burnout.
On-call management is one of the most important aspects of seamless IT service. Its aim is to ensure that the right person is notified in the case of an incident, so that they can react accordingly as quickly as possible. In certain cases, many people have to be notified. To achieve this as efficiently as possible, it is vital to have an up-to-date and smoothly functioning system.
There is a moment in every company when 24x7 support is needed. Congrats! The next step is to start building an on-call team. In this article, we'll go through some of the aspects you should consider. We'll keep it small and, in a future article, go deep into each step.
On-call is a special working hour arrangement under employment law. It comes into effect when the employee is obliged to be contactable at least by phone, so they can start work in an emergency. On-call duty is generally counted as time specifically meant for work purposes. In practice, this means that employees are normally not allowed to work while on-call. However, there may be exceptions. For example, on-call employees may also work from home if they can be reached through their work device.