On call support compensation

[suicidal_monkey]

My company is reviewing it's on call compensation, and trying to find places to compare with. If any of you have an on call rota I'd be very grateful if you could share some info with me (DM or this thread as you wish!)

Specifics I am after...
Do you get paid extra for being on call? Taking a call? Bank holidays? If you're happy to share some detail that'd be amazing.

For reference, at Ocado we get paid a flat rate when on call (£33, 66, 132 for weeknight, weekend, bank holiday) and 1.5 time when taking calls outside working hours (2x on bank holidays). Requirement is being ready to take a call (ie not drunk have phone signal, not far from home: able to get online with broadband to fix things within 45 minutes max, ideally 10). We tend to do weekly shifts.

[albert]

So you're saying by covering all night on a weekday they give £33 for being on standby before even a call is placed. Then 1.5 time for every half hour, hour (what minimum time do you clock?).

I think the rates are similar to what it was at booking.com when I was there, except you got a flat â,¬520 for the week as a flat rate. You were not expected to be in the office at 9am if you handled a 3 hour overnight incident, and during the day you are only on project work, unless actually called due an emergency, then you react obviously.

Expectation is you are on a call managing an incident asap, normally within 10 mins. No social life (well other than how many beers at home can you handle before getting reckless?).

We had one person covering all services, but he/she was not expected to solve the problem, but rally the right people to get involved. This meant you were on call for 1-2 weeks per year only.

Also that meant yes, they got called, for sure, but didn't always get the problem to fix, whoever did also got the 1.5x 2x rate.

We used pagerduty, and everyone setup their own notifcation preferences. Swaped weeks etc. All linked to the payroll system.

I think for sure what your company pays today certainly should not reduce, a slight increase in flat rate per day would be fair, and perhaps a set per hour rate rather than based on a persons salary, as after all, every person on call does the same job exactly, holds the phone and reacts in a timely manner.

[Penfold]

Sorry, I've not had dealings with this so can't offer any help. One of my client's has an external IT support company and I can see if I can get an answer from them if that would be of use?

[FatBob]

Our on call is 1 week in 4 and we are on call from 17:00hrs on a Friday until 09:30 the following Friday 24/7 and we have the following setup -

You get 15% of standard wages for all on call hours worked so for a full week i can claim 19.2 hours of my standard time (plus then any calls and overtime as below)

callouts during the week are £25 per call (regardless if its the service desk asking what time it is !) and that includes the first hours work any further work after the first hour is at 1.5 x

callouts during the weekend are £35 per call and then any further work after the first hour is at 2x

Bank Hols are £60 per call then any further work after the first hour is at 2x

requirements pretty much as yours - have to be within an hour of logging on, capable of responding to human speech (although sometimes.......)

HTH

[Evilntwisted]

Its been a year since I left my MSP to work as a Sales Engineer but this seems standard with most MSP's. Our on call rota was from Tier 2 / Tier 3 engineers and was 1 in 8 roughly. The expectation was to do your normal shift 9-5 and if on call it switched over from 515pm to 8am the next working day inc all weekend's. I would highlight it was extreamly rare we would get calls past midnight and if we did then we were lenient with the start time in the morning.

We paid £30 per day for being on call and then any calls dealt with were overtime of 1.5x on top.

Likewise there was an expectiation to be able to start working the call within 30 minutes.

[suicidal_monkey]

Thanks all

Please don't go to any trouble bothering your clients Pen.

If possible FatBob & Evilntwisted could I get the company names? Don't worry if you'd rather not share though!

We're basically looking at whether we're competitive with what we do for it and apparently there's no readily available market data out there like there is for salaries.

Our teams also use pagerduty for alerting but it's not linked to payroll so they have to enter time [into workday...:sideways:] separately/manually and because people often swap days here and there (some teams run a daily rota ...so they only need to appear to be sober one day in a row) so the daily rate works okay. Usually 4~7 people on a rota depending on team size. Typically people do do a week at a time and so get £330 flat rate for it (Fri/Sat/Sun all count as weekend nights), plus any overtime pay for any actual calls. Ideally that person manages to fix things but they might have to wake another team's on call person or escalate (if the escalation person, like me, is on a "best effort" rota then they get overtime for the call only, ...but they don't need to always be, er, in a suitable state to take the call so there's no flat rate for us). We have a completely separate team whose job is to accept issues directly raised by our clients and direct them to the correct on-call rota in pagerduty, but we try to catch what we can via automatic alerting before anyone is impacted.

We do have something about starting late the following day when on long calls overnight but I'm not sure that part is written down in a coherent way (it's not leave but...probably depends on your line manager) and it's been a while since I had to think about that - I shall have to check!

[TheDvEight]

On call all week £175 to be available 24/7 via telephone and visit if needed/emergency 9/10 won't get called out. Have to stay in and around the area I live.

[Evilntwisted]

Thanks all

Please don't go to any trouble bothering your clients Pen.

If possible FatBob & Evilntwisted could I get the company names? Don't worry if you'd rather not share though!

We're basically looking at whether we're competitive with what we do for it and apparently there's no readily available market data out there like there is for salaries.

Our teams also use pagerduty for alerting but it's not linked to payroll so they have to enter time [into workday...:sideways:] separately/manually and because people often swap days here and there (some teams run a daily rota ...so they only need to appear to be sober one day in a row) so the daily rate works okay. Usually 4~7 people on a rota depending on team size. Typically people do do a week at a time and so get £330 flat rate for it (Fri/Sat/Sun all count as weekend nights), plus any overtime pay for any actual calls. Ideally that person manages to fix things but they might have to wake another team's on call person or escalate (if the escalation person, like me, is on a "best effort" rota then they get overtime for the call only, ...but they don't need to always be, er, in a suitable state to take the call so there's no flat rate for us). We have a completely separate team whose job is to accept issues directly raised by our clients and direct them to the correct on-call rota in pagerduty, but we try to catch what we can via automatic alerting before anyone is impacted.

We do have something about starting late the following day when on long calls overnight but I'm not sure that part is written down in a coherent way (it's not leave but...probably depends on your line manager) and it's been a while since I had to think about that - I shall have to check!

Sure I worked for Buisness Computer Solutions for 17 years. https://www.bcs365.co.uk/ I am sure they would happily talk to you about it. If you do want wider data I work with different MSP's everyday at ConnectWise as I am a Sales Engineer.

I would however say you are competitive from what I have seen and maybe slighlty too high but It depends on the area you work I suppose. London is always higher.