As anyone who is in IT knows, being on-call for after hours support in some way, shape, or form usually comes with the territory. But how much after hours support is reasonable to expect from IT staff? This is the hot topic around my office right now.
My company provides a high-volume 24/7 service to the public, and due to the nature of the service we tend to be busiest at night and on week-ends (which means the majority of service-affecting problems tend to happen during those hours). Being a somewhat small company, we have a limited number of staff to contend with these outages (right now we have 3 people on the rotation). Our technicians are on-call for a week at a time, and typically log somewhere between 2 and 12 hours of off-hours support throughout the week they are on-call (4 – 6 hours is probably the average). They are compensated for this extra work by a combination of OT and comp time. This of course does not alleviate the fact that the on-call person is typically dragging the week they are on-call (especially the ones who don’t fall back asleep easily after being called at 3:00AM).
Unfortunately, while I’d love to provide onsite 24/7 support, there isn’t enough operational work to justify having someone in the office all night to deal with the 2 or 3 support situations that may come up. What I’m wondering is whether this is a problem for other small (or even large) companies. How much time do your support technicians spend providing after hours support, and how are they compensated for this? Does the on-call responsibility ever create a morale issue? If so, how do you deal with it? I’m really curiuous about how other companies are handling this situation…