On-call or working?

pete-20-11

I get around £300 for a week on call, plus overtime or time off in lieu for actual hours worked. 

£100 seems a bit poor, especially as they want you responding in 5-10 minutes. 

Will they be upset if you don’t answer the phone because you’re sitting on the bog?!!!😁

Serenity74

Thrugelmir said:

Nothing to suggest the employer won't be.  There's often an element of jumping the gun with office gossip leading the way. With employees working from home. Doesn't help with communication and everybody being on the same page. Until matters become official just is speculation. That does nobody any good.  Times are challenging for many companies who've yet to recover from the effects of the pandemic. Unless the business generates revenue and ultimately bottom line profits. People won't have a job to do in any event. 

Looking at the 11 hour break rule that will without a doubt be broken on a regular basis. Its not really office gossip, we've been told officially we will be covering 24/7.

The only unknowns at the moment are if it will be 1 week in 4 or 1 week in 8 depending if 1st line are going to be used, I suspect they won't as there will be too many calls they can't deal with. And how much the on-call allowance will be, we know for any hours worked it will be our normal hourly rate. 

To be honest the 'times are challenging' line starts to ring hollow, been hearing the same for over 10 years now across 2 employers. 'a recession is coming', 'we're in a recession', 'we're just coming out of a recision', 'austerity', 'pandemic', there's always something. As I mentioned earlier, during the pandemic we've been busier than ever yet have lost 50% of our staff to redundancy with their workload added to the remaining staff. At the same time wages continue to stagnate and benefits continue to drop away as 'you don't need x in lockdown'. It can't all be a one way street because 'you're lucky to still have a job'. 

Serenity74

zagfles said:

It sounds like a completely incompetant employer who doesn't understand the law and idiot sales staff who've sold cheap 24/7 cover without calculating the cost of providing that cover, which can be big depending how they define the cover, for instance did they specify emergencies only out of office hours or the same level of support as in the day? 

I suspect its more that they've chosen to ignore the parts of the rules that don't suit rather than being ignorant of them but this is pretty much it. SMB support seems to be in a race to the bottom with companies pushing prices lower and offering more to gain contracts. Jobs that 10 years ago would have been, as an absolute minimum, £75 per hour and now being charged as low as £35 an hour. 

In terms of what is being offered it is exactly the same level of support as during the day. As far as the customer is concerned there's no difference if they phone up at 3am or 3pm. 

Serenity74

oh_really said:

Do the terms of your employment require you to not only have a phone but to make it available for your employers business. Do the expect you to provide a landline as well?

I need to dig my contact out and see what exactly is in it but we've moved form being provided with a company phone to using our own phones with phone allowance to using out own phones with no compensation as 'everyone gets free minutes these days'. 

Don't need a landline but obviously need internet etc to work from home. We had several satellite offices housing one or two staff, they've all gone as people moved to working from home in the pandemic. We're now permanently working from home but don't receive any compensation for that. Too be honest that doesn't worry me too much. While there's costs involved working from home they are much less than I was spending on commuting and I don't miss sitting in traffic for hours every day. 

zagfles

Serenity74 said:

zagfles said:

It sounds like a completely incompetant employer who doesn't understand the law and idiot sales staff who've sold cheap 24/7 cover without calculating the cost of providing that cover, which can be big depending how they define the cover, for instance did they specify emergencies only out of office hours or the same level of support as in the day? 

I suspect its more that they've chosen to ignore the parts of the rules that don't suit rather than being ignorant of them but this is pretty much it. SMB support seems to be in a race to the bottom with companies pushing prices lower and offering more to gain contracts. Jobs that 10 years ago would have been, as an absolute minimum, £75 per hour and now being charged as low as £35 an hour. 

In terms of what is being offered it is exactly the same level of support as during the day. As far as the customer is concerned there's no difference if they phone up at 3am or 3pm. 

Point out to them that they can be criminally liable eg if anyone is killed in a car crash because they've not had adequate rest due to violating the working time regulations etc. See https://www.wilsonbrowne.co.uk/guides/working-time-regulations/

Do the customer contracts have SLAs? We used to have SLAs for various priorites, eg priority 1 would be fix within 4 hours, priority 2 would be fix within a day etc. Priority 1 was defined as system unusable. Quite often customers would log pri 1's which weren't really, ie they had an issue but system was partially OK. Our desk would tell them to switch the system off till someone got there. If they refused, eg because they're using the system in a partial way, they'd downgrade the priority and leave it till the morning.

Alanp

As an ex service engineer  I used to be on call, the first 26 years it operated as emergency call out, it was weekends 1 in 6, it was rare we went out but it did happen but only for one or two calls, and it was extremely rare we ever went out on a Sunday, , it was time and a half on Saturday and double time on Sunday, plus £100 weather you went out or not, then we were taken over by a company who was the polar opposite, we were guaranteed to go out at weekends, usually for a full day, it was an 8 hour response time, it was mooted that it would be down to 4 hours for a whole week, but this was voluntary and didn’t have many takers , I left nearly two years ago ( along with many others) and am so glad I did, this scene of yours sounds pants, if you can ,,leave,, this could be the thin edge of the wedge, if you accept this then, what’s next??

Dr_Crypto

This sort of stuff can be a nightmare. You need to look up the working time regulations and associated terms such as deferred rest. 

Basically on call only works if you are only going to be working very occasionally during the on call shifts. Anything more than that it you need a proper shift rota or people can’t get their mandatory rest and do their office hours jobs. 

On call is a nightmare as an employee too. You can’t relax properly (I find) and it intrudes into your social life - can’t go out, drink, etc. 

Serenity74

zagfles said:

Do the customer contracts have SLAs? We used to have SLAs for various priorites, eg priority 1 would be fix within 4 hours, priority 2 would be fix within a day etc. Priority 1 was defined as system unusable. Quite often customers would log pri 1's which weren't really, ie they had an issue but system was partially OK. Our desk would tell them to switch the system off till someone got there. If they refused, eg because they're using the system in a partial way, they'd downgrade the priority and leave it till the morning. 

They do indeed, although even the SLAs are a bit of a mess as things aren't defined properly. I've repeatedly raised that as an issue and nothing has been done but now with on-call being introduced its even more of an issue as we're being told to 'do what you think' which probably won't be an acceptable response when someone complains about the level of service they've received.

We have 2 SLAs to hit for each call, one for first response and one for fix. First response is anything from 30 mins to 4 hours depending on where on the ridiculously over complicated system of 10 different priorities it falls. Completion is anything from 4 hours to 10 days. We won't have any helpdesk to intercept nonsense calls out of hours, everything will be coming direct to us.

The biggest problem for me in terms of definition is the mid range SLAs. In theory you could just say you'll look at it when you're back in the office, ie the following morning or Monday if its a weekend, as the SLA for closure is 3 to 10 days depending on priority. But the customers, and more importantly the managers, expect the calls to be resolved much quicker than that. In reality those calls in office hours are closed within 4 - 8 hours. This is the problem with selling customers 24/7 support rather than on-call.

Serenity74

Nice memo sat waiting for me this morning. Confirmed as £100 for covering a week 24/7 plus normal hourly rate if you have to work, no double time etc for nights or weekends.

We will still be expected to work 9-5 as usual no matter what calls we get when on-call.

It is starting at 1 week in 4 with a promise of moving to 1 in 8 or 10 however I would be surprised if that happens. 

This one is genius, if you're on annual leave and on the rota to cover out of hours you will still be expected to do the out of hours.

The only tbc is how they are going to deal with sites at the other end of the country. Think I mentioned our head office is up north and I'm at the other end of the country. Don't think this is them being considerate, suspect its more to avoid paying a huge amount of mileage and travel time.

Now we have more details I'll be touching base with others today to hopefully push for a united front in resisting this.

Alanp

Wow, that really is taking liberties, what job do you do..?