In some cases, distributed teams may have access to different things, so even with a follow the sun model, you may need to have a backup person on-call overnight. When possible, it’s a great way to ensure better work-life balance and address employee concerns about being woken up in the middle of the night. Scheduling on-call rotations during daylight hours is called a follow the sun model. If, on the other hand, your whole team is in Minneapolis, someone’s going to be on the night shift each night. If you have teams in both locations, it may make sense to assign on-call duties based on daylight hours. Better work-life balance and flexibilityĪ team in a single geographic location will need to plan differently than a team that’s distributed.Īfter all, 1:03 a.m.Better team culture and support for employees.More talented people who will want to work with your team when job openings arise.Higher employee retention (and satisfaction).Happy, well-rested engineers and developers who perform better.Whatever sustainability looks like within your organization and team, the benefits are clear: It may mean tracking your alerts and schedules to make sure one person isn’t getting disproportionately saddled with urgent tasks. It may mean meeting with teams to identify which potential issues must generate an alert even in the middle of the night-and which are less urgent and could wait until morning. It may mean creating a follow-the-sun schedule where teams across time zones are only tasked with being on-call during their waking hours. And it keeps employees from being overtasked, missing sleep, and sacrificing productivity and job satisfaction.īenefits of building a sustainable rotationĪ sustainable on-call schedule is one that respects and values employee time and system uptime and functionality. It minimizes the risk of scheduling errors and missed issues. For on-call workers in the medical field, there is a strong correlation between work satisfaction and protecting sleep schedules.Īn effective on-call schedule that’s tailored to your business and teams ensures customers are confident that they’ll get quick, consistent support for any potential incidents. Studies show that on-call employees with irregular schedules are more than twice as likely to often experience work-family conflict than employees with typical schedules. Employee engagement, retention, and focus are also at risk here. Of course, revenue isn’t the only thing impacted by ineffective schedules. The less effective your on-call schedule is, the more revenue you risk. The importance of effective on-call schedulesĭowntime costs businesses $700 billion per year-and that’s just in North America. Keeping teams happy, committed, and productive means taking their work-life balance into account when creating schedules. An unhealthy work-life balance has the opposite effect. Having the flexibility to roll with these kinds of punches will make for a happier team and a higher chance of getting issues resolved quickly when they do arise.Ī healthy work-life balance increases attachment, loyalty, and commitment to employers. And sometimes the schedule as a whole isn’t working for the team and needs to be revisited. Personal emergencies might mean an employee needs to pass an issue off to a backup person. There are times when small schedule changes might need to be made. Not allowing for flexibility in the schedule And knowing you’ll be on-call means developers have some built-in incentive to ship stable code.ģ. Relying on any one small group or person to handle your full infrastructure needs is asking a lot. If you want a recipe for burnout, this is it. For on-call rotations to be effective, they need to be tailored to your organization and team.Ģ. Large teams will operate differently than small teams. Companies with locations around the world will operate differently than teams in a single location. Or their schedules simply don’t work for their teams.įour of the most common mistakes companies make are:Įach organization and team is different, and your on-call schedule should reflect that truth. One reason on-call makes some people nervous is because many companies just get it wrong.
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