Not Available whilst on Call - Sack able Offence?

A2Z said:
Probation... is the time when you have to be squeaky clean. If you are off sick even for a day during your probation at my company then that's a good reason to let you go.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a terrible place to work - people get sick, it's a fact of life, it has no bearing on the quality of an employee as long as they were genuinely ill surely.
 
Last edited:
Marvt74 said:
Sorry if it wasn't clear. It was due to being out on the razz. No excuses for that at all. It was a stupid thing to do and i'm not defending it in the slightest. My original opinion was that dismissal was a little harsh IF it was a first time issue and the previous 5 months had been problem free. Especially for someone fairly young, who might turn into a productive member of the team for many years to come.

My advice at the moment has been to try and beg and ask for a second chance, even to suggest extending the original probationary period for another 3 months to prove his worth/reliability.

For some more info, the company involved is a fairly small (i think) Third Party IT Support type company, maybe around 5-10 employees. The person in question is my stepson so i accept i can't be fully impartial, although i do my best to take everything into account and believe i question things i don't know (such as whether there have been other incidents he's not told us about)
Click to expand...

We need a little more detail, what's the SLA's of this oncall, is the compensation in line with the SLA / work phone etc. Was it voluntary?

Should someone on probation even be doing oncall (is he on a lower starting wage)?

On the other hand why, knowing he is oncall, did he go out drinking? Of course that would be unacceptable and a sack-able offense for a new start as it's effectively turning up for work drunk.
 
I think a pertinent question here is also what his manager did to mitigate such an event. The guy was on probation so the company should assume they don't know whether he is reliable.
 
I'd dare say that if on call is treated as part of your main hours then you could get some sort of disciplinary but if it is overtime or allowance based then it could be a slap on the wrist or be taken off the rota temporarily / permanently assuming there are plenty of other folks available to take over.
 
I suppose we don't know the consequences of missing the callout - at my place we have a standby and our systems ring someone else if the callout was not picked up or accepted.

For all we know the callout could have been for a system going down with a large financial penalty for the client for example, or maybe it stopped production in a large factory - maybe the client demanded some blood for the failure...
 
BongoHunter said:
That sounds like a terrible place to work - people get sick, it's a fact of life, it has no bearing on the quality of an employee as long as they were genuinely ill surely.
Click to expand...
Sounds fairly reasonable to me. We do not retain people who have more than two sickness or lateness instances in their first thirteen weeks.

Generally speaking, away from HR policies and so on - employees who are off sick or late during their induction are almost never worth retaining.

Every time I've seen a manager make an exception for someone who they think is really promising/has potential blah blah blah they end up on the phone to employee remains a few months later along what they can do with this nightmare of a person who rocks up when they feel like it, rings in sick all the time and so on.

Recruiting is expensive, but people with a poor attitude and a bad work ethic are even more costly over time.
 
At our place not responding to an on call would be a disciplinary offence which would probably be dealt with quite harshly, particularly if there was no good reason. Last time I was on call, which is a few years ago now, you had 45mins to respond to a call out and if you didn't then the it started going up the management chain pretty quickly as escalations at that point due to the potential costs to the company if things weren't fixed (note only system/service down type incidents were on call).

Never happened to me in my time on call (although I did refuse to go onsite once, as there was no reason too and would have actually delayed the resolution of the incident as we would have all been travelling still when the network came back enough for us to regain system level access remotely) but I do know one guy who this sort of thing did happen to and he tried to blame it on one of his colleagues ... that didn't end well ...
 
Easier to get rid of people in probation. Much harder to get rid of them later. He's given them a sign that they might have to get rid of him, so why wouldn't they do it while it's easy...
 
billysielu said:
Easier to get rid of people in probation. Much harder to get rid of them later. He's given them a sign that they might have to get rid of him, so why wouldn't they do it while it's easy...
Click to expand...

It's pretty easy to get rid of anyone with less than 2 years in the employment.
 
Brookert said:
For those of you with an on call part of the job, how does that work with your pay?
Click to expand...
Get a fixed allowance depending on your level / salary that you get regardless of if your phone rings (2k - 4k)

Then for callouts get paid for you time at normal rate after the first 30 mins of a callout for the first call of an evening, get paid for all time of callout at normal rate for subsequent calls.

There are special rates for bankholidays etc.
 
Lopéz said:
Sounds fairly reasonable to me. We do not retain people who have more than two sickness or lateness instances in their first thirteen weeks.

Generally speaking, away from HR policies and so on - employees who are off sick or late during their induction are almost never worth retaining.

Every time I've seen a manager make an exception for someone who they think is really promising/has potential blah blah blah they end up on the phone to employee remains a few months later along what they can do with this nightmare of a person who rocks up when they feel like it, rings in sick all the time and so on.

Recruiting is expensive, but people with a poor attitude and a bad work ethic are even more costly over time.
Click to expand...

So glad I don't live in the UK and have to put up with this crap anymore.

Being sick is a 'poor attitude' and 'bad work ethic'? We wonder why the UK is so much less productive than other countries with a humane approach to staff.
 
Brookert said:
For those of you with an on call part of the job, how does that work with your pay?
Click to expand...
Back in the 90's I got a few K on call allowance for a week on call every month, and then two hours pay when called (double time on some days).

Nowadays I am more senior so it's expected that I am available for escalations 24/7/365 for no additional pay.
 
Brookert said:
For those of you with an on call part of the job, how does that work with your pay?
Click to expand...

For the support guys at my previous company they'd get paid £400 for being available on the weekend(Saturday morning till midnight Sunday), sometimes they'd do nothing and could just get on with mowing the grass, reading the paper etc.. etc.. but they had to be close to a computer so they could drop everything and deal with an issue if required.

If one of the support managers needed to be called (issue had to be escalated) then they'd get something like £100 too.

If on the other hand you're in R&D then it is just expected/part of the contract... then again you don't expect to get called very often and if you are then it is something serious. The director of R&D essentially declared that if developers don't want to be woken up at 3am when something they wrote failed then they shouldn't write **** code in the first place.
 
Just got back from a callout myself. I do one in four on a rota and get paid a set amount for being oncall / available and then time and half when called out. I usually try and get at least four hours overtime in for a callout to make it worthwhile (including travel).

I don’t particulary like being on call but it boosts my salary by about a third a year.

We have rotas so if someone does not pick up their phone they then page the next oncall person who might live miles and miles away.
 
Back when I worked in the field (IT support) we used to work it every 3 or 4 weeks, we had a primary and secondary engineer on call so if the first guy was unreachable or already busy then the second guy would get called in. Ther ewas an allowance difference of around £50 for the basic standby but then overtime for any callouts, mileage etc. Perhaps the OP company needs to look at having a standby just in case, it would certainly do nothing but help SLAs.
 
Rexton said:
I work IT on-call, in the office 8am-4pm, on call 5pm-8am at home.

We're unofficially told to "live our lives as normal" while on-call, and we're given an hour to respond to any missed calls.

I've missed a few due to being in deep sleep at 4am, however management is pretty understanding and I've never had anyone say anything about it.

I'd see if he can get the terms of his on-call, but I'd agree dismissal would be incredibly harsh.

With the amount of calls I take we're essentially working 5 day long shifts. We only get a few hours of sleep during the night in between calls.
Click to expand...
Sounds like a fun job.

Surely there's some kind of legislation preventing you from, in your own words, doing a 5-day long shift? I thought the whole working time directive was supposed to prevent that?
 
If they want him gone he will be gone.

If he is good they will give him another chance I suspect but if he repeats it he'll be gone.

The probation period doesn't really have any relevance to the above points based on how long he has worked there.
 
FoxEye said:
Sounds like a fun job.

Surely there's some kind of legislation preventing you from, in your own words, doing a 5-day long shift? I thought the whole working time directive was supposed to prevent that?
Click to expand...

Current legislation doesn't cover it very well - there seems to be an ongoing legal consideration though that if the nature of work during on call hours means the employee is forced to choose where they have to be during those hours, etc. that it counts as working hours and is covered by working time and minimum wage, etc.

EDIT: From a quick look seems it is working its way through the courts at the moment with some test cases at EU level so probably end up with some kind of legal implementation eventually.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom