On-call engineers - your advice please?

[BigDannyO]

My company normally provides technical support for our product during office hours only, ie Mon-Fri 9-5 excluding public holidays.

We have an OOH contact centre which is set up for paid Service Contract holders, but is not used for technical support.

We had an incident yesterday where an installer in Scotland (where it wasn't a bank holiday) was getting into trouble with configuration of the product before a handover at 1300. Their MD managed to contact my MD who passed it to me and I dealt with the problem as much as I could whilst enjoying the bank holiday festivities!

However, this has now prompted the other company's MD to start making demands of our company, that we should have 24hr tech support with engineers always available. My MD agrees with the sentiment and has put it to me that we should be providing this.

I have reservations about implementing this, which my MD and other managers don't necessarily agree with.

So if you're an on call engineer or work in TS please can you answer the following questions? I have my own views but seeing as my fellow managers don't agree with me perhaps I'm in the minority?

1) Is it fair to assume that weekend, bank holiday and eventually 24hr on-call arrangements are made with no remuneration, as it is considered part of your "job description", and "swings and roundabouts" because the company has pre-arranged holiday days between christmas and new year (which incidentally are already covered by the same engineers on a rota for Service Contract call-outs)?

2) Would you be happy using your personal mobile?

3) When a technical support call become unsolvable without the resources at the office, what is the personal responsibility of the engineer?

Would really appreciate people's thoughts on the above, thanks for your time.

 

[platypus]

So if you're an on call engineer or work in TS please can you answer the following questions? I have my own views but seeing as my fellow managers don't agree with me perhaps I'm in the minority?

1) Is it fair to assume that weekend, bank holiday and eventually 24hr on-call arrangements are made with no remuneration, as it is considered part of your "job description", and "swings and roundabouts" because the company has pre-arranged holiday days between christmas and new year (which incidentally are already covered by the same engineers on a rota for Service Contract call-outs)?

2) Would you be happy using your personal mobile?

3) When a technical support call become unsolvable without the resources at the office, what is the personal responsibility of the engineer?

Would really appreciate people's thoughts on the above, thanks for your time.

1) Nope. If your employees are given Bank Holidays then you should be remunerating these either financially or with time in lieu.

2) Not on your life.

3) As with normal support, you need pre-determined and contractually agreed points at which to escalate, and what is actually covered by 24 hour support.

 

[ubern00b]

1) Hell no. I get 10% a year on top of my salary for a 1 in 3 week on-call rota.
2) Not a chance.
3) Escalation point is necessary.

 

[Em3bbs]

How long before someone complains about the use of the word engineer.

 

[BigDannyO]

1) Nope. If your employees are given Bank Holidays then you should be remunerating these either financially or with time in lieu.

2) Not on your life.

3) As with normal support, you need pre-determined and contractually agreed points at which to escalate, and what is actually covered by 24 hour support.

Thanks, you've written exactly what I would have answered. What is annoying me know is that I'm beginning to feel that for sticking up for my team on these issues I am being unreasonable.

When I, and those who I am responsible for, were employed there was no implication of providing an OOH service for technical support, so I strongly believe that any service that is provided needs to be administered and remunerated properly. Unfortunately it appears I am alone in this, presumably because my fellow managers (sales and admin related) and MD are not the ones who will be providing the service!

 

[JonJ678]

Perhaps I'm missing something here. Point 1 seems to suggest you're considering asking your guys to sign a new contract, which says they can be dragged into work at any point without warning, for no extra money. No way in hell I'd sign that.

I think you'll also put new people off working for you.

edit: DannyO - if you and the rest of the team can find work elsewhere, it may be prudent to jump ship at this point.

 

[BigDannyO]

How long before someone complains about the use of the word engineer.

That's a non starter - the people in my department are degree qualified, MIET, IEng, CEng or a combination thereof.

 

[covenantuk]

1) Is it fair to assume that weekend, bank holiday and eventually 24hr on-call arrangements are made with no remuneration, as it is considered part of your "job description", and "swings and roundabouts" because the company has pre-arranged holiday days between christmas and new year (which incidentally are already covered by the same engineers on a rota for Service Contract call-outs)?

2) Would you be happy using your personal mobile?

3) When a technical support call become unsolvable without the resources at the office, what is the personal responsibility of the engineer?

(1) No. We receive a 6% uplift in salary plus all hours worked on-call are paid in addition to salary.

(2) Only if calls are forwarded from a generic number and the forwarding changed to whoever is on call at the time. Renumeration must be made for any calls necessary. If customers have your personal phone then they WILL phone it when you're not on call

(3) We make best efforts to resolve, this includes attending our office if required as it has 24-hour access, but NOT our datacentre which has change request procedures in place for authorised access.
In practice we have VPN access to our nework so can fix anything from home that would be fixable in the office. If the engineer cannot resolve or put a temporary solution in place, then it is escalated to management who can liaise with customer/users to decide a course of action.


For all the of the above it required a new contract agreed with employees, this also set out the required minimum rotation (1 in 4 weeks) and SLA agreements.

 

[randal]

1) Is it fair to assume that weekend, bank holiday and eventually 24hr on-call arrangements are made with no remuneration, as it is considered part of your "job description", and "swings and roundabouts" because the company has pre-arranged holiday days between christmas and new year (which incidentally are already covered by the same engineers on a rota for Service Contract call-outs)?

2) Would you be happy using your personal mobile?

3) When a technical support call become unsolvable without the resources at the office, what is the personal responsibility of the engineer?

1. No, it's not fair to assume. What does it say in your contract of employment about out of hours support? More over, what does it say in the customer's contract with your company about supported hours?

If your company want you to start working this, they need to work out the on call allowance for standby and then what rate they pay for any called out hours. The standby payment ensures that you are available, meaning you make changes to your personal life to be available to support the business. The rate is for hours worked. I personally think it's unreasonable to just pay the hourly rate, because you've put your life on hold waiting for their call.

2. Ideally you should be provided a phone with which to make/take work calls. This is a 2 way street. Firstly you don't stump up your personal cash for your company, and secondly the company have a "reliable" means with which to contact you. That said, if the company want to implement an expenses process for you to claim back your calls/data usage then I don't see what the problem is.

3. Depends on the support model at the office, and what it is I guess. If it's a bespoke solution provided by your company, then it would be the support department's responsibility to fix. Then back off to dev/3rd line. If it's a vendor provided product then hopefully you'd have support to back off to with them. Really this comes down to how the support rota is structured. For out of hours call out you ideally want a backup engineer or a pool as additional knowledge contact points, or for fault handover if the fault runs on for an excessive amount of time.

 

[Orford]

15 years of being a on-call engineer for 3 different companies.

All of them paid a monthly payment for being in the on-call rota. All of them paid hourly rate at time and a half, minimum 30 Min's for every phone call even if it lasted 5 Min's.

All paid double time for bank holidays and triple for Christmas day. 24/7 on call one week in every three.

Holiday cover is up to me to arrange if my holiday falls on my on-call week. Thats easy to do as the other engineers expect the same favour back.

All provided a company mobile phone.

If the call cannot be resolved over the phone all companies paid over time to travel to the customers site from the moment I left home to the time of my return home. If there was no point in travelling to the site arrangement are made to have some one on site with a replacement the next morning. Passing the job back to the out of hours call centre who then pass it to the office as soon as they open in the morning.

Medical Engineer. I agree though more of a technician but they call me and engineer and pay me as an engineer, so who's arguing.

 

[BigDannyO]

1. No, it's not fair to assume. What does it say in your contract of employment about out of hours support?

Absolutely nothing. We are entitled to TOIL if we are required to work over hours or at weekends, but that needs to be pre-arranged between employee and employer.

More over, what does it say in the customer's contract with your company about supported hours?

There is no contract in place for technical support, we advertise it is available during office hours.

3. Depends on the support model at the office, and what it is I guess. If it's a bespoke solution provided by your company, then it would be the support department's responsibility to fix. Then back off to dev/3rd line. If it's a vendor provided product then hopefully you'd have support to back off to with them. Really this comes down to how the support rota is structured. For out of hours call out you ideally want a backup engineer or a pool as additional knowledge contact points, or for fault handover if the fault runs on for an excessive amount of time.

We are the manufacturer of a bespoke system, so it's really down to us. If, during office hours, a call couldn't be resolved we would make arrangements to visit site. We make no promises on how quickly we will attend, but for Service Contract call outs we would do next working day, which is what we would normally aim for with tech support escalation.

I would want my OOH support engineer to be able to terminate the support call and arrange next-working day on-site response if necessary, but my contemporaries believe the call should be "dealt with there and then".

 

[Orford]

Our service contract has a promise to have a viable solution within 4 hours. Which is marketing speak to sell the contracts. As a viable solution within 4 hours could be to do a site visit the next day.

 

[platypus]

Essentially you will need to offer your employees a new contract (at the very least to cover the EU working time directives), and if you were to change my job [description] to encompass on-call without offering remuneration I would be looking for a new job.

Surely your other managers aren't so stupid that they would expect any different?

 

[Caged]

The other managers probably expect them to go along with it because of 'the economy' and 'they should be grateful to have a job'.

 

[Maundie]

Where I work it's the following:-

1, If you work on shifts (either OOH call desk or OOH engineer on 24/7 support) there is a minimum £7k shift allowance but bank holidays etc. are classed as normal days for them as the money is for unsocial hours.

2, No they are provided work numbers (either direct lines or mobiles)

3, To visit site/customer and try and resolve the issue with the resources they have (be it software re-installs to hardware replacements)

 

[BigDannyO]

The other managers probably expect them to go along with it because of 'the economy' and 'they should be grateful to have a job'.

It is precisely this. Not a great situation to be in.

 

[Caged]

Because obviously when the company was making money hand over fist they were sharing it with their staff.

Edit for content: If you roll on this one it will never end. The fact that you're a team of people who know a custom product inside out makes it very hard to replace the whole team at once, so there is no chance you will all get let go if you refuse to sign a new contract.

 

[randal]

Absolutely nothing. We are entitled to TOIL if we are required to work over hours or at weekends, but that needs to be pre-arranged between employee and employer.

If they want to implement a structured on call system to ensure that engineers are on hand 24/7/365 to support a customer requirement then I would say this needs to be revisited in your contract of employment. For both yours, and your customer's benefit.

There is no contract in place for technical support, we advertise it is available during office hours.

Saying the above, is your customer trying to pull a fast one then?? Your MD is right to keep customers happy, but if they're not paying for a service and making demands then they're taking the mick out of your MD. I suggest he goes back to them and a) asks them to check their contract and b) asks them if they're willing to pay for the service. It's a business, not a charity after all. (Unless you're a charity lol).

We are the manufacturer of a bespoke system, so it's really down to us. If, during office hours, a call couldn't be resolved we would make arrangements to visit site. We make no promises on how quickly we will attend, but for Service Contract call outs we would do next working day, which is what we would normally aim for with tech support escalation.

I would want my OOH support engineer to be able to terminate the support call and arrange next-working day on-site response if necessary, but my contemporaries believe the call should be "dealt with there and then".

Well that sort of SLA/response and process would be defined in a support contract with the customer. What you've described sounds like a best endeavours with next business day response, if the customer is expecting 24/7 fix within X hours then you need that clearly defined with them.

Done properly this is a nice little earner for you, your engineers and your company and your customer gets the level of support they want in order to perform their business. Done improperly, your customer is going to run rings around you and work you and your team into the ground with their demands.

 

[anything I don't mind]

1) depends on the employment contract.
2) the company can not expect staff to use their own phone credit, unless it was specified in the employment contract.
3) Depends on the support contract, for us the ooh is best endeavours only. If there is a p1 issue then it gets escalated to the third line who covers the affected site, who is not in the ooh team. Our ooh team is fairly limited. They have full access to the sites but usually only do password resets and help with documents and remote access problems. Anything more significant is logged and passed to the on site team the following day. If its a p1 then the third line for that site is meant to know about the problems through monitoring before a user calls the ooh about the problem. If your ooh contract is full support and you support scotland client, that do not share the same holiday and they would expect full support on a day when you are not geared up for it. Then I would be annoyed if i was a customer as well and you should make provision for those days by paying the staff on ooh extra money to work the public holidays if the customers are expecting full support. I can't imagine there are many days in a year where it might occur that scotland do not share a holiday.

 

[Catanonia]

Your company is experiencing what happens to all software companies eventually, the realisation that they need to provide 24/7 support to customers and they are not geared up for it.

You need to put a budget plan together and present it to your bosses outlining the new hires needed to provide shift work, extra expenses such as pay and equipment and offset this against a premium support plan that customers pay for.

Do not let it go lightly with "one offs" to appease the bosses otherwise you will dig a hole for your team

Expect a head count of 30 - 40% to provide shift work and 10 - 20% increase in pay for those doing it.

Present this to your bosses and give them the finacial choice They will soon back down or you may get lucky and end up with a proper support operation which you know you need.

All of these numbers are approximate, do your own calculations.

Good luck