Working Time Regulations and all that jazz.. expectation of out-of-hours work (on call!)

telling people to call him any hour of the day and night
I've seen this a few times from folks in the US. "I'm on PTO next week so I might only check my emails and IMs every hour or two, call my cell if anything comes up, if I don't answer straight away it's because I'm travelling I'll call you right back when I can".
 
I've seen this a few times from folks in the US. "I'm on PTO next week so I might only check my emails and IMs every hour or two, call my cell if anything comes up, if I don't answer straight away it's because I'm travelling I'll call you right back when I can".

Where as my place are lucky if I remember to turn my out of office on at all. ;)
Even if I do it's pretty unhelpful...deliberately so. I'm not one for an essay on where else to get help or what to do. Mine's more like:

"I am out of the office until the new year"
 
Trying to make sure he/they understand my complaint is not out of hours work, as that is very much part of our industry (dealing with creatives, deadlines, technology etc.). Even down to simple things like replying quickly to that email at 9pm whilst sat in front of the telly.. because it'll save you waiting another 24hrs for a resolution/whatever. But as said, being technically "on call" is way different from this and he is just not understanding that.
The problem here is the boundaries can get a bit blurred in the sense of give an inch and they take a mile. If there was a blanket "I don't work out of hours without prior agreement" then the 'on call' thing kind of solves itself.
In their eyes, if the less critical stuff like replying to emails at 9pm is happening, they may struggle to understand why something 10x as important is getting short shrift or otherwise being called out as an issue. I'm not saying that makes their POV acceptable, just explaining they might not be on the same page because of what they are witnessing.
 
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Where as my place are lucky if I remember to turn my out of office on at all. ;)
Even if I do it's pretty unhelpful...deliberately so. I'm not one for an essay on where else to get help or what to do. Mine's more like:

"I am out of the office until the new year"
Why would you want your OOO to be unhelpful? Is your role unimportant and/or never urgent?
 
Why would you want your OOO to be unhelpful? Is your role unimportant and/or never urgent?

If I'm out of the office I prefer not to call out other people that should be contacted placing more work on them. If it's urgent, they will then naturally find someone else (whether in our team or not) when they raise it via the correct channels. We have a lot of people that come direct to members of our team causing issues in the long run.

It's not about importance or urgency. I just don't like the expectation of an essay in an OOO. Just keep it to the point. You are OOO and back on X. I can find your manager or colleague myself ta. I see ones where it calls out an entire list of different types of queries and people. Might just be me. I am also a miserable ****. ;) When I'm OOO I don't really care about work at all. I completely switch off and do not expect to be contacted unless if was a real emergency.
 
on call should be good money, make sure you're getting paid for it.
but don't do overnight, getting woken up is not worth it.

I was in this position before, boss wanted to impose on call for free, I made sure not to outright refuse, but refused to do it for free. That was worth about 10k a year back then, so maybe 15-20k now is what I'd expect you to get, otherwise just decline.
 
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I worked in a role which included on-call. On-call was anything outside of normal working ours and only for major incidents and sev 1s (depending on what it was). We had a day rate which ended up with a weekly pay of £380 on top of our wage. any time worked was charged at OT rates.
It worked pretty well as we put a lot of time during shift into monitoring / optimising to minimise the amount of issues outside of hours. I did 3 weeks in 5 on-call. Downsides apart from being bothered in my own time was that if i got called at 3 am for example i'd struggle tog et back to sleep and be tired for the 8am start.
Where i work now i don't do on-call but the company have it for some roles, we're really strict on the working time directive so if the team get called out at say 3am they are not allowed to work for the 11 hours between shifts. If their typical shift starts at 8am they would be paid as if they were working from 8am. If the 11 hours would have taken them to the end of their shift then they just turn in the next day as normal with a full day pay.

Personally i think there's got to be a really decent work /life balance so wouldn't be on-call anymore and just enjoy my free time more.
 
This is one of those times when they will not change a process while you keep covering it.

So you have to subtly force the process/system into failure, so it becomes a problem they have to fix.
 
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