Re: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation
Generally, somewhere around 1 to 2 days pay for each week on call is typical--it really does depend on what you're paying your employees. Some guy making $10/hr is different than someone making $80,000. It also does depend on your company. If you're a small mom and pop shop and have a very strong team feeling, you may not be able to afford that premium--and your employees will still be fine pitching in for less. If problems are rare, then 1 day, if occasional, 2 days, and if frequent...well, you may want to examine infrastructure and/or hire night shift :) Also, typically there is some sort of comp-time / flexible scheduling involved here. If not done already, put the investment in various remote access and remote reboot setups so that, barring needing to actually replace equipment, everything can be done remotely. Have readily accessible spares, etc. In other words, make it as easy as possible... Having too-frequent on-call issues because of whatever will heavily impact job satisfaction regardless of what you're paying--at some point, money isn't the issue for most employees. Honestly, I would err on the side of generous on this if at all possible just from the standpoint of employee retention. From what I've seen in the industry, on-call is a major cause of burnout and job dissatisfaction. Additionally, because it sometimes directly impacts and interrupts family / personal time at unplanned moments, often spouses of employees start resenting it as well. A lot of companies do have manditory on-call that is not (directly) compensated so you aren't necessarily atypical if you don't directly compensate or you only do a token amount. Just keep in mind that you will decrease job satisfaction. -Clint Ricker Kentnis Technologies On Nov 14, 2007 12:00 AM, Marlon K. Schafer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We talked about this lately in my office. We're talking about $50 if you just pull standby, maybe answer a couple of phone calls. $100 if you have to go out or answer more than a couple of calls. marlon - Original Message - From: Mark Nash [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 6:40 PM Subject: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation We are wanting to have people be on-call in case of emergencies and for telephone tech support at night on weekends. How do you pay your people for on-call time where they are doing nothing, and how do you then pay them when they work during those time periods? Are there employment rules on this? Mark Nash UnwiredOnline 350 Holly Street Junction City, OR 97448 http://www.uwol.net 541-998- 541-998-5599 fax WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation
Good points Clint. The path I chose was to lead by example, which usually helps moral. I take the evening and weekend shifts personally. I also learned that for monitoring, that I could not always rely on a third party. When someone was on call, would they really be? Did I get the message before the on call person? I felt a better approach was to have some paid weekend hours. For example, each tech has to work one Saturday a month. Thats the day the hard to organize residential job gets done, or the day research and paperwork gets caught up on, or that network documetnation and management, etc. And if an emergency occurs, he gets pulled to take care of it. We rely on Voice Mail heavilly on Weekends, and support on call back only. And if I need someone on a late evening, they get paid time and a half or trade it for a larger number of hours off one day later in the week. Its understood that its the tech's responsibilty to do tech, and will require some evening work. But by doing the monitoring personally, I can make the judgement call on whether its cost justified to pay the tech to go onsite after hours. That may not scale, but for me its the reality of being a small business owner, until I grow large enough to hire for those periods. Also the sceond highest paid person, ios nmber 2 on the list for responsibility, and they also monitor as a backup to me. They may not get the alert at 3am, always, but I'm likely to learn about it a few hours before the start of business, if I miss the message personally. The larger you get the easier it gets to share the load. But with only 1 or 2 techs it is challenging. We also work on it by extendign our hours 8a to 8pm, so there are less hours outside of business hours. (this can be accomplsihed by working 4 long days a week, or staggering the start time of employees). Tom DeReggi RapidDSL Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband - Original Message - From: Clint Ricker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 11:34 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation Generally, somewhere around 1 to 2 days pay for each week on call is typical--it really does depend on what you're paying your employees. Some guy making $10/hr is different than someone making $80,000. It also does depend on your company. If you're a small mom and pop shop and have a very strong team feeling, you may not be able to afford that premium--and your employees will still be fine pitching in for less. If problems are rare, then 1 day, if occasional, 2 days, and if frequent...well, you may want to examine infrastructure and/or hire night shift :) Also, typically there is some sort of comp-time / flexible scheduling involved here. If not done already, put the investment in various remote access and remote reboot setups so that, barring needing to actually replace equipment, everything can be done remotely. Have readily accessible spares, etc. In other words, make it as easy as possible... Having too-frequent on-call issues because of whatever will heavily impact job satisfaction regardless of what you're paying--at some point, money isn't the issue for most employees. Honestly, I would err on the side of generous on this if at all possible just from the standpoint of employee retention. From what I've seen in the industry, on-call is a major cause of burnout and job dissatisfaction. Additionally, because it sometimes directly impacts and interrupts family / personal time at unplanned moments, often spouses of employees start resenting it as well. A lot of companies do have manditory on-call that is not (directly) compensated so you aren't necessarily atypical if you don't directly compensate or you only do a token amount. Just keep in mind that you will decrease job satisfaction. -Clint Ricker Kentnis Technologies On Nov 14, 2007 12:00 AM, Marlon K. Schafer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We talked about this lately in my office. We're talking about $50 if you just pull standby, maybe answer a couple of phone calls. $100 if you have to go out or answer more than a couple of calls. marlon - Original Message - From: Mark Nash [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 6:40 PM Subject: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation We are wanting to have people be on-call in case of emergencies and for telephone tech support at night on weekends. How do you pay your people for on-call time where they are doing nothing, and how do you then pay them when they work during those time periods? Are there employment rules on this? Mark Nash UnwiredOnline 350 Holly Street Junction City, OR 97448 http://www.uwol.net 541-998- 541-998-5599 fax WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org
[WISPA] On-Call Compensation
We are wanting to have people be on-call in case of emergencies and for telephone tech support at night on weekends. How do you pay your people for on-call time where they are doing nothing, and how do you then pay them when they work during those time periods? Are there employment rules on this? Mark Nash UnwiredOnline 350 Holly Street Junction City, OR 97448 http://www.uwol.net 541-998- 541-998-5599 fax WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
RE: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation
We pay $50 per weekend they are on call $100 per day if they are deployed to the field Gino A. Villarini [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aeronet Wireless Broadband Corp. tel 787.273.4143 fax 787.273.4145 -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Nash Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 10:40 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation We are wanting to have people be on-call in case of emergencies and for telephone tech support at night on weekends. How do you pay your people for on-call time where they are doing nothing, and how do you then pay them when they work during those time periods? Are there employment rules on this? Mark Nash UnwiredOnline 350 Holly Street Junction City, OR 97448 http://www.uwol.net 541-998- 541-998-5599 fax WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation
Excellent slashdot articles on this very thing: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/27/1946245 http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11917cid=255567 - I kinda like this one My $.002 below We had a special email address emergency@ that customers were told was to be used in emergency only situations. It was up to the tech with the on-call duty to take the call or to simply reply that the issue emailed would be taken care of during normal business hours. Some customers got it, others did not and took some training to get it right. When I worked on-call we made sure that the pager given to us was leased with a instant spare in the air insurance replacement policy. It was amazing how often that thing was dropped off overpasses, dropped horizontally through walls, drown in lakes and even, dropped in a garbage disposal accidentally, we must have replaced it 15 times in the time I worked there. It is also very important that there be an esprit de corp among your staff. So if you want to sneak away from the pager for a movie with your honey, someone else who might not necessarily be on-call is willing help you when you receive a page while you are in the movie. We also allowed the pager duty person some extra slack when it came to coming in early the next morning. The text based pager was important as you could see how bad the weekend was from the inbox of the pager on our IMAP server. It is also important that the _boss_ take on-call duties when it is appropriate. I may not like some of my former managers but one of them was great by always surprising whom-ever had pager duty on a holiday/anniversary/any-day by taking the pager. Of course, we all chipped in when he had the pager as he lived an hour from where we worked. BTW, when a cranky customer hits that pager with some whiney non emergency request and the CTO of the company calls him back, well, let's just say that whiney customer stopped doing that... :) Eventually taking the on-call rotation became a pretty big burden so the company hired a super-slacker-pot-head to simply sleep on a couch in the office and respond to the pager. If the page was a simple reboot-this-device-for-this-customer then he would go do the reboot- monkey thing. If it was anything more in-depth, he would call the appropriate person responsible for that system and either be remote hands or hand off the issue. All of his outgoing emails were canned and he generally was told to NOT directly communicate with customers. Having him basically sleep there but not really have any maintenance responsibilities was great for us as he was able to provide an outsiders view of what was causing the most pain. He left great emails for us with hey, this system is pretty much borked, if you fixed it, then I could sleep more! Some of my geek friends working for The DiG, Amazon and MSFT are given broadband adapters for their laptops so they can remote in from the park etc while on pager duty. With all that being said, we paid $100 a week for taking the rag, :) a red two-way pager shared between the four of us. I hope this helps, ryan On Nov 13, 2007, at 6:40 PM, Mark Nash wrote: We are wanting to have people be on-call in case of emergencies and for telephone tech support at night on weekends. How do you pay your people for on-call time where they are doing nothing, and how do you then pay them when they work during those time periods? Are there employment rules on this? Mark Nash UnwiredOnline 350 Holly Street Junction City, OR 97448 http://www.uwol.net 541-998- 541-998-5599 fax -- -- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -- -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation
We talked about this lately in my office. We're talking about $50 if you just pull standby, maybe answer a couple of phone calls. $100 if you have to go out or answer more than a couple of calls. marlon - Original Message - From: Mark Nash [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 6:40 PM Subject: [WISPA] On-Call Compensation We are wanting to have people be on-call in case of emergencies and for telephone tech support at night on weekends. How do you pay your people for on-call time where they are doing nothing, and how do you then pay them when they work during those time periods? Are there employment rules on this? Mark Nash UnwiredOnline 350 Holly Street Junction City, OR 97448 http://www.uwol.net 541-998- 541-998-5599 fax WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
