Providing out of normal working hours support (IT)

haroldwne

Question about going rates for out of normal working hours support. This is for providing IT support to a customer.

Let's assume an employee is on a fixed salary. Working outside of normal hours has not been a part of the contract. Now let's say that he's asked to carry a phone and take it home once or twice a week, maybe one or two weekends per month, and be on-call.

What would be a typical either daily, weekly or monthly rate (whatever you are familiar with) for asking an employee to carry a phone, keeping in mind that they probably won't get a call? And let's say they do take a call, spend a half hour diagnosing and fixing a problem - what would be the call pickup fee? Plus any other fee for that matter?

As a benchmark, assume the employee is on €50k per annum.

Thanks in advance or replies.

2Shae

From someone who used to be in a company who did this it really comes down to what the employees want. Is it on rota (different staff member every week) etc or is it a fixed person

seamus

It varies. In some places being on-call is a condition of employment and time worked on call counts for nothing. Other places give a fixed on call fee regardless of how much had to be done.

The usual afaik is a set on-call fee or bonus, with time or time and a half for time actually spent working. Given that this is a new requirement you're introducing, you will have to negotiate payment.

But working out how much to pay depends on what "on-call" means. If it means simply being available to pick up a phone and handle alerts by ringing other people and getting them to manage the situation, then a straightforward hourly rate without a bonus is probably reasonable.
If you expect them to drop everything and be sitting at a laptop within a few minutes, then you're imposing restrictions on them, so a flat on-call bonus is appropriate, as well as an overtime rate for time actually worked.

You will also need to make note of working time requirements to ensure that employees aren't working more than their maximum weekly hours, but also to ensure that they're getting appropriate rest periods - if someone is working on a customer issue till 2am one night, you can't legally require them to come into work for 9am.

I am pie

My experience has been that fixed term employees don't get paid for out of hours support, but that they are rostered and given half days or days extra leave depending on what level of effort was required.

Depends on what is in place, if it is a new concept for the company you might want to discuss with your manager and ask what the best approach is to get staff buy in for this process, if money is tight am sure that hours or days in lieu would be acceptable.

Manach

Offhand merely being on call is not counted towards your average weekly statutory hours unless you need to be physically present at work, or actually been called.
Again offhand, rates wise for a weeks-on call including w/es ~ 150E, which does not include extras for then handling customer queries.

ifah

Every contract I've worked has required on-call so I'm well used to it by now - rates have varied from
- standard 12-hour fee (~130 per 12 hours) + minimum 4 hours billed for each call (even if it only takes 10 minutes to resolve) - had to be on-site within 30 mins so could never stray for duration.
- 20% hourly rate for each hour on-call + 1 hour billable for each call (even if it takes 10 mins) - remote access (could spend 8-10 hours working during night and then back in work for 8am)
- no pay (I didn't stay long!)
- Time off in Lieu (not great)

In general it is up to the employee to decide what value they place on flexibility with regard to their free time. Some on-call is very restrictive - all depens on the SLA you're working to.

Smoggy

2 hours @ x 2 for holding the phone
then if called time spent @ 1.5

Moonbeam

I always got an on call allowance for covering on call and extra pay if it involved a site trip. it never did involve a site trip though mostly just fixing stuff remotely.

iusedtoknow

I used to have to do on call - we had 1 hour to respond to a call, then the clock started ticking to be logged on and doing something about it within 30 minutes. We were contractually obliged to do this, and we ended up doing it every 8 weeks, though there was always a lot of flexibility, we could switch around with our co-workers etc.

The hours were 2300 on a Friday until 0600 on Monday. We were paid an extra E300 for this time period as you really couldn't do much else with the weekend (no cinema/concerts etc)

haroldwne

Thank you for all the replies. Some of the numbers mentioned give me something to go by.

To answer a few questions:

2Shae: In the beginning, it is likely to be two people, but the plan is to hire another three to split it out. Therefore, when one guy happens to be off sick or on holidays, the one other guy could potentially support Monday to Thursday from 5.30pm -> 9am the following day. Fridays most likely off. But Saturdays would definitely be on call... probably normal(ish) hours, like 8am - 6pm. This is likely to be the case for at least two or three months.


I am pie: It is a new concept for the company. Verbally at least, we have staff buy in. That so far has been fairly easy. It's a small company (< 20 employees in total). Remuneration is most likely going to be extra pay, not days in lieu.

ifah: The SLA is most likely going to be, worst case (for us anyway), a 2 hour turn-around for a P1 issue. In most cases, it should be possible to do this remotely... There is no reason to require on-site support. The app will be running in Cloud, developer can access sourcecode remotely etc...