Let’s be honest: on-call can really, really suck. Getting woken up at 2 am, fumbling around in the dark to grab your laptop, and then finding out it’s a problem that can wait until the morning isn’t exactly a sustainable process.

Having an on-call rota is an integral part of providing a service that is available 24/7. In turn, a substantial percentage of industry members are either on a rota or responsible for running one – and it’s a stressful gig. As the person on-call you’re responsible for debugging and resolving a wide variety of issues, often relating to things that you rarely touch in your day-to-day. There’s also a significant personal cost: not only in the capacity of 2 am wake-ups but in the capacity of towing your laptop with you everywhere “just in case”. 

In this talk, we’ll discuss how to build a compassionate on-call rota, and how that can help build sustainable and high-performing teams.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:

• Key elements to creating an ethical on-call rota
• How the right schedule can feed performance in teams 
• What you can do to implement a similar on-call rota at your own organization