On-Call Best Practices: How to Not Burn Out Your Team

Being on-call is a necessary part of running reliable services. But too many teams treat it as a punishment rather than a responsibility — and the result is burnout, resentment, and ironically, worse reliability.

Here's how to do on-call right.

The Foundations

Fair Rotation

Spread on-call evenly across the team. Nobody should be on-call more than one week out of every four. Smaller teams might need to hire specifically to enable a healthy rotation.

Compensation

On-call should be compensated — either through additional pay, time off in lieu, or other tangible benefits. Expecting engineers to be available 24/7 without compensation breeds resentment.

Clear Escalation Paths

Every on-call engineer should know exactly who to escalate to if they can't resolve an issue. Nobody should feel alone at 3 AM with a critical production outage.

Reducing On-Call Burden

Fix the Root Causes

If the same issues keep waking people up, fixing those issues is more important than optimizing your on-call schedule. Track recurring pages and prioritize eliminating them.

Improve Your Monitoring

Better monitoring means fewer false alarms and faster diagnosis:

• Tune alert thresholds to reduce false positives
• Add context to alerts so on-call can start debugging immediately
• Implement smart routing so the right specialist gets the right alert

Automate Common Fixes

If the fix for a common alert is "restart service X," automate it. The on-call engineer should handle novel problems, not routine restarts.

Invest in Runbooks

Well-maintained runbooks mean any engineer can handle most incidents, not just the original developer. Each runbook should be specific enough that someone unfamiliar with the service can follow it.

During the On-Call Shift

The Handoff

On-call handoffs should include:

• Active or recent incidents
• Known issues or upcoming risky changes
• Anything unusual about the current state of systems
• Any ongoing maintenance windows

Response Time Expectations

Be explicit about expected response times:

• P1 (Critical): Acknowledge within 5 minutes, begin working immediately
• P2 (High): Acknowledge within 15 minutes
• P3 (Medium): Acknowledge within 1 hour
• P4 (Low): Next business day

The Right Tools

On-call engineers need:

• Laptop with VPN access
• Mobile phone with alerting apps
• Access to all relevant dashboards and logs
• Runbooks bookmarked and accessible from mobile
• Direct contact info for escalation chain

Metrics to Track

• Pages per shift: Are they trending down over time?
• Off-hours pages: How often are people woken up at night?
• False positive rate: What percentage of pages don't require action?
• Time to acknowledge: Are response times meeting targets?
• Escalation rate: How often does primary on-call need help?

The Culture Piece

Respect On-Call Time

If someone was paged at 3 AM and spent two hours fixing an issue, don't expect them at a 9 AM standup. Flexibility after overnight incidents isn't a perk — it's basic respect.

Celebrate Improvements

When the team reduces pages-per-week from 15 to 3, celebrate it. Reliability improvements are often invisible — make them visible.

Make It Sustainable

If your on-call is so burdensome that people are leaving the team to avoid it, you don't have an on-call problem — you have a reliability problem. Fix the system, not the schedule.

On-call is a responsibility, not a punishment. When done right, it builds ownership, deepens understanding of production systems, and ultimately makes your product more reliable.