Percentage of pay for technical support 24x7 for 50% of the year

Question

I work for a manufacturing firm with a development team of 2. We've created real-time apps that are now an integral part of the process, a process that runs 24x7. Technical support for the process has been provided in an informal way. The dev team members have been given a company phone and support calls go through to whoever answers first, no guarantees though.

After an incident where no support could be provided because both of the team members were unavailable the company wants to introduce a more formal agreement. Basically support will be rotated, 1 week on, 1 week off. The employees will be paid to be on support, receive a call fee for any calls and receive a call out fee if required to go into work to fix the problem.

My question is this: What is a reasonable amount of pay to expect in return for this level of service? As a percentage of salary or as a dollar value, please specify US, AUD, etc.

Also, is anyone else in this situation and if so what are you doing/what are your experiences?

Answer 1

Myself, I would pay between 5% - 10% loading, probably at the lower end given they're rotating this role.

A call out rate is definitely a good idea too. For our casual staff, we give them a 4 hour minimum so if they're called out for an hour, they get paid for 4. This is at their normal hourly/salaried rate. For support, I would say a 2 hour minimum would be more than adequate.

Additionally, you might want to consider the severity of the call and whether anything actually needs to be done out of hours. Urgency & Impact. Your staff should be trained to ascertain this should they receive a call. If a resolution can wait until morning, then it could simply be logged and dealt with the next day. Here's a useful article on prioritising incidents (http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol3iss1.htm).

Finally, I would recommend trialing it for a few months, gathering all the metrics you can and then making an assessment.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

What you've stated sounds great for hourly workers. I concur with Carl's 5-10% numbers, and his suggestion to vary it based on how many people you have working the rotation. However, I think a four-hour minimum is overly generous. When I was in the outsourcing business, we billed our customer in fifteen-minute increments. Given that was a built-in minimum (as far as the customer was concerned), a one-hour minimum seemed to be quite fair as an "inconvenience fee" which goes to the support tech. After all, they are already getting paid more to simply "carry a phone".

For salaried workers, I've seen "pager pay" range from 5% to 15% of base pay. You may want to set the fee higher than for hourly workers as a salaried employee is not getting paid by the hour, so therefore they won't get paid per call. On the other hand, if you want to keep your workers happy, I strongly suggest that you implement some sort of award program if you don't have one already. If a really nasty service call causes someone to drive back into the office and work through the entire night, the least you can do is give them a (sizeable) "attaboy". It was not uncommon to receive a several hundred USD$ one-time bonus when we had people work to resolve a very highly visible issue outside of normal hours or over an extended period. I think I got an $800 award once if I recall correctly. That was a pretty crappy week which led up to that award as you might have guessed. :)

(Just in case anyone is curious, my employer at the time from which I'm basing the above numbers was Hewlett-Packard.)

Answer 3

You need to pay the hourly workers at straight rates of pay for this, which means regular pay for regular time and overtime pay for hours in the week over 40, either worked or on standby. Putting an employee on-call is basically asking that employee to set aside their lives and time for your company and all of that employee's time and life will be disrupted for that.

When you put an employee on standby, you are basically engaging them to be waiting. The US Department of Labor as well as the Supreme Court have determined that regardless of what you have the employee doing, the employer must compensate them for all of their time. It is wrong to have that hourly employee on standby and compensate them in a way different from the regular pay rates. The employee will consider that the employer is "ripping them off" if the employer arbitrarily sets a different scale or rate for the time they are required to sacrifice being on standby and could result in litigation, either before the Labor Commissioner or in open court.

Having hourly employees do 24x7 support is one of the biggest mistakes an employer can make. You need to re-classify the position as "exempt" and raise the salary of the position commensurate with the duties that are to be expected.