Running an on-call rotation is part logistics, part psychology. When done poorly it creates churn, low morale, and fragile systems; when done well it makes incidents predictable, learning fast, and teams resilient. These tips focus on practical decisions you can make this week to protect engineers and reduce firefighting while keeping your services reliable.

1. Define clear on-call responsibilities

Ambiguity causes stress. Make sure every person on rotation knows what they own and what they dont:

• Scope document: One page listing services, runbooks, typical escalation steps, and contact points.
• Expected response window: Set realistic time expectations (e.g., acknowledge within 15 minutes) and make them visible to the team.
• What to do vs. what to escalate: Provide concrete triggerswhen to page the secondary, when to call for leadership help, and when to open a ticket for follow-up work.

2. Keep rotations short and predictable

Long rotations add cumulative sleep debt and make life-planning hard. Consider:

• Shorter blocks (one week or less) for active teams; multi-week blocks for very small teams only when supported by robust follow-up policies.
• Fixed start/end times (e.g., Monday 9am to Monday 9am) so everyone knows their weekend boundaries.
• Publish the schedule at least one quarter in advance and make swaps easy but visibleallow voluntary swaps with manager approval to prevent gaps.

3. Pay or compensate on-call fairly

Compensation reduces resentment and signals that the company values the work. Options include:

• Flat stipend per rotation or per week.
• Extra time off after a major incident (time banking) so people can recover without penalty.
• Bonuses tied to on-call responsibilities for teams with frequent interruptions.

4. Protect maker time and respect boundaries

On-call should not mean constant interruption of deep work. Implement guardrails:

• Limit on-call tasks during the first and last two hours of a makers workday, unless a critical incident occurs.
• Encourage a culture of triage: if an alert can wait for the next business day and wont materially affect customers, schedule it rather than wake someone at 2 a.m.

5. Invest in alert hygiene

Too many noisy alerts are the single biggest driver of on-call fatigue. Make alerting smarter:

• Triage alerts with an error budget: only page people when an alert affects customers or core infrastructure.
• Use multi-dimensional thresholds and grouping to avoid duplicate paging.
• Regularly review and kill alerts that no longer indicate meaningful problems.

6. Make runbooks usable and accessible

Runbooks cut cognitive load under pressure. Keep them:

• Concise and action-oriented: steps to diagnose, mitigate, and where to look for logs.
• Versioned and close to code or monitoring dashboards so theyre easy to update when systems change.
• Indexed by symptom and by service so the on-call person can find the right procedure quickly.

7. Reduce toil through automation

Spend engineering time to lower repetitive work that consumes on-call cycles:

• Automate common remediation steps (restarts, scaling, cache flushes) with safeguards and audit logs.
• Provide self-serve tooling so on-call engineers can resolve incidents without manual, error-prone steps.

8. Run blameless post-incident reviews and track follow-up work

Postmortems are where learning compounds. Make them concrete:

• Hold a blameless review focused on causes, not people.
• Create short, prioritized follow-up tickets with owners and deadlines. Dont let postmortem actions vanish into the backlog.
• Share key learnings with the wider teamsmall write-ups or a short demo help spread knowledge without heavy overhead.

9. Design escalation paths and secondary coverage

Not all incidents are equal. Use a layered approach:

• Primary: first responderhandles detection and initial mitigation.
• Secondary/backup: a person who can take over if the primary is unavailable or needs help.
• Escalation to SRE or cross-team owners: clear rules for when to involve other teams or leadership.

10. Onboard people to on-call thoughtfully

New on-call engineers should be eased in:

• Pair them with an experienced on-call for their first shift or two.
• Run tabletop exercises that simulate common incidents so they can practice without pressure.
• Provide a checklist: access to monitoring, escalation contacts, runbooks, and tools for page acknowledgement.

11. Offer psychological safety and debriefs after tough shifts

Incidents can be emotionally draining. Normalize care:

• Debrief after significant incidents to talk through stressors and what support is needed.
• Encourage use of time off after night shifts or particularly stressful incidents without stigma.

12. Measure what mattersbut avoid punitive metrics

Track metrics that help improve the system rather than punish on-call engineers:

• Mean time to acknowledge and mean time to restore as engineering health signalsnot as performance KPIs for individuals.
• Alert volume trends to identify where automation or tuning can reduce load.
• Follow-up backlog completion rate to ensure learning from incidents converts into durable fixes.

13. Iterate on your on-call policy

On-call programs should evolve. Make review recurring:

• Quarterly reviews with rotating representatives from on-call, product, and leadership.
• Collect anonymous feedback after rotations to surface problems you might not hear in public meetings.
• Adjust compensation, rotation length, and tooling investments based on feedback and incident trends.

Designing an on-call experience that preserves people and systems is an ongoing effort. Start with small, reversible changes: reduce noise, codify playbooks, and give engineers predictable schedules and fair compensation. Over time these steps add up to less firefighting, better learning, and a healthier engineering org.