On Call Policy
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4 Posts
Does anyone have an on call policy they can share with me which is designed for property managers or maintenance employees to provide weekend and evening coverage for tenants who have a question or emergency?
Do you pay for every hour the employee carries a pager or only if they come in for an emergency? If they come in - do you pay them time and a half? Or do you include the on call pay as part of their salary?
Comments
The short story is that the more restrictive your requirements are, the more you need to have them on the clock.
For example, if they cannot drink or if they have to stay within a certain number of miles of the workplace while "on call", it becomes sufficiently controlling over them that it is essentially "like work". The rulings on this are, as usual, on a "case by case" basis but the more you restrict their behavior, the more likely it is that their time is compensable.
Here is some language that might help: On call time is not considered hours worked when employees are free to engage in activities of their own purpose but are required to carry a beeper. On call time will be considered hours worked when employees are required to restrict personal activities so time cannot be used for their own purpose, such as being within 30 minutes drive of the facility (not drinking alcohol, etc.). Employees on restricted on call duty are paid their normal rate or overtime when appropriate. Employees who do come to the facility will be paid a minimum of 2 hours worked.
Check your state law on this before writing a policy.
We have the same situation due to our staff as well as tenants in our facility...we must maintain the building operational 24/7. Our maintenance team and the manager rotate the 24 hour on call process by carrying a 24 hour cell phone. Payment is given in recognition of this inconvenience and in addition we also provide overtime pay if they are called and must resolve a problem either from home or coming in to work. We pay a minimum of 3 hour overtime if called, as per our standard overtime policy. We do pay for being on call whether they are called or not...it's the requrired service we are paying for. We are looking at increasing our rates but currently to carry the pager we pay the individual $35 for each weekday and $75 for each weekend day and stat holiday. This pay is for covering the hours of 5 pm to 7 am during weekdays and 7 am to 7 am on weekens and stats.
We are also building in a "sleep time" clause where an employee can be given time to catch-up on their sleep, up to a maximum of 3 hours if there is a normal scheduled work day after their call response.
Keep in mind that the employee may be able to continue with their day to day activities but this is only to a certain level and that is what we felt we needed to acknowledge in our pay. If an employee is on call and goes to a movie, they must leave if called. Or if they are at a family function, their enjoyment of that function is still impacted. Employees can not go out of town in case they are called either.
Our response time is 15 minutes for the initial call back (don't need to come in yet) and then 2 hours to return to work or resolve.
Hope that helps. I do have more specific policy wording if you want but I know we are probably more generous with our compensation than others might be....but that also helps us to keep good qualified staff that are very dedicated. I know they will go over and above when required.
34: are the people you have on call exempt or non-exempt or one of each?
If they're exempt, you can pretty well do whatever you want as far as FLSA is concerned. The caveat is that if you are too inconsiderate, people will simply leave or fail to perform or both.
For non-exempt people, it goes back to "waiting to be engaged" versus "engaged to wait". The more you are engaging them to wait versus them being in a position of waiting to be engaged, the more likely it is that their time is compensable. If someone's sitting at home hoping you will call them and give them work, they are waiting to be engaged. If someone is sitting at home in case you need them and that is what you've told them they have to do, then they are engaged to wait.
It boils down to how effectively the person can use the time for their own purposes. If they cannot use the time for their own purposes, they are engaged to wait, which is compensible. However, you do not have to pay the same rate for time during which they are engaged to wait and you can do interesting things with schedules to make payroll work out reasonably.
Example 1: John's rate is reduced in compensation for the vast number of hours.
Let's say John the maintenance guy works noon to midnight M-Fr. That's a 60 hour week, of which 20 hours are during the time that he is engaged to wait. Maintenance people in the relevant labor market make $10/hr, or $400 in a typical FT work week. If you pay John $8/hr, he makes $320 straight time plus $240 in OT, $560 net for the week making nearly $10/hr but substantially more overall. That works in John's favor if he owns a DVR in case he has to go fix a leak and has a simple lifestyle that permits spending 20 hours in front of a TV each week. This is a matter of finding the right person.
Example 2: John gets 2 separate rates in compensation for the time that is typically not productive
Now let's pretend that John works 5 10s from 8AM to 6PM. John makes the market typical rate of $10/hr while on active duty from 8:00 until 4:00 and earns $6/hr from 4 until 6. That's [(8*10)+(2*6)]*4=368 for straight time pay and [(8*10)+(2*6)]*1.5= 138 for OT on the 5th day for a total payroll of $506.
You can always add a bonus if the person is actually used to make the deal more palatable, particularly if it's difficult to staff the position. In example 2, a bonus to offset the pay differential will be easier for payroll than assigning a bunch of different hours at different rates back and forth. It only gets ugly if they get called out a lot unless you put a max on it somewhere. Note that $6/hr isn't going to fly much longer, either.