NearIRM
NearIRM Team
NearIRM Team2 min read

How to Build an On-Call Rotation That Doesn’t Burn People Out

Incident Response

Burnout on on-call isn’t caused by one bad week. It’s caused by a system that treats every alert like an emergency and every engineer like they’re always available.

A good rotation reduces fatigue by design. It limits interruptions, spreads responsibility fairly, and makes sure alerts go to the right person the first time.

Start with coverage that makes sense

If your team is small, keep the rotation simple. One primary, one backup. If your team is larger, split by service or domain. The goal is the same: the person getting paged should be the person most likely to fix it fast.

Don’t overbuild. Most teams don’t need five levels of escalation. Three is enough for almost any situation.

Set timeouts that respect reality

A one‑minute timeout isn’t fast. It’s just noisy. People need time to wake up, read the alert, and decide what to do. Five minutes is a sane default for most levels. Ten is fine for backups.

If your system can’t tolerate a five‑minute response window, that’s a system design problem, not an on‑call problem.

Cut noise before you cut sleep

Noise is the number one driver of burnout. If you don’t control it, no rotation will save you.

  • Route low‑severity alerts to business hours.
  • Collapse duplicates.
  • Page only on things that need action now.
  • Log everything else.

Make swaps easy

People get sick. Plans change. If it takes a ticket and three Slack messages to swap shifts, you’ll end up with half‑covered weeks. Use rotations with one‑click overrides and clear ownership.

Test the system

A rotation that hasn’t been tested is a guess. Send test alerts. Make sure the right people get notified. Confirm that escalations fire on time.

Do this quarterly. Not yearly.

The short version

  • Clear ownership
  • Few escalation levels
  • Realistic timeouts
  • Noise control
  • Easy swaps
  • Regular testing

NearIRM makes this easier by keeping schedules, routing, and escalation in one place. If you’re rebuilding your on‑call system, start with the basics and keep it human.

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