I recently joined a small-medium company as a line manager, with around 30 employees with great owners but questionable management. The company has exponentially grown within the last 2 years, so I’m seeing a lot of learning opportunities for the owners and managers. When signing my contract, the role was new, so there was no job description yet so I wrote “pending conditions of job description satisfactory” in pen on their version of my contract. This is where it gets interesting.
I recently found out about an “after-hours” phone. It’s a phone number linked to the website as an “emergency out of-hours” contact. Employees at the company rotate on a week to week basis, each taking the phone home and answering calls between 1am to 7am as there is a time difference with the global scope of clients. Some weeks there may be no calls; other weeks there may be upwards of 5. I asked my colleagues what compensation was awarded for this (in the same conversation when finding out about the phone), such as an “on-call” rate, and to my surprise – nothing. Additionally, you don’t just have the after-hours phone for your Mon-Fri, you have it for 7 days which includes your weekend. This means needing to have access to laptop, internet, and quiet space to deal with urgent queries. On your weekend.
I’ll be next line shortly to take the after-hours phone (it goes alphabetically down the list) however I’m not quite sure how to approach this. In my mind, it’s quite simple. If there’s no compensation for additional on-call work, no discussion about this in my interview, and no job description to accept this as part of my duties I really don’t agree with this.
I overheard the manager giving the after-hours phone to one of the new girls, and she laughingly accepted the phone saying “well I don’t have a choice do I”. In my mind, I though, “yes, you do.” I want to speak up for myself, but I also don’t want to cause a scene with the other employees who all play their part in taking the after-hours phone home week to week and causing a rift.
What do you recommend I do?
Disclaimer: I don’t want this to come across as though I’m a lazy worker and doing the bare minimum. I often work overtime, through my lunch breaks, and my work ethic always proves this. I just don’t want to be taken advantage of.