A manager should never be the final point of escalation, and a proper out-of-hours escalation plan is how you stop it happening. If your phone is buzzing at dinner because the team has nowhere else to send a problem, the plan is broken. You aren’t failing.
That’s the curse of the berry. The device in your pocket makes every manager reachable, every hour, for free. Companies notice. Very few of them stop to ask what it costs.
Are you really irreplaceable?
Are you invaluable? How about irreplaceable? Will the world stop turning if you don’t pick up the phone or answer that email? No?
OK, so why are you ignoring your family (or friends, or yourself) to pick up the phone?
It’s very easy for companies to take advantage of employees, and even easier with managers who feel a personal responsibility for the performance of the team and the department. I’m not talking about people who get paid to be on call. Unfortunately, I’ve found that managers rarely get compensated for it. I’m talking about the ones who aren’t paid and answer anyway.
Feeling responsible is a good instinct. Treating it as a standing, unpaid shift is how good managers burn out.
Why does the manager end up as the final escalation point?
Because nobody designed anything else. The plan is usually “call the manager,” and it works until the day the manager is on a plane, asleep, or finally off.
Look at the arithmetic. One seat covered around the clock is 168 hours a week. One person works about 40 of them. That’s 4.2 people for a single seat before you count holidays, sick days or training, and no company staffs a manager seat that way. It staffs it with one person and a phone.
Companies need to understand that employees’ lives and health are at stake here, and for some of you (you know who you are) your family lives too. Staff need time away from work and away from the stresses of the job, if for no other reason than to recharge for the next day. The numbers back that up. A joint WHO and ILO analysis found that working 55 or more hours a week is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared with 35 to 40 hours.
Being on call doesn’t mean you’re counted as working all night. It does mean you never fully switch off. That’s the part nobody puts in the job description.
What does an out-of-hours escalation plan look like?
It starts with the customer, not the manager. Every company says customers matter. Few show it at 9pm on a Saturday.
A workable plan has three parts:
- A named first responder. A senior agent or team lead who is on the rota, knows it’s their week, and is paid or given time back for it.
- A manager at the right level, not the last level. The manager is the second call, for decisions the first responder can’t make.
- Senior management as the final step. If a customer problem is serious enough to reach the end of the chain, someone with the authority to spend money or make a call should be there to take it.
I covered who gets called, and in what order, in the escalation matrix piece. The short version is that every level needs a name, a number, and a trigger for when to pass it up. Real out-of-hours coverage belongs in that plan too, rather than being something that “just happens” when a manager is generous.
A manager should be in the plan. A manager should not be the plan.
What does constant after-hours contact say about your staffing?
If staff members are constantly contacted outside regular business hours, their staffing and hiring need to be looked at.
That sounds obvious, but it’s the point most companies skip. Late calls feel like a people problem or a dedication problem. They’re usually a coverage problem. Either the team is too thin for the hours the customers actually need, or the process sends the wrong things up the chain.
Track it for a month. Log every after-hours contact, who made it, and whether a first responder could have handled it. That’s the evidence you need to ask for a rota, an on-call allowance, or another hire. It’s much harder to argue with a month of logged late calls than with “I’m tired.”
Being valuable doesn’t mean being reachable at all hours. A manager nobody can replace is a risk the company is carrying, not a strength.
Hutch Morzaria is a Director-level CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building global support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has hired dozens of support and CX leaders across his career and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
