The on-call engineer who never gets a real day off
Your on-call schedule rotates fairly. Everyone takes their turn, and the spreadsheet looks balanced. What it does not track is how many times the engineer technically off call still gets pulled into a thread, a quick question, or a "mind taking a quick look at this" outside their week. On paper they got their week off. In practice they never fully disconnected, and burnout doesn't check the schedule before it arrives. Nobody who sends one of those messages thinks of it as a violation. It adds up once you count how many times it happened over the quarter.
A fair rotation on paper and genuine rest are two different things, and only one shows up in a spreadsheet. Watch for the quiet pulls that never make it into a ticket, the quick Teams message answered from the sofa on a Sunday, since those are the ones nobody counts and everybody eventually resents.
The prompt:
You are building a policy that actually protects off-call time.
Context: [your on-call schedule, any messages sent to off-call engineers in the last month, and how often people get pulled in outside their assigned week, even briefly]
Build:
What genuinely warrants breaking off-call time
What waits until the next business day