The Cost and Benefits of "On Call"

[Paul Rhodes] (0:02 - 39:19) Today on The Maintenance Mindset, we're going to talk about a topic that is a little bit off limits. It's often controversial and it's frequently identified as one of the biggest reasons why it's challenging to find and hire new multifamily maintenance professionals. We're going to look at the subject of on-call with a maintenance mindset.

So for those of you who are watching this on video, you've already identified that something's different. It's particularly proper, this episode, for this to be filmed in a different location because of our topic. Yes, you heard the little teaser promo correctly.

We're talking about on-call. And this topic is one that's challenging to discuss because it's very polarizing. You know, previous episodes, we've talked about looking at things through a different frame.

I'd like to approach this from kind of a combined frame. In other words, from the perspective of on-call as a whole, both for the management company, meaning the property, and for our maintenance technicians. And I've got to be honest, being on-call is one of the things that attracted me to this as a career.

The real reason for that, we'll get to at the end of our discussion today. Beginning in my career, I liked when I got a call. It would happen and I got to play the superhero.

I got to be Superman because somebody was letting me know an issue, a problem that they had that I had the answer to. I had the solution and I could fly in, ride it in my truck, and save the day. I had the tools, I had the knowledge, and even if I didn't exactly know what to do, I was still the hero because I showed up.

I think that's one of the critical components of on-call that we have to keep in mind. Now, even though it did lead to some changes in my home life, it made some changes in decisions that I made with my family and with holidays and all of the things that go around it, internally. For me, I loved it when a call came in.

I kind of looked forward to being on-call. Yes, there was a little bit more money that I got to be able to make and it increased my ability to provide for my family in more ways than just financially. But for me, it was about being able to be a hero and get recognized as being a hero.

So for our discussion today, that's kind of the background that we have. Ultimately, being on-call, I still today view as a net positive. And that tends to wrinkle some maintenance technicians in discussions.

But we'll get to it. You see, I think one of the issues that we have to begin by dealing with is defining on-call. And I'd actually encourage you at your property to define it.

When we say on-call, what does it mean? For the framing of our discussion today, my definition of on-call is emergency repairs that are performed after normally scheduled work hours. Now, that statement in and of itself is pretty easy, but I'd like to break it down almost word for word or concept by concept.

And to do that, we begin with on-call. And it starts with the fact that, yes, this is at the other end of a telephone. Now, when I started out in my career back in 1995, on-call, we didn't really have cell phones.

We had pagers, a beeper, that, yes, in my truck, I had to have a roll of quarters because, okay, children, here's a concept. When your pager would go off, we didn't have cell phones. Instead, you stopped at a payphone.

Yes, payphones were a thing. They existed. You put a quarter in, dialed the number, and talked to somebody on the other end.

Every phone had a cord attached to it. Therefore, on-call meant the act of calling was often a challenge. If you were in between or if you were out and away from home, you had to have a plan in how that was going to work.

And, yes, it did require some strategizing and forethought. Fast forward to today, I worked on properties and for management companies that we had Nextel, which that was where, instead of using radios on-site, you had the walkie-talkie phone that on the side of it, you beeped the button and you could call somebody on another phone that, yes, had self-service, but it operated just like a walkie-talkie did, a radio. And that's really where on-call comes from.

It means you are standing by for when the need arises. You are the one designated to respond, to call the resident. I mean, heck, I can remember when I did finally get a cell phone and the joy of being able, no matter where I was, to directly dial that resident back until the resident got my phone number.

And then, instead of calling the apartment community, they would call me on my cell phone. Yeah, this was even before we had smartphones. So you flip the phone up and you didn't have caller ID.

I don't even think those first calls that we got, you had the person calling you's phone number on your screen. Yeah, okay. We've already gone through the Paul from Generation X, ancient world memory banks.

Fast forward to today, on-call is still a thing where you are designated to respond should the need arise. And it's set up in the job description. It's a part of the job.

So the definition then, emergency repairs performed during non-work hours. The first thing to go into is emergency. For your community, what is defined as an emergency?

Is no hot water an emergency? In my opinion, yes, it is defined as an emergency. Because if my house doesn't have hot water and my wife has to get up and take a bath in cold water, that's an emergency.

Let alone for the fact that if I have to get up and take a cold shower, that's an emergency. But for your community, you're going to have to make that up. One of the biggest calls that we end up having to make, notice what I did there, is to decide when during the summer season an emergency exists.

Often there's a temperature threshold that it's set at. And that temperature threshold can change, 75 degrees, 80 degrees, 90 degrees. Let me encourage you to get specific in defining emergency.

And by that, not only temperature threshold, are you talking about a temperature inside a resident's apartment or the temperature outside the resident's apartment? Whatever that is, have it specified. I mean, some of them are easy.

Water coming from the ceiling, water appearing where it's not supposed to be. Those are real easy. Others are less, like heating.

If somebody calls in and says, I don't have heat in my apartment and it's 70 degrees outside, is that an emergency? Questions like these need to be sorted out before somebody goes on call. Second, be sure that if a resident calls in with a request that they say is an emergency, but it's not spelled out in your policies or procedures, in that definition of what is an emergency, be certain that your maintenance technician, or if you are a maintenance technician, be certain that you have the backing for whichever decision you make.

In my mind, the person taking the call is the one that's on the hook. If a resident calls in and the person on call makes the decision that whatever that call is, if it's not listed in the definitions, then it's up to the technician to decide. And whichever they decide, on-site leaders, back them up.

If they were wrong, separately take them aside and say, look, we need to respond for whatever this was, or we need to not respond for whatever this was. But in front of the resident, back them up. These are people who are designated in the middle of the night that they will respond for a certain set of parameters.

If the call responds outside of those parameters, then in my opinion, it's up to the technician to decide. If you think differently than property manager, community manager, regional, whoever it is in your phone tree, be ready for a phone call and accept that phone call if you're going to expect for that technician to get in touch with you to make the decision. The next section that we need to define in there, we've got what on-call is, what an emergency is.

The next thing is repairs. Have a definition for what you consider a repair versus a Band-Aid. And ensure that your team is empowered to perform one or the other, whichever is the preference.

Some property managers that I've worked with in the past have said, I want you, after hours, to only do the repairs that are needed to get it through to the next day. Other management companies have stated, I want you to fix that as completely as possible. Yes, that means if you're in a place where you can perform that major repair after hours, go ahead and do it because that will save us time the next day.

And if we can save a trip back during normal hours, go ahead and take it. In my opinion, you're out there at night, it's late. Do what you can reasonably to fix it correctly.

Don't enter an unsafe situation. Don't just throw a Band-Aid on whatever it is. I'm not a fan of short-term repairs for long-term problems.

If after hours you can do something to get you through till the next day, if it's a Band-Aid, I'm not a fan. If you can do something that furthers along the long-term repair and then be sure that you come back in the morning, then go ahead. Do it that way.

Ultimately, the person who is there has the decision ability. They are empowered to do that. Ultimately, my hard and fast rule is no Band-Aids.

And wherever possible, stay away from what I call robbing Peter to pay Paul. In other words, don't go steal an operating part from a vacant apartment just to go put it into an occupied unit. That's where supplies and having parts on hand come into play, which that's a different episode.

The next thing that we need to be sure that we do in our definition is talking about performing. And yes, that means that our maintenance team needs to be able to perform. That indicates that they need to be, first of all, recognized.

In my mind, the technician that's on call, they have to have their cell phone. Chances are we'll need to be able to respond within a certain amount of time. Although in today's challenged labor market, that time may end up getting stretched just because it's possible we haven't been able to find a maintenance technician within a close enough proximity to respond within a certain amount of time.

Figure that out. That would be a case. But our maintenance technician has to be able to respond.

Well, in my mind, that means that they need to throw a uniform shirt in their truck or their car. At bare minimum, they need to be able to respond and perform their duties with a name badge. We've talked about on other episodes the importance of having that name badge, the importance for, one, our resident to be able to be identified by our maintenance technician.

The nice thing is, is when they knock on the door, chances are whoever's inside that apartment is a resident. But the flip side is we need to give our residents the ability to identify us after hours, possibly at night, that we are there to perform work. In my mind, that means be sure that our maintenance technicians have enough uniform shirts so that they can throw one on at night when they need to respond to our emergency.

All of that goes under that category of setting an expectation for what performance means. The last thing on our definition is that statement, non-work hours. You know, our whole statement when we put it together is, on call is emergency repairs that are performed during non-work hours.

That means the office isn't open. That also means that this is time that our technician had planned on not working. In other words, they had planned on being off.

Yes, it is at this point in time that many people will remind me that, hey, when you took the job of being a maintenance technician, you understand that you are on call. Okay, that's great. But, you know, it sure would be nice to have that fact recognized, and by that I mean, when I'm at home, my plans, my thoughts, my wants is to be at home.

When a call comes in, yes, I understand. It's my responsibility to respond, and a little bit inside, because of my ego, I get to be the hero. I'm off.

I'm gone. But, you know, I got to thinking about this concept of non-work hours, and really what we're talking about is being interrupted. And what is the effect of being interrupted?

Actually, let's talk about that right after this short break. So, I had a conversation a few years ago now with both a community manager, and in a very short time frame thereafter, a regional manager. And they were complaining about mumblings or grumblings that their maintenance technicians were making about having to be on call.

And I remember very distinctly the property manager asking me, why is it such a big deal when maintenance is on call? I mean, I'm on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I will always get a call.

Yes, that could be true. However, those phone calls of the property manager, through our discussion, she eventually agreed with me that those could be solved over the phone. Often, they were about money or about something that needed to occur.

And if an in-person visit would be required, it would be scheduled during work hours. The regional actually gave a little bit of a similar take on the discussion in saying that, you know, our maintenance technicians, they should be prepared. They understand that they're going to be on call.

And that's why we rotate them in and out. I said, okay, but what about communities that only have one maintenance technician? And that maintenance technician is, as the property manager said, always on call.

What kind of toll does that take? And the regional says, well, we tell them that during the interview, so they should just understand it and take it as a part of the job. Okay, I can kind of see that point.

And maintenance technician, if you're in that position, be sure that during the hiring phase of your interview process, when you get to the point of salary, figure out what that cost is. What's that worth? And you see, it's that part, the cost, that I think we need to talk about a little bit more.

And by that, I'm not just talking about salary. Now, there is a little bit of salary that is involved. And yes, from a maintenance technician perspective, there is a lot of discussion that I end up talking with of, I don't like going out for call.

I don't make any extra money because it's taxed at a higher rate. Actually, I did a little bit of looking into that. Now, full disclaimer, I'm not a tax attorney.

I don't pretend to be one on TV. But looking at the tax rate, my understanding is that on-call hours are taxed at the same rate as your normal work hours, at the same percentage. That only changes when you work enough overtime to put yourself up in a higher tax bracket.

Then you will be taxed at a higher rate. And I guess you could argue because of on-call. But I think at that point, you're kind of arguing semantics.

The end result is most places in the country, when you work any hours over 40 hours a week, you get paid time and a half for those hours that you're there. But that actually takes me back to the call piece. The call piece.

And by that, I mean cost. What is the cost of on-call? Not financial, the cost.

You see, I got to looking into a study and I wondered what it's like or what the toll is on interrupted work, because that's what it is when you're on-call. Your home life, because based on our definition, is after normal working hours, our home life is interrupted. You see, I found a study and this study is publicly available.

You don't have to go anywhere extra for it. The study is called The Cost of Interrupted Work. It's available for free by download.

You can look it up on your favorite browser of choice. It's put together by Gloria Mark with the Department of Informatics of University of California, Irvine, in partnership with Daniela Gudeth and Ulrich Glock. I apologize for messing up their names if I did so.

They work for the Institute of Psychology of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. And it's a publicly available study. And what this study did is it looked at, and this is the title again, The Cost of Interrupted Work.

And I'm looking at it or thinking about it for the fact that if this is work that's performed after normal working hours, in essence, we are interrupting home life. The study actually showed that anytime someone goes through a normal work, what they're focusing on and then is interrupted. Once they finish with the interruption, it takes 20 minutes in the original work status to get back to the productivity that was being experienced before the interruption.

Let's frame that as our maintenance technician on call. Now, our maintenance technician on call, they're at home. They're off of work.

They're doing whatever it is that they do in their free time. For me, that means at home with family. And then a call comes in, an emergency.

Have to respond. Great. We go, we respond.

I get paid time and a half in order to respond. Then when I get finished, I come back home. For most of us on our management companies, when we get back home, the clock stops.

It may be different for you at your management company. Verify what your times are. But in essence, we stop being paid when we get back home.

According to this study, it's another almost half hour before I can get back to the mental state that I was before I left. And you see, that in my mind is a cost of being on call. See, this study ended up looking at how that worked.

And the summary I found to be very interesting because what they determined and their whole reason why I think we can interpret this study this way is one of their findings was that context doesn't matter. In other words, they ran a test to where somebody had to write emails. They were writing emails and then they would be interrupted in the email they were writing to go do other work.

And they classified other work in two ways. One way was in context. In other words, what if somebody is writing an email and they get interrupted by being forced to write another email, a different email?

Once they finish that different email, how long does it take to get back to the state of mind, the frame of mind that they were in on that original email? That was roughly about the 20-minute mark. They also found of non-context interruptions, meaning somebody's writing an email and then they're interrupted and asked to go, I don't know, into another room and work on a peg board for a little while.

Then come back to the original task and how long out of context interruption does it take to get back to the original state? And what they determined is it didn't matter. It took the same roughly 20 minutes of reengaging with the original email to get back into that same state of mind, the same productivity.

If context doesn't matter, then whatever activity I'm working on, if I get interrupted with that already planned activity, it takes me 20 minutes once I'm back to get back into it. And that's why I think it can apply to on-call. Now, it was interesting to me in reading this study that what they actually found though is that when you come back or if you know there's a chance you're going to be interrupted, the people in the test sped up their work.

The test even acknowledged that this could be a net benefit as a worker, that the job gets done faster. However, accuracy in the job did suffer a little bit. Not a huge amount.

The job still got done, but it became a little bit less accurate. Now, my interpretation of those findings are that if I'm on call and I'm at home, I'm enjoying my home, my free time, I get a call. Yes, I have to go.

I know I have to go. I plan for it. It's my job.

I have to go. So I go. I do the work.

I come back home. We already know from the findings that it's going to take me 20 minutes to get back. But actually, if I'm on call, I change my life in order to deal with the call.

And this is also where we pick back up that story with the regional, because the regional was complaining. Why are my maintenance technicians so upset about having to be on call? In this story, I happen to point out to her that you had a nice dinner tonight.

Didn't you? And we happened to be out at a restaurant having this conversation. And she said, yeah.

I said, I noticed you had a glass of wine with dinner. She says, yeah. I said, your maintenance technician that's on call can't.

They might like a glass of wine or to have an adult beverage of whatever kind or type. But because they're on call, they are required, even though they're not getting paid for this particular decision, they have to change their behavior based on the fact that they are on call. Are we acknowledging that change in behavior?

That's the question I asked the regional. And she didn't have an answer for me. So what is the cost of being on call?

A change in behavior. As a maintenance technician, when I'm on call, I have to change my behaviors. I have to change my decisions.

I can remember when I was on call on site that there were times that my wife and my daughter and I, we had to change plans. A new movie would come out and we'd want to go see whatever movie it was. And yet we couldn't.

That was a decision I made. Now, could we go? Yes.

But I did not want to interrupt the movie because of the possibility of a phone call coming in. If we went out to dinner, the three of us, we drove two cars. My wife drove separate.

That way, if a call came in and I had to leave, she still had a way back home and I didn't have to go in the opposite direction from the restaurant to take her and my daughter home, drop them off, and then go to work. In other words, we changed our behavior. In essence, we actually spent a little bit more money in gas and mileage because we had to make an allowance for the fact that I was on call.

Now, I don't mind. That's a part of the job. I do chalk that up to being a part of the decision-making process and just understanding that I'm on call.

However, as leaders, are we acknowledging that there is a change that goes on for our workers that are on call? Identifying the fact that there is a cost beyond the financial one in the lives of our maintenance technicians when they have to take call might be further along the way to increasing what I would like to consider as the esteem of being a maintenance professional. Kind of getting back to that personal reason for having on call, liking being on call is because I got to play the superhero.

So this result that we ended up having of noticing a change in behavior, just the fact that somebody is on call, I do want to call out one more thing of that. The study showed that work is completed faster. Good.

The work is still done. But my question is, what's the perception of our customer, our resident? Now, before and in classes when I'm asked questions about being on call, my number one response for maintenance technicians when they're on call is to smile.

Perception matters, even on the phone call. When you call that resident back that they have their air conditioners broken, or they have a pipe break, or the toilet is clogged, or whatever it is, smile. Now, you don't want to be giddy.

Oh boy, happy, happy joy that this horrible calamity has befallen you, my resident. Ha, ha, ha. No, be pleasant.

This might be just the worst hour of the day of that particular week for the resident. Be pleasant. Don't act as if you are interrupted to your customer, your resident.

Yes, you are interrupted. Chances are they already know that they are interrupting you. But from their mind, that's your job.

Matter of fact, that's one of the selling points we use to lease apartments. You, if you owned a home, you are responsible for maintaining that home. And if anything breaks, it's up to you to fix it.

But if you lease an apartment, if something breaks in the middle of the night, call this number. Somebody will respond, and we'll be right there to solve the problem, or at least begin a repair. That's a part of the sales, the value proposition of renting.

Yes, now we've changed to the benefits of on-call. So we started out talking about the cost of being on-call. These are actually benefits of being on-call.

Yes, it is a net benefit to your apartment community to have on-call technicians. How they respond after hours is a huge benefit. I have talked with owners and managers and regionals and leaders of all property types that they have said they've heard from residents that the reason why the resident renewed is because maintenance responded and solved their problem.

They don't even want to move out for fear that they're going to go to a different community where somebody's not going to respond as well, or go to a house. Okay, maintenance technicians, those of you who are listening, how many times have you gotten a call from a former resident that moved into a house that something is broken, and they want to hire you to come fix whatever it is that's broken at their house? Yes, we matter, which that's actually the final piece out of this.

Having somebody that is on-call, performing repairs off hours when they're not scheduled, in an emergency, during what to our residents is a crisis moment, it matters. It's important. In that sense, we get to be not just superheroes, we get to be doctors.

We get to be firemen and firewomen. We get to be emergency responders, and these are people that matter. They do work that is important and meaningful.

The newest Gallup survey for 2024 on workplace engagement has a lot of data around how stress is up and actually work fulfillment is down as of 2023. The findings are published in 2024, but it's for year 2023. In that survey, freely available from Gallup, one of the things that Gallup identifies as a way to increase fulfillment at work is to do what Gallup defines as meaningful work.

Maintenance as a whole is a very meaningful job. Being on-call is meaningful work. It's meaningful for our residents because we're solving a crisis.

We are responding. In the data that we looked at from Satisfacts, if we solve a problem, our residents are twice as likely to have a positive experience living on our properties than if there was never a problem to begin with. Yeah, we talked about that a couple episodes ago.

Being on-call matters. It's worthwhile. If you're a maintenance technician and wondering about this whole on-call thing, let me tell you, that's the part, to me, that really means a lot.

Yes, it's a part of the job. Yes, you signed up for it. Yes, if you don't like being on-call at the end of the day, it's the job.

I honestly don't believe there is, at least at this point, a meaningful way where after-hours response is going to be taken away from this particular career choice anytime soon. You can advance your career far enough to get to the point to where you are no longer on-call. Myself, for instance, I today am in a role, in a job, where I don't take call.

Instead, I travel on the road. In other words, for 24 hours a day, for however many days I'm on the road, I'm kind of working. Hence, I'm filming this, as I mentioned at the top of the show, in a hotel room, apart from my family.

I do it by choice, and I've got to admit, I'm doing meaningful work. That I'm training and developing maintenance technicians in their careers, and I can't think of a more worthwhile occupation. On-call is the same way.

Let me know what you think about what I'm talking about in regards to on-call. Let me know maybe where I got it wrong or where you disagree. Let me know even if you do agree, and if I should expand on something that I've said.

Thank you for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week, and I'll see you somewhere.