On-call Best Practices For Engineering Teams To Prevent Burnout

When on-call is working well, engineers can focus on fixing the problem. When it’s not, they spend their time juggling process, tools, and expectations while the incident escalates. Engineers manage scheduling, incident coordination, communication, and administrative follow-up. When incidents escalate, teams face immediate operational challenges: updating Slack, tracking work in Jira, assembling responders, and communicating status to stakeholders. When these workflows are fragmented, every incident feels like a scramble, and that chronic scramble is one of the most reliable paths to burnout.

Many teams have robust tooling for alerting and detection, and that’s crucial. Good detection helps you find issues fast, but incidents still spiral when the response process itself is messy.

This is where tightening the incident workflow inside the tools engineers already use actually changes how on-call feels day to day.

Phoenix Incidents, an incident management platform built directly in Jira and Slack, reduces chaos by enforcing a clear, end-to-end process without asking teams to adopt a new standalone system. The result is fewer manual handoffs, less context switching, and more predictable, sustainable on-call expectations.

In this article, we’ll walk you through on-call best practices for engineering teams, how they reduce burnout risk, and how tightening your incident process (not adding yet another tool) improves on-call communication, coordination, and reliability.

Why On-Call Best Practices Matter

When an alert fires, engineering teams need more than just the right person paged; they need a repeatable, lightweight workflow for managing the incident from acknowledgment through resolution. That workflow should protect two things at once: system reliability and the people responsible for keeping it running.

How Process Overhead Affects On-Call Teams

Engineers consistently identify the same friction points during major production incidents:

• Manual updates across multiple systems (Slack, Teams, Jira, paging tools).
• Keeping stakeholders informed throughout the incident.
• Getting the right people involved quickly.
• Recording what happened and when.
• Writing up root causes and lessons learned after the incident.

None of these steps is technically difficult, but under pressure, they add up. During a high-stakes outage, this procedural overhead slows teams down and causes burnout. Over time, the pattern becomes familiar: the same people are always pulled in, the same manual steps repeat, nights and weekends get interrupted, and the emotional load compounds.

That is what burnout often looks like in incident response: not a single catastrophic week, but an ongoing accumulation of unstructured work and constant urgency.

What Improves Reliability and Reduces Burnout

Teams improve reliability and reduce burnout when they do two things well:

• Respond consistently.
• Learn consistently.

Consistency lowers cognitive load during incidents because engineers do not have to reinvent the process each time.

Learning reduces repetitive pain—especially when teams review both resolved and canceled incidents to understand what truly required escalation. If teams close the loop on follow-up work, they are less likely to fight the same fire again next quarter. Google's SRE book and research show that teams that conduct thorough postmortems and implement follow-up actions reduce repeat incidents.

Reduce Incident Noise, Not Just Incident Friction

Even with a clean response process, teams burn out if too many issues page a human. One effective practice is to bias toward escalation early—encourage support, customer success, or engineers to raise an incident when something feels off—but then regularly review canceled or downgraded incidents.

Over time, those reviews surface where alerts are too noisy, where detection needs tuning, or where teams need better training on when escalation is appropriate. Treating canceled incidents as signal, not failure, helps teams reduce incident fatigue without discouraging people from raising concerns.

Phoenix Incidents makes this practice explicit. Incidents can be intentionally canceled, with a reason captured at the time, rather than silently dropped or erased. Over time, teams can review canceled incidents to see clear patterns: alerts that were too noisy, situations where escalation criteria were unclear, or cases where better training would have prevented unnecessary paging. Because canceled incidents are still recorded in Jira, teams don’t have to rely on memory or anecdotes to improve the system.

On-Call Best Practices Every Engineering Team Should Use

These best practices support both system reliability and the sustainability of on-call for the humans doing the work.

1. Establish a clear on-call scheduling structure.

   On-call scheduling should balance coverage, predictability, and fairness. Modern teams benefit from rotation transparency: everyone should know exactly who is on call, who backs them up, and how to escalate.

   To reduce burnout, this clarity matters. Engineers are less likely to feel “always on” when on-call windows are well-defined, handoffs are explicit, and escalation paths are known in advance.

2. Improve on-call communication during an incident.

   Clear communication is one of the most reliable ways to reduce confusion during an incident. High-performing teams maintain discipline around using a single source of truth for all communications. During an incident, engineers shouldn’t be scattered across tools. Centralizing updates avoids misinformation and incomplete timelines.

   For on-call engineers, this means fewer duplicate questions, less rework, and less emotional friction with stakeholders. When everyone knows where to look for updates, the on-call person is not manually broadcasting news in five different places at once.

3. Enforce a consistent incident management workflow.

   Strong incident management is about having a defined process every time, even under pressure. For teams who use Slack and Jira, a reliable workflow should always:

   • Start with an incident creation.
   • Notify the right responders.
   • Open a single Slack channel for real-time coordination.
   • Keep Jira, Slack, and paging tools in sync.
   • Send automatic reminders based on severity and SLA deadlines.
   • Ensure that follow-up work (action items) is owned.

   Phoenix Incidents enforces this end-to-end structure without requiring any new interfaces or dashboards outside Slack and Jira. When the workflow is predictable and tool switching is minimized, the mental overhead of each incident is lower.

4. Improve Post Incident Reviews (PIR) without over-automation.

   A sustainable on-call practice requires teams to learn from incidents. But many PIRs fall apart because:

   • No one remembers what happened when, or the order gets fuzzy.
   • Teams skip the post-incident reviews (PIRs) or treat them like a checkbox.
   • Root causes stay vague or inconsistent across incidents, making patterns hard to spot.
   • Action items get written down but never assigned, tracked, or completed.

   High-quality PIRs help teams avoid reliving the same painful outage over again and reduce burnout when action items are clear, owned, and actually completed.

5. Track meaningful metrics (without chasing vanity KPIs).
   If you're an on-call engineer, you've probably felt the frustration of juggling incidents while wondering if anything will actually change. You respond to the same alerts week after week, wondering if leadership even knows how much toil you're dealing with, or worse, if they're tracking metrics that don't reflect the reality of your workload. That's why it matters to track metrics that actually help

How Phoenix Incidents Simplifies On-Call Management

Phoenix Incidents is designed for engineering teams that don’t want yet another standalone tool on top of their already full stack for incident management. Key capabilities include:

1. Incident creation & coordination inside Slack.

   • Human-initiated incidents.
   • Auto-creation of an incident-specific Slack channel.
   • Real-time synced status updates to Jira.
   • SLA-driven reminders.

2. By keeping coordination inside Slack and Jira, engineers spend less time juggling disconnected tools and more time actually resolving the problem. That reduction in context switching is a quiet but meaningful contributor to lower stress.

3. Seamless integration with paging tools.

   Phoenix Incidents works alongside paging tools like PagerDuty and VictorOps, enabling seamless coordination in Jira and Slack without disrupting your current alerting workflow. On-call engineers can trust that acknowledgments and status are visible where the team already works, instead of manually copying information between systems.

4. Guided Post Incident Review (PIR).

   Our customers consistently highlight the PIR flow as one of Phoenix Incidents' most valuable features, praising how it helps their teams learn and improve after incidents. The PIR flow is guided, not heavily auto-generated, so teams stay in control of the narrative and learning. Over time, this structure helps teams address underlying issues and reduce the number of painful incidents driven by the same patterns.

5. Reporting for engineering leaders.

   • Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA): How quickly incidents are acknowledged.
   • SLA performance: Whether incidents are resolved within target timeframes.
   • Common patterns: Issues that keep happening across multiple incidents.
   • Overdue action items: Follow-up tasks that haven't been completed.

   This gives leaders visibility into where the incident process is breaking down, so they can make targeted improvements that reduce unnecessary pressure on on-call engineers.

How to Make On-Call Sustainable

To prevent burnout, make on-call shifts more manageable by organizing incidents clearly, setting explicit expectations, and distributing the workload fairly across the team.

When teams:

• Know exactly how incidents are created, escalated, and coordinated.
• Work in a single, shared communication channel instead of scattered tools.
• Use PIRs to close the loop with concrete action items.
• Have clear visibility into trends and follow-through.

On-call shifts become intense but bounded periods of responsibility, not an endless, undefined burden.

Sustainable on-call also means real recovery after incidents. Clear handoffs at the end of a shift, time to step away after a rough outage, and avoiding immediate context switching back to feature work all matter. Teams that treat recovery as part of the on-call process—not an afterthought—are more likely to keep engineers engaged and willing to rotate on call over the long term.

Phoenix Incidents helps teams reach that state by living inside Jira and Slack, quietly enforcing the process, and reducing the procedural chaos that so often pushes engineers toward burnout.

Conclusion

Clean on-call management, reliable communication, and structured learning cycles make teams more resilient and less chaotic, and they make on-call more sustainable for the people doing the work.

If your team already uses Slack and Jira, book a demo to see how Phoenix Incidents brings your incident process together in one place, helping you resolve outages faster and more smoothly while reducing stress on your engineers.