How Does Your Company Handle Off-Hours / On-Call Work?

Hello all,

I'm hoping to get a survey of how your companies handle compensation for off-hours or on-call work particularly for employees. I work for a SAAS company which still has a very manual deployment process – we use Azure DevOps on prem with release pipelines and (in some places) config transforms, but there are still many manual touch points. Database deployment has to be handheld due to the many defects in our current deployment tool (we're working on migration to SSDT). Recently management started requiring that a QA Engineer be online to regression test each release. These monthly deploys start at midnight on a Saturday evening and can go for hours, and we may have off cycle releases on top of that. To say nothing of the on call our three infrastructure engineers share.

We need to invest in software, infrastructure, and process upgrades to automate regression testing/ database deployment and more, and these things are in progress, but they're slow. I've floated the idea to some people of a standard amount of bonus PTO for working after hours. One of our engineers said that some companies pay a bonus based on how much time you are actually called in while on call. What I know for sure is that I need to help protect the talent we have on staff today because we've already lost people to burnout and we're going to lose more if we keep this up.

How does your company handle compensation for mandatory evening and weekend work? Is there a way that people on those projects get the time back, or get extra pay? Are they getting screwed the same way folks are at my company? Something in the middle? I'm hoping to know so I can encourage the conversations that need to happen for us to retain the talented folks we've hired and to be able to find more.

Thank you!