Organising an on-call rota: legal framework, tools and handover (France)

Article L3121-9 of the Labour Code (Code du travail) defines an astreinte, on-call duty, as a period during which the employee, without being at their workplace and without being at the employer’s permanent and immediate disposal, must be able to step in to carry out work for the company. Two consequences follow: the duration of the intervention counts as actual working time, and the on-call period itself gives rise to compensation, either financial or in the form of rest.

The boundary matters. If the employee must remain immediately available on site, it is no longer on-call duty; if they can go about their own business but must be reachable and able to step in, it is in principle on-call duty. Be careful, however: the Cour de cassation (France’s highest court of the ordinary judicial system), following the Court of Justice of the European Union, holds that on-call duty must be reclassified as actual working time where the employee is subject to constraints of such intensity that they objectively and very significantly affect their ability to manage their time freely (Cass. soc., 26 October 2022, no. 21-14.178). A very short response time, the argument the employee relied on in that case, or frequent interventions can weigh in that assessment. The text also requires that the employees concerned be informed of their individual schedule within a reasonable period.

Under article L3121-11, a company or establishment agreement, or failing that a sector agreement, sets how on-call duty is organised, how employees are informed and the notice periods, and the compensation in financial form or in rest. Before building a schedule, therefore, check what your company agreement and your sector agreement provide.

Where there is no agreement, article L3121-12 provides that the employer sets out the organisation and the compensation after consulting the comité social et économique (CSE, the body that represents employees in the company) and informing the labour inspectorate. In that case, each employee is told of their individual on-call schedule fifteen days in advance; in exceptional circumstances, this period may be reduced to at least one clear day.

On-call duty does not remove the right to rest. Article L3121-10 specifies that, outside the duration of an intervention, the on-call period is taken into account when calculating the minimum daily rest (11 consecutive hours, article L3131-1) and weekly rest (at least 24 consecutive hours plus the daily rest, article L3132-2). In other words, only the duration of the intervention is excluded from that calculation: on-call duty in itself does not interrupt rest.

For the rota, the practical consequence is to provide for what follows a busy night of interventions: a person called out several times must be able to recover their rest hours. Write the rule into your organisation rather than discovering it the next morning.

A fair rota comes down to a few rules: a fixed length for a period (night, week, weekend), an order known in advance, a named replacement for each period, and a rule for swaps between colleagues. Sensitive periods (public holidays, school holidays) deserve to be allocated on rotation over the year, with a visible history so that everyone can see that the sharing is fair.

As for tools, a shared calendar accessible to everyone, with a notification at the start and end of each period, covers the essentials. What matters is to limit points of failure: a single reference document, an on-call phone or line that is clearly identified, and a back-up contact if the person does not answer. The on-call number can stay the same from one period to the next: it is the phone, or its forwarding, that changes hands.

Keep a record of each intervention (start time, end time, reason): since the duration of an intervention is actual working time, this log is used to calculate pay correctly and to check that rest periods are respected. It protects the employee and the employer alike in the event of a disagreement, and it feeds back into a review of the calls that could have waited until the morning.

Provide for a short meeting or a structured message at each change of period: requests in progress, people to call back, open incidents, special instructions. A half-page template is enough: date and time, nature of the request, who took it, what has already been done, what remains to be done.

The aim is for the person taking over on-call to find each call in a usable form, without having to listen again to a voicemail box: a summary and the caller’s details, rather than a forty-second message to decode.

A phone answering service that has no access to the schedule does not know who is on call, and a voice agent must not be left alone to detect an emergency or to decide in the caller’s place. Its role is to take the message properly and to transfer the call when the caller asks, to the person or line you have designated.

Alyas answers 24 hours a day from the information you give it, announces that it is an AI and that the call is recorded, captures the caller’s details and request, and places a transcript and a summary in your workspace. If it does not know, it says so and offers to pass the request on. It transfers, at the caller’s request, to a single number (for example your on-call line); it manages neither the schedule nor the switch between several people on call. Free 10-day trial, with no credit card required.