Why a standby on leave policy breaks teams

You don’t need to work in containers to recognise the pattern. When a company insists every operator is “on standby” even while on medical, annual or childcare leave, it isn’t demonstrating commitment to customers. It is admitting there is no system—only heroes. In heavy-lift industries like shipping, where schedules stretch across time zones and port windows shift by the hour, the instinct to keep phones on is understandable. But an institutionalised standby on leave policy is not operational toughness. It is a design failure dressed up as work ethic.

The hidden mistake sits one layer beneath the policy. It is the absence of an ownership map that makes coverage predictable and escalation boring. Teams that default to “be reachable at all times” have quietly chosen proximity over structure. They have replaced duty rosters with the hope that someone loyal will pick up. Over weeks, that looks like responsiveness. Over quarters, it becomes attrition, brittle handovers, and a leadership story that says commitment equals availability rather than reliability.

How does a company—MNCs included—end up here? Usually through a sequence of reasonable short-term decisions. A lean team absorbs a surge in volume. A client becomes an anchor account with non-standard requirements. Management promises service levels the org never re-architected for. Sprints become the default cadence. On-call becomes the only leverage left. Because the pressure was real, people cooperated. Because the pressure never stopped, the cooperation calcified into culture. And when culture is built on sacrifice, it resists redesign. “This is how we do things” sounds principled; in practice, it locks in fatigue and blocks process.

The effects land in familiar places. Velocity degrades because the same operators who are meant to improve the system are firefighting at night. Trust erodes because “leave” becomes a negotiation, not a right. New joiners learn the wrong lesson—that success means being interruptible, not accountable. Leaders misread effort as effectiveness. Customers experience speed in acute moments and slowness everywhere else. The org’s muscle for preventative work atrophies because nobody has protected time to do it.

There is also a talent signal embedded in always-on expectations that reaches beyond shipping. When a 28-year-old UI/UX designer in Singapore says he’s ready to leave the field after a year of unsuccessful applications, and the market’s answer is “we only hire seniors,” it sounds unrelated. It isn’t. Companies that lean on permanent standby or perpetual seniority are using experience as a stopgap for absent systems. If design is expected to “just know” and ops is expected to “just answer,” what the organisation has outsourced to individuals is structure. Seniors can carry that load longer. They cannot turn it into a system without permission and time.

A healthy alternative does not begin with perks or motivational speeches. It begins with designing coverage as an operating asset. That means writing a clear, rotating duty roster that is visible, enforced, and compensated. It means documenting an escalation ladder that spells out when a call is warranted, who calls whom, and what information must be ready before the phone rings. It means ring-fencing leave in the same system, not outside it, so that someone on protected time is never the first, second, or third option. In global operations, it often means a follow-the-sun model that hands the baton to a counterpart who is awake and accountable, rather than pinging a sleeping “owner” because they “know the file.”

Coverage only works when ownership is specific. In teams that function well, people don’t “own containers” or “own clients.” They own steps in the chain with crisp entry and exit conditions. An operator owns vessel scheduling changes from notification to updated plan published; a second owner owns stakeholder communication from published plan to acknowledgment; a third owns exceptions that cross a defined risk threshold. This sounds slower than “everyone do everything,” until you notice how much faster teams move when each link knows what “done” looks like and when passing the work is the rule, not an apology.

Protected rest isn’t a soft benefit. It is a system requirement. Cognitive performance, judgment under uncertainty, and memory recall are the parts of operations we least want to degrade—and the first ones chronic sleep debt erodes. Companies that claim they must call during leave because “issues can be major” should be the loudest advocates for protected recovery, because the very people they will tap during a real emergency need to be capable of solving one. A policy that blurs leave into availability makes emergencies feel constant and, paradoxically, lowers the threshold for escalation. Once people learn they will be interrupted anyway, everything begins to feel urgent enough to justify it.

If compensation is used to justify uninterrupted availability—“we pay well, we expect standby”—then pay needs to be anchored to design, not just to sacrifice. True standby should be rare, time-boxed, rostered, and paid. The rest should be systemised so that the org’s baseline is sustainable without premium labour. One-year bonuses cannot offset the compounding cost of preventable churn, slow onboarding, and rework. When leaders calculate the real price of attrition and the drag of institutional fatigue, they find that coverage design is cheaper than heroics.

The same clarity applies to hiring. If you are posting only for seniors because juniors “can’t be left alone,” what you are admitting is that your org design will break without people who pre-compensate for ambiguity. That is not a hiring strategy; that is a risk statement. The fix is not to lower the bar—it is to redesign the bar. Define scopes that a strong junior can own end-to-end without being a shadow of a senior. Create explicit interfaces between roles so mentoring is a set of repeatable interactions, not an after-hours favour. Measure progression by how much system you can trust someone to run, not by how long they’ve waited for a vacancy.

Leaders often ask how to tell if they have a culture problem or a structure problem. In practice, culture is just structure people feel. If your people verbalise pride in being “always reachable,” you probably have a structure that rewards immediacy over clarity. If they defend the practice by pointing to client outcomes, check whether those outcomes are stories or system stats. Healthy systems make good stories boring. Unhealthy ones keep producing dramatic saves that feel great in the moment and cost the organisation its future capacity.

Changing this does not require an org-wide revolution. It requires a sequence of decisions that move authority from improvisation to design. Start by redefining what “on call” means in your context, including thresholds that must be met before a person is interrupted. Align that with a coverage roster that explicitly includes leave, not as an exception, but as a planned state with an identified alternate. Rebuild handovers so they are written for the next owner, not for the current one’s memory. Then make the outcomes observable. Track the number of unplanned interruptions per operator per month, the proportion that met escalation criteria, the cycle time from incident to post-mortem, and the time people actually remain unreachable on leave. If those numbers don’t improve, your system isn’t changing, no matter what the policy says.

The shipping industry will always operate on the edges of time. Weather shifts, port congestion, and geopolitical friction are not getting simpler. That is precisely why clarity must do what hustle cannot. A standby on leave policy looks decisive. It is, in fact, a hedge against doing the work of design. You can keep paying for that hedge in sleep, attention, and talent—or you can pay for coverage, ownership, and trust, and reclaim leave as what it is supposed to be: a system that lets people come back capable of doing the job you hired them for.

If you recognise your company in this, ask one plain question before you defend the status quo. Would the operation still function if the most loyal person stopped picking up? If the honest answer is no, then the problem isn’t their commitment. It’s your system debt. And no amount of heroic availability will pay it down.