Mental Health Awareness Month: How to Build Sustainable On-Call

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, highlighting the challenges engineers face with on-call duties and the resulting stress, burnout, and high turnover rates. Organizations report significant financial losses due to unsustainable operations, with more than two-thirds losing over $300,000 per downtime hour. Implementing sustainable operations involves reducing cognitive load, eliminating manual toil, and integrating AI to improve operational resilience, work-life balance, and on-call rotations. PagerDuty offers solutions such as intelligent scheduling, virtual responders, and unified workflows to enhance efficiency and reduce anxiety. A crucial element is fostering a blameless culture that promotes psychological safety and open communication about mental health. Organizations are urged to take steps towards sustainable operations to enhance team well-being and maintain a competitive edge, with 95% of leaders acknowledging the competitive advantage of faster incident recovery.