May is Mental Health Awareness Month. If you’re an engineer and you’re reading this, you know the on-call drill. 3 a.m. pages. The manual scramble. The anxiety of quickly fixing the issue and answering countless update requests. The endless break-fix work that leaves no room to focus on what you really love: building stuff. The finger-pointing that defeats any honest attempt at learning from what happened.

According to our State of AI-First Operations report, 42% of organizations cite developer morale and burnout as a top impact of incidents. This number probably hits home: it’s your team, your colleagues, and maybe you.

The real cost of unsustainable operations.

More than two-thirds of organizations report losing over $300,000 per downtime hour. The pressure to respond immediately—regardless of the hour or personal cost—has never been higher. Responder teams operating in this high-stakes scenario are faced with intense stress, as they’re oftentimes stretched thin and working through manual and disparate processes.

This erodes well-being, productivity and morale. The result? Engineers are more likely to make mistakes and leave the profession altogether, making it harder for organizations to retain talent.

What sustainable operations actually look like.

Sustainable operations start with reducing cognitive load and eliminating toil where possible. Organizations using AI in operations report 74% improved operational resilience over the past year, compared to 64% of those not yet adopting AI. More importantly, they report better work-life balance, reduced anxiety, and balanced on-call rotations.

That sustainability must be built into tooling and systems as much as operational processes. PagerDuty offers a path toward it with a few different capabilities:

• Frictionless on-call schedules: Eliminate on-call anxiety and administrative toil with flexible, intelligent schedules that offer precise control, enable self-service shift selection, and ensure no single person carries the burden alone. Explore Shift-Based Schedules.
• Prevention over reaction: What if a virtual responder could triage issues before you even wake up? What if it could automatically pull context from your observability tools, analyze patterns from past incidents, and recommend fixes? Meet the SRE Agent.  
• Unified workflows that preserve context: A chat experience that brings the full incident lifecycle into your flow is table-stakes to drive efficiency. See the modernized Slack experience.
• Create a continuous learning flywheel: Capture learnings from every incident directly within PagerDuty to feed organizational intelligence back into your operations and prevent future disruption. Discover PagerDuty’s new Post-Incident Reviews.

Building a culture of #hugops

Technology alone doesn’t solve burnout. A blameless culture that creates psychological safety and encourages open, transparent communication is paramount to enable teams to learn from errors and enhance their resilience.

• Normalizing conversations about mental health: Make it safe to talk about stress, anxiety, and burnout without stigma.
• Setting boundaries: Respect off-hours. Encourage fully disconnected PTO. Build redundancy so no single person is irreplaceable.
• Celebrating collaboration, not heroics: Reward engineers who prevent incidents, not just those who fight fires at 3 AM.
• Investing in continuous improvement: Make sure to have an Incident Review process in place to identify systemic issues and opportunities, not to assign blame.
• Measuring what matters: Track cognitive load, on-call burden distribution, and responder well-being—not just the technical outcomes.

This Mental Health Awareness Month, make a meaningful change.

Sustainable operations are a necessity. Your team’s wellbeing directly impacts your organization’s resilience, innovation capacity, and competitive advantage. With 95% of leadership recognizing that faster incident recovery creates competitive advantage and 59% of organizations now using AI in operations, the time to act is now.

Start small. Pick one area: incident coordination, scheduling, or unified workflows and commit to reducing toil. Measure the impact on both operational metrics and team well-being. Iterate. Build momentum.

Your team deserves tools that help to protect their mental health, workflows that preserve their flow, and a culture that values their well-being as much as their output.

Ready to build sustainable operations? Explore PagerDuty’s AI agents and unified platform or talk to an expert about protecting your team’s wellbeing while improving operational resilience.