Why do you expect people to be happy to surrender their time with no additional compensation for it?

How can we get you to accept doing the on-call work when your employees don't feel like doing it?

If you apply a PIP for anything that wouldn't otherwise be grounds for immediate dismissal, you're an idiot. Period. And in this case, there's no reason to believe that a PIP would change the outcome, so it's still idiotic. Take the time to learn what a PIP is and how to use it effectively, please.

First, determine who was responsible for hiring the engineer in question, and determine if they indeed were told there would be no on-call work. Afterwards, determine if the performance of this engineer is worth it, either keeping them and not forcing them to be on-call or pay them to be on-call. Skip the PIP because the engineer has made it clear, they won’t be on-call, without reimbursement for their work while on-call which is perfectly reasonable. PIP would waste everyone’s time. The employee absolutely positively is no being unreasonable to expect compensation for being on-call

No one likes to be on call. I had a pager call 30-some years ago when I worked on air traffic control as an on call subcontractor. There was a call came in about 2am mid-night. I had to call back. I got compensated afterwards. Depending on the nature of the work, sometimes on call is un-avoidable. But, you must compensate the employees. If no compensation, your company is bullying the employees.

Are the down votes just because one dislikes the OPs perspective? The question seems reasonable enough from a leadership perspective and has resulted in reasonable answers

Even if you could force them to accept, they're all going to leave your company as soon as they can. Your CTO is destroying the your department by doing this. If I were you, I would be looking for an exit as well.

What kind of question is this? The real question is "How can we get free work out of our employees that are outside the original scope of contract?" You don't. Draft a new contract, give them pay raise. That's the obvious choice. What is the issue here? Does your CTO not grasp how a business transaction works? Maybe he needs to be re-evaluated for his eligibility as a C-level staff because he's missing some very basic understanding of reality.

@morsor It's not reasonable because it is a CTO issuing a mandate to his supposed slaves, and the manager here is simply one of said slaves repeating the decree. This shouldn't even need to be asked. It is a contractual change at such a basic level, AND the demand to work for free, that it is just absurd. Maybe the CTO needs to talk to legal first and see if his company's legal team thinks it'll fly.

@morsor The OP is a manager, not a fresh junior employee. They should know better than the question says. If you ever were on-call before, you would know on-call is the same as work. Once you receive a call, you need to start to work immediately. The OP was not certain about the the compensation, what kind of question is this ? Hence, the downvote.

The manager needs to get compensation for their employees first before asking this question. If the money is there, the employees still refuse to be on-call, then the question is meaningful.

(Being a manager does not always mean they aren't a freshly hired employee, or new to this role, or both. Managers have a first job too, y'know. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance...

@keshlam The OP did say "So now they are demanding an immediate pay raise before being put on call for a week. Not sure this is going to be approved though." This means the OP knew the compensation is important. They should have asked this question after they know if there is pay raise or other compensation. Please see the very first comment Player One made.

I'm guessing this is united-states ('cos this wouldn't fly in most civilised countries ;) ), but could you edit that in to confirm (or say where it is, if that's not right) ?

@AakashM I was in the US. I had a friend who worked for a comm company on-call for maintaining a data server center. Once he received a call, the clock ticks. It's USD$200.00/hr. This was in year 2000. His wife was awake when he was asleep. Once the phone rang, his wife woke him up, then went to sleep. (there would be a penalty if he did not pick up the call)

@Nobody oh, don't get me wrong, I'm on an on call rota myself. But I agreed to it...

Trying to force your engineers to be on a call at night and on weekends without extra compensation is the fastest way of seeing them leave. I would recommend not trying to implement this, otherwise your next major concern will be finding new engineers to replace the ones leaving.

You might want to tag your question with a country name. Because in some countries, for example Germany, employers are required by law to compensate employees in when they are on-call or in standby duty, no matter if they are actually called during that time.

I think the question should be "How can I get my CEO/CTO willing to pay extra compensation to my engineers to accept being on call?"

@Nelson: I also would not accept the conditions presented by the OP - but that does not make the question bad. This is probably a quite common issue for IT workplace leaders - and most (if not all) answers have illustrated the fundamental disagreement between employer and employee and hopefully given food for thought

Is the CTO on-call like everybody else ? Please note that I am asking about CTO, not CEO or CFO.

Are we sure this is a real question? it has generated a lot of comments and answers, but the OP has not participated in any of them. Actively participating and answering the questions posted in comments is a good sign that the question is serious, but in this case the OP seems to have vanished completely. Starting to wonder if the question is real.

Good call, sometimes it is hard to tell if this is ragebait or an actual situation, but honestly I have seen enough questions on here that are the same level of ridiculous from the management - mostly of the "I f***ed an important employee, but they actually f***ed me back, how do I make them stop/f*** them further" variety. My favourites had a decent collection of these I shared around, but now that favourites are private (and called "Saves") I cannot do that anymore...

@morsor No country indication, no detailed explanation of implementation strategy (e.g. clarification if there is any kind of compensation planned), no interactions of the OP... I think there are good reasons to downvote the question in itself.