Hi, sorry to hear about your experience! I work in a research/project management-type role. My workload fluctuates a huge amount by week, and I do typically work long hours, but even when I have a particularly heavy week, it hardly ever feels like I’m “on call.” Within a week, I can largely organize my work as I see fit and I believe this is mostly true for my colleagues in similar roles; the only time we behave as if we are on call is for major deadlines. I occasionally take meetings at weird times due to international partnerships, but always with plenty of advance notice.
And actually, when it comes to ops roles, our head of ops is very encouraging of people protecting their vacation time. I give her a ton of credit for being thoughtful and intentional about how to develop a healthy culture around working hours/protected time, especially given that we’re an international organization spread out across time zones. Of course it mattered that she’s one of the co-founders and could lay out reasonable expectations—ie, she wasn’t going to always be on call, and wouldn’t expect anyone else to.
I think unquestionably certain roles are more demanding in hours, responsiveness, or both, but that should be made clear in job descriptions or interviews, and hopefully allow you to make an informed decision—eg, one former colleague was hired for a comms role explicitly described as involving “rapid response,” so you can predict that would put you more on call than other roles at the same org.
So basically, my sense is that:
a) roles in ops & events management will have more “fires to put out” than other roles in the same organization, but also
b) ops will have more “fires” at some organizations than others, and
c) if someone at a high enough level cares, they can just lay out norms, and that will shape org culture.
My typical week has 4-6 meetings. I usually have 3 standing meetings: staff meeting, a check-in with my boss, and a meeting with a project collaborator. Then each week I usually wind up having 1-3 extra one-off meetings related to projects, like a check-in with a contractor, an informational meeting with a researcher, or a brainstorming session with a colleague. Internal meetings tend to be 60-90 minutes whereas one-offs with external parties tend to be 30-40 minutes. If eg project schedules sync in a weird way, I might get up to 8 meetings, but that’s uncommon. (Some of my colleagues have much more meeting-heavy schedules; it depends on the project and what stage they’re on.)
In terms of booking: I find my existing meeting schedule very easy to handle, and place a high value on personally being helpful and accessible to others. So I’ve intentionally set up my Calendly to show slots at any time during my working hours and to be book-able on fairly short notice. But that’s totally self-motivated! (Due to working fully remotely, I actually legitimately like having a meeting to break up the day.)