Run an SLA 24/7 (ignore office hours)

By default, SLA timers pause outside your team’s opening hours — a conversation arriving at 5pm Friday doesn’t start breaching at 5:01pm. For some policies, that’s the wrong behavior: contractual round-the-clock SLAs, monitored emergency channels, or after-hours support teams need timers that count continuously.

The fix is one toggle.

Before you start

• The policy you want to convert exists (create one)
• Admin permissions on SLA Policies
• A clear understanding of who’s responsible for responding outside business hours — turning this on without staffing creates breaches you can’t prevent

Steps

1. Open Settings → SLA Policies.
2. Open the policy.
3. Toggle Ignore office hours on.
4. Save.

The timer now counts 24/7 on every conversation this policy applies to. Existing conversations are affected immediately — their countdowns will adjust on the next scheduler tick.

Verify it worked

1. Open a conversation the policy applies to outside business hours (or wait until then).
2. The SLA badge’s countdown should continue to tick down. With office hours respected, it would have paused.

When to use this

• 24/7 monitored emergency channel — The team responds round-the-clock; SLA should reflect that
• Contractual SLAs in enterprise contracts — Customers don’t care about your office hours; the contract doesn’t either
• Async-first teams with global staffing — Someone is always on; pausing the timer creates artificial slack
• Critical-issue tier above standard support — Even at 3am, a Sev-1 incident shouldn’t have a paused timer

When NOT to use this

• Standard business-hours-only support — Don’t punish the team for time they’re contractually off the clock
• Single-region team with no after-hours coverage — Breaches you can’t prevent demoralize the team without improving outcomes
• Most B2B SaaS support — Customers send emails on Saturday but rarely expect Saturday responses

Combining with channel/team scoping

You can have some policies respect office hours and others not, based on how they’re scoped:

• Standard Support (channel-assigned to email) — office hours respected. Email is async; pausing the timer overnight is fine.
• Critical Issues (team-assigned to On-Call team) — office hours ignored. The on-call team is on regardless.

The toggle is per-policy. Different scopes can have different behaviors.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: I turned on Ignore office hours but the timer still seems to pause. Fix: Save the policy, then refresh the conversation page. Existing badges may be cached for a few seconds. If it persists, check that the policy you toggled is actually the one applying to the conversation — see Set up channel-specific SLAs for how the most-specific match wins.
• Symptom: Conversations are breaching overnight on a policy that’s supposed to respect office hours. Fix: Ignore office hours got toggled on by mistake, OR the workspace’s opening hours are set incorrectly (covering more time than they should). Check both.

See also

• Opening Hours
• Create an SLA policy