Quora's “coordination hours”

Quora values synchronous coordination. In order to quickly adapt to technology trends and collaborate to push the limits of what is possible across all of our functions to build the best products for our users, we need people to be able to talk to each other in real time.

We have designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours” where most employees are expected to be available for meetings and impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located. This maps to 6am to 12pm in Hawaii, 12pm to 6pm Eastern Time, 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12am across most of Europe. Because of the time zones above, most of our workforce is in North and South America, but we are happy to employ people who want to work during these coordination hours across the world.

We have a lot of work to do to achieve our mission, so we expect employees to do a significant amount of work outside of these hours as well, but we allow total flexibility on when that other work is done. Depending on their time zone and their personal commitments, some people might do all of their other work before these hours, and others might do all of it after.

Adapted from the Quora blog If you want more insight into the original decision to go remote-first in 2020, see https://quorablog.quora.com/Remote-First-at-Quora.