Core Hours
Hotjar is a remote, flexible working environment. We do not control nor monitor working hours. Instead, we expect everyone to give their best to make Hotjar succeed – and we trust completely in each other to do so. We work a 40 hour week but outside of core hours, you are allowed to plan your time and productivity as you wish (but please coordinate this with your team). Please note we said a 40 hour week. We've found that we hit maximum efficiency when our team works full-time. Therefore we do not support part-time or reduced schedules. We've tried it and it's not for us (at least not now).
To maximize team collaboration, we suggest team members overlap their ‘online availability’ time, as much as possible. Online availability refers to your ‘online’ time on Slack and ‘availability’ for calls with colleagues on Hangouts. For this reason, we require as a minimum you are ‘available’ every day between 2pm–5pm CET.
If you are busy with errands or have an appointment during the day, you are free to not be available at all. If you plan on taking an unusually long break during the day, please notify your team.
It is your responsibility to always have a good internet connection and a high-quality headset (it must be a headset) during your ‘online availability’ times.
Weekly Structure
To better align our focus / meeting / planning hours across all teams and maximize opportunities for communication, we have set out rough guidelines to structure our working week. These guidelines are not set in stone but are meant to help us schedule calls and collaborate better. All team members are free to set out their own work week, keeping in mind the guidelines set out below:
Mondays: Call heavy days! We have our planning meetings, 1-1s, sync calls, etc., on Monday. People are likely to be in meetings for the large part of the day so they might be a bit slower when it comes to responding to messages.
Tuesdays: Focus days! Tuesdays are generally the most productive working days of the week. Having a focus day on Tuesday allows each team member to focus more on their sprints. We try to avoid having regularly scheduled meetings on Tuesdays unless they are project-centric. This doesn't mean that communication or cross-team collaboration is off the table - we can't work without speaking to each other, neither do we want to encourage this! Other team members are less likely to be tied up in meetings on Tuesdays.
Wednesdays: No meeting Wednesdays! We never have scheduled calls on Wednesdays unless it is an emergency. People will jump on quick calls as necessary to collaborate, and still communicate via Slack / Email.
Thursdays + Fridays: All our 'big' meetings are scheduled for these days - weekly demos, monthly meetings, Leadership planning, etc. How call-busy people are will depend on the week we are in during the month.
