Cohere Health Work-Life Balance & Wellbeing

What’s your quotable principle for keeping a sustainable work pace — and what signal shows it works?

“Going the extra mile is part of building something meaningful. Burnout is not.” We’re a fast-scaling, mission-driven company, and we hire driven people who care deeply about improving healthcare. That ambition and drive to push yourself is real, and it’s part of why we’ve grown the way we have.

But sustainable pace doesn’t mean removing ambition. It means building systems that allow people to recover, recalibrate, and prioritize intentionally. We’re not perfect at this. Remote work blurs lines. Growth creates urgency. And high-performers can be their own toughest critics. 

Signals can change pending what’s happening in the business, but two things we like to encourage are: leaders openly resetting priorities when capacity is stretched, and people actually taking PTO and not “working from vacation.”

Which policy or norm makes flexible work succeed — and how do you measure impact?

In a mostly remote company, flexibility works best if expectations are clear. Focusing on clear ownership, transparent priorities and shared visibility into workloads can help ensure the sometimes ambiguous nature of flexible work doesn’t turn into overwork.

We promote work-life integration rather than work-life balance. Integration means your life doesn’t compete with your work; it coexists. Maybe you have an appointment in the middle of the day so you stay logged on a little later to get your work done, or you set focus time on your calendar so you can get deep work done without Slack disruptions. We measure impact through things like performance against goals, retention of high-performers, utilization of PTO and employee pulse surveys. Clear expectations are key. 

Which well-being-related resource do people actually use — and what improvement have you seen on your team?

While we offer traditional well-being benefits like mental health resources, PTO, remote work in the United States and more, I think the most valuable resource we can offer is manager training. Managers have the most access to our employees, so enabling them with the right tools to support their teams is key. Ensuring managers are confident in navigating workload conversations, for example, allow us to course correct earlier and reduce regrettable attrition in high pressure functions. 

Like most scaling organizations, we still have work to do, but our aspiration is simple: We want to build a place where high performance and human sustainability can coexist.