Have you ever strolled past that illustrious corner office in your place of work and wondered, Just what is it that my CEO actually does all day?
Sally Herships, a writer for Marketplace, wondered the same thing. Perhaps she could have ambushed her own CEO and asked, “So, what exactly do you do all day?” But, then, that might have placed her career in jeopardy. In fact, most of us are probably — and rightly — reluctant to pointedly question our CEO’s daily responsibilities, even if we do know the CEO well enough to have an opportunity to ask.
Many employees aren’t entirely sure what their CEOs do during the day. From Kirill Kedrinski.
Herships opted for a safer route, contacting a few CEOs of other corporations. Two companies agreed to allow Herships to speak with their CEOs. The two companies, Happy Family (an organic baby food company) and Sealed Air (a company that produces, among other things, bubble wrap), could hardly be more different. And yet, Herships noticed that they both had two very consistent demands on their time. Those two things are:
- Attending a lot of internal meetings, and
- Reading and responding to a lot of emails.
Happy Family’s CEO, 37-year-old Shazi Visram, admitted to Herships during their interview that Visram had needed to heed the call of nature for quite some time prior to meeting with Herships, but had not yet had the chance to do so. Visram has 80 full-time employees, and when she’s on-site at their New York headquarters, she makes an effort to check in with all of them. That equates to a whole lot of meetings.
Visram also estimates that she receives around 500 emails per day. That’s more than one email per minute during a typical 8-hour work day (but, of course, there is no such thing as a “typical 8-hour work day” for most CEOs).
Sealed Air’s CEO, 59-year-old Jerome Peribere, can’t exactly check in with each of his employees every day. That’s because he has 25,000 of them. And yet, lke Visram, Peribere’s day is chock full of meetings and emails.
At least Visram is no longer sleeping on a yoga mat at her office, which she did when she first founded the company. (And she was pregnant at the time!) An employee took pity on her and splurged on a fold-out bed for her. No word on whether or not she still sleeps there!
Herships also spoke with Andrea Prat, who studies CEOs as part of his job as a professor of economics at Columbia Business School. Prat notes that the meetings might start to wind down by close of business each day, but the CEOs job doesn’t stop. The study Prat conducted concluded that CEOs officially put in 11 hours each day, but that doesn’t take into account any time spent working before he or she arrives in the office or after he or she goes home at the end of the day.
As for off-the-clock work, Peribere says, “The good thing about the weekend is that you can spend quality time working.” (Um, dear reader, are you sure you still want to be the CEO of your company after hearing that?)