By Kevin Meyer
Interesting article by Kimberly Weisul in BNet describing a study on where CEOs really spend their time. As you'd probably suspect, the vast majority is spent in meetings.
As you might suspect, CEO’s go to meetings. A lot.
- Some 60% of CEO time was taken up in meetings
- CEOs spent 25% of their time on phone calls and at public events
- Only 15% of CEO time was spent working alone.
Time is also split between insiders and outsiders.
On average:
- CEOs spent 42% of their time with insiders-other employees
- CEOs spent 25% of their time in groups that included both insiders, such as employees, and outsiders, such as suppliers.
- CEOs spent 16% of their time as the only company representative with one or more outsiders.
- Among insiders, the finance department got the most time, or an average of 8.6 hours per week. Human resources got the least CEO time, or 5.5 hours per week.
- Among outsiders, consultants dominate CEO time, getting an average of 4.7 hours per week. Suppliers get the least attention, or only 1.3 hours per week.
But here's the interesting data:
As CEOs worked more hours, those extra hours went to meetings with people inside the company, so the hardest-working CEOs spent more time with their own people. Time spent with insiders seemed to improve firm performance, while time spent with outsiders didn’t seem to make much difference.
A 1% increase in the amount of hours a CEO spent with his or her own people correlated to increase in [firm] productivity of 2.12%.
The power of realizing there's a brain attached to the hands of your team, and tapping into that creativity, knowledge, and experiences.
Works every time.
karen Wilhelm says
Wouldn’t you like to know how many hours are spent with front line and first tier management employees and how to compare more profitable vs. less profitable companies?
Mike Thelen says
Compare that to CEO’s like Mike Lovejoy of ACME. How do they compare, face-time, floor-time versus traditional (what I believe Kevin is focusing on above). (For reference – Mike Lovejoy has 3 stand-up desks, one in each plant – no office.)
david foster says
I’d think the internal vs external time spent by the ceo would be strongly influenced by the split of work between ceo & chairman…if they’re different people, then the chairman can do a lot of external stuff that the ceo will have to do himself if they’re the same person.
Dan Markovitz says
Here’s what Peter Drucker said about meetings:
“Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. . . if people in an organization find themselves in meetings a quarter of their time or more — there is time-wasting malorganization.”
Wonder what he’d think of this BNet study?
Ryan says
I’m also a little curious as to what definition is used for “meeting.” Two or more people? Could it be a one-on-one work session?
I don’t know how much it would “really” matter, but I know that a lot of people consider meetings to be completely different things.
Interesting information nonetheless. I would like to see some more details on why the inner office meetings might be leading to the productivity. Is it simply getting more work done? Is it a sort of moral support to the employee, which helps them work better and smarter? The list could go on and on.