Should CEOs Have Fixed Working Hours?

Laxman Narasimhan, former global CEO of Starbucks, was suddenly moved out from the corner office amidst poor performance by the company.

Around that time, he had created a small storm by announcing that to achieve work-life balance, he preferred to work only till 6 pm every day. Poor company performance and work-life balance?

Which raises a fundamental question: should CEOs have fixed working hours and how can they best manage their time?

In the great debate about employees' work hours, there is a related and important but under-discussed agenda: the working hours of CEOs.

A young employee Anna Sebastian Perayil of EY India passed away amidst allegations of overwork and exhaustion.

It is well-recognised that the working culture of an organisation is often set by the example of its CEO and top leadership.

Last year, NR Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys stirred the hornet’s nest by arguing that employees, many of whom are from the young generation, should work 70 hours a week and that when he was leading Infosys full-time, he had done so too.

Gaurav Dalmia, chairman of Dalmia Group Holdings said, “I think the great debate about the number of work hours is not very valid. It should neither be fixed nor flexible, but CEOs have to manage their time according to the circumstances. For example, if an IPO is coming up, the CEO and top leadership will have to work 24x7, but at other times, it could be normal working hours.”

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Perils Of Time Management

Time management and long working hours for CEOs have become more important now than in the past for a variety of reasons. Business groups in India have become complex organisations. Many of them are also global. For example, the Tata Group has a turnover of $165 billion, employing 1 million people in 100 countries through 30 companies. Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the chairman of Tata Sons is in an unenviable position.

Infosys on the other hand, as of March 31 2024, employed a total of 343,234 Infoscions with 40.1% of them being women. The company is spread across 56 countries. In 2023-2024, while it generated approximately 61% of its revenue from North America, only 3% came from India. However, over 85% of the employees are based in India. The moot point being that employees and top leadership including the CEO, especially in the software sector, work on cross-border timings.

Additionally, today the CEO’s work involves a large number of stakeholders including shareholders, employees, the board, customers, the media, governments, NGOs and activists. Social media platforms amplify a company’s and CEO’s work — both good and bad.

The CEO is often the internal and external face of the company. The recent EY India incident of the death of an employee shows that the company and the CEO were reactive in their responses which took up a lot of leadership time. Proactiveness could have reduced the time in managing the crisis or even preventing the crisis.

In a seminal study published in a 2018 Harvard Business Review edition, Harvard Business School’s Michael E Porter and Nitin Nohria wrote on how CEOs spend their time, “Running a large global company is an exceedingly complex job. Unlike any other executive, the CEO has to engage with them all. More than anyone else in the organisation, they (CEOs) confront an acute scarcity of one resource. That resource is time. There is never enough time to do everything that a CEO is responsible for.”

While all these indicate the need for long CEO work timings, the fact is that like how many employees in forward-looking companies are given work-life balance, the CEOs also need that to perform their best.

Former PepsiCo chair and CEO Indra Nooyi and former chairman of the Godrej group Adi Godrej are good examples of how they tried their best in working limited and fixed times and prioritised their personal and family interests and still came up top in business performance.

Nooyi in her book, My Life In Full, talks about how she was able to prioritise both work and family. Her mantra: leading with purpose at work and home. One of the ways in which Godrej manages his time is through strict punctuality in regular and board meetings. He was always to the point and came well-planned. He led by example and the other leaders in the group followed suit.

Best Practices

Dalmia outlines strategies he uses to get the best out of his time and what he has seen other CEOs do. These include developing clear priorities, having a detailed checklist, time management through ‘span of control’ by limiting direct reports and having a strong middle management. He said, “Delegation by CEOs is not abdication but an ability to get work done from the management team.”

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Porter and Nohria argue that “Given that work could consume every hour of their lives, CEOs have to set limits so that they can preserve their health and their relationships with family and friends. Most of the CEOs in our study recognised that. They slept, on average, 6.9 hours a night, and many had regular exercise regimens, which consumed about 9% of their non-work hours (or about 45 minutes a day). To sustain the intensity of the job, CEOs need to train—just as elite athletes do. That means allocating time for health, fitness, and rest.”

Sanyukta Jolly, professor of Human Resources at the IILM Institute of Higher Education said, “One of the ways in which CEOs can work in limited fixed hours is to focus on productivity rather than the number of hours. Some CEOs work best in the first half. Prioritising work and doing important jobs first can help the CEO in accomplishing his tasks in a limited time.”

Finally, having a great executive assistant is crucial for a CEO. Not only do they shield the CEO from unnecessary distractions, but also help the leader by taking decisions that need not have his attention. For example, like many business groups, Bharti Enterprises chairman has several executive assistants who perform different activities like managing his diary and going through his emails on behalf of Sunil Mittal.

The success of a company depends to a large measure on the CEO’s performance and productivity. A key factor for this is smart time management. In a corporate world of increasing complexity, neither fixed nor flexible and long hours will work for the CEO. He or she needs to find that balance between both.