Ancestry's CEO Skips the Private Office and Eats Lunch in the Break Room With Staff

Howard Hochhauser, chief executive of the genealogy company Ancestry, has a simple rule for staying in touch with what is actually happening inside his own company: he eats lunch in the employee break room instead of a private office. It's a small habit, but Hochhauser treats it as a real management tool, not a photo-op gesture, because it gives him a direct line to opinions and concerns that rarely survive the trip up through several layers of management.

Hochhauser traces the practice back to his time at Bear Stearns in the late 1990s, where he worked in equity research and eventually rose to vice president and analyst. He has pointed to the investment bank's founder, Ace Greenberg, as the model for this kind of accessibility, recalling how Greenberg's presence on the trading floor rather than behind a closed door shaped his own sense of how a leader should operate.

Asked why he still bothers with it as CEO, Hochhauser put it bluntly: "One of the things that I think I struggle with — I think other CEOs struggle with — is access to unfiltered information." The idea is that executives who only hear from their direct reports get a curated version of company morale, while a seat in the break room surfaces complaints and ideas before they get smoothed over.

He points to a recent example: before formally announcing a new in-person work policy, Hochhauser floated the idea informally over lunch. Employees raised concerns about childcare and other family obligations that hadn't come up in leadership discussions. He says that feedback changed how the policy was ultimately communicated, landing on a looser, trust-based message: "You're an adult. Use your judgment."

Hochhauser isn't alone in treating the lunch hour as a management channel. Apple's Tim Cook has been known to sit down with random employees in the company cafeteria, while Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn and chief technology officer Severin Hacker hold daily team lunches in public spaces rather than in executive suites. At ABN Amro, CEO Marguerite Bérard has held weekly lunches with small groups of eight to ten staff during a period of workforce changes, and First Watch CEO Chris Tomasso eats in the break room and follows up with handwritten notes to employees. Taken together, the examples point to a pattern: as companies navigate hybrid-work fights and restructuring, some CEOs are using the most mundane part of the workday to get information no dashboard or survey will give them.