Ancestry’s CEO says a billionaire boss taught him to eat lunch with employees in the break room—it gives him access to ‘unfiltered information’

At many large companies, CEOs are squared away in plush corner offices, where they take meetings and receive elaborate lunch orders.

But when midday rolls around, Ancestry employees find their CEO Howard Hochhauser taking his meal in the office’s eating area.

It’s a habit he picked up from Ace Greenberg when Hochhauser worked at Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns in the late 1990s.

He held multiple positions within the equity research department, ultimately serving as a vice president and equity research analyst.

And when it came time to step away from the keyboard and sit down for their midday meals, the company’s long-time CEO, Greenberg, would eat among his employees.

“Ace Greenberg, who founded the firm, sat on the floor every day, and it stuck with me.

Like, gosh, that’s really a visible statement.

He’s really accessible,” Hochhauser tells Fortune .

“You could talk to him, he wasn’t sitting in some glass office that’s untouchable.” “One of the things that I think I struggle with—I think other CEOs struggle with—is access to unfiltered information,” he continues.

“People wrap you in this bubble…And so if you’re breaking bread with people casually over lunch, you tend to get that [information].” What Ancestry’s CEO learned from having lunch with staffers By sharing meals with employees, Ancestry’s CEO can get a temperature check on how policies and decisions land with staffers.

Even when Hochhauser had to remind employees of the company’s in-person working expectations, he says employees were honest about their feelings.

About two days before he announced in-person expectations to his employees, Hochhauser informally ran the idea by a bunch of staffers.

Immediately, they felt comfortable raising concerns about how that will impact caregiving: dropping their children off at school; being able to make soccer games in the evenings; helping their kids move into college.

“People appreciate it, leveling with them and telling them what expectations are,” Hochhauser says.