Private Secretaries to each of them, Advisors ditto, Communication Secretaries ditto, Deputy communication secretaries ditto, Digital managers ditto, official spokespersons ditto, household staff at KP and Amner Hall, Nanny, housekeepers, Chefs. Then there is a security detail, and so on...
As I see it though, the fact that there is a need for them to have households of this size rather indicates that there is an awful lot of behind the scenes work to be done, rather than none at all. I presume you imagine all these people are busy each day doing something?Inevitably those things that they are doing have been delegated downwards to be performed, and their output will in turn be delivered upwards for approval and action.
I have always presumed that their offices operate like the offices of a CEO for big organisations. The CEO is the “face” of the organisation, and so the one who fronts up to meetings and engagements, with the expectations that they will be well-prepared and say/do the right things. They receive every a mountain of correspondence and requests everyday, which gets filtered down to their teams to respond to, but they still need to consider them and provide instructions for a good number of them. They will get detailed briefings for most engagements, and it is their responsibility to get up to speed with them (feedback from people at engagements suggests they do this well, by the way).
The letter the Queen wrote in response to the Oldie Award that came out yesterday is a good example of this kind of process. I do not for a moment believe that the Queen sat down and typed that letter herself. But I do believe that she would have discussed what response she wanted to make in a regular meeting with the staff member who handles her correspondence (a CEO would typically do this daily with one of their team), who then produces the draft, which the Queen then approves. It will then be printed off and placed in her folder of correspondence to be hand-addressed and signed, as her letters typically are. Some correspondence she does hand write herself (they all do - plenty of examples are out there). That kind of process takes up a couple of hours a day most days.
Then there’s the fact that we know that they have a supervisory capacity over their staff, even though they wouldn’t get involved in the day to day nitty gritty. The decision to split the Royal Foundations that came from the top is an example of this, as is the smaller decisions about how their houses and offices are run - Prince Charles having around half of his energy consumption coming from renewable sources etc.
Big, busy offices spin off a lot of work for their principals. Nothing I have seen of the way the Royals operate suggest it’s any different for the most senior ones. None of this is spending 8 hours a day down the pit, off course it’s not. But it’s not like many of us are doing work like that these days either.