HR leaders are not lacking insight, empathy, or strategic intent. What often limits their influence is not the absence of data, but the absence of shared language with the executives making organizational decisions. Even when HR has the right information, its impact can fall flat if those insights are not framed in terms that connect directly to how leaders think about performance, risk, and value creation.
In a recent episode of HRTechChat, I spoke with Maria Scarangella, founder of Marstella and former Vice President of Talent and Enterprise Learning at GEICO. Our conversation explored a challenge many HR leaders intuitively understand but often struggle to address directly: HR is not sidelined because it lacks value. It is sidelined when its insights are framed in HR terms rather than positioned as inputs into business decisions.
The Issue Is Not Metrics. It Is What We Stop Short of Explaining.
Turnover, engagement, time to hire, and retention are familiar metrics. They are also rarely sufficient on their own in executive conversations.
As Maria shared, the disconnect often happens when HR treats metrics as conclusions instead of starting points. Senior leaders do not make decisions based on percentages in isolation. They make decisions based on cost, risk, capacity, and opportunity. Metrics only become meaningful when they are translated into those terms.
Turnover becomes relevant when it explains lost productivity, execution risk, or customer impact. Engagement matters when it connects to throughput, quality, revenue per employee, or leadership effectiveness. Without that translation, even well-designed analytics remain informational rather than influential.
Quantifying the Employee Lifecycle Changes the Conversation
One of the most compelling parts of our discussion focused on quantifying the full employee lifecycle. This includes hiring, onboarding, time to proficiency, sustained contribution, and eventual exit.
What often surprises leaders is not simply the cost of turnover. It is the cumulative value lost when roles never reach full productivity, when critical talent exits at the wrong time, or when performance stagnates due to ineffective enablement. These losses compound quietly and rarely appear in a single dashboard.
When these dynamics are quantified and connected to business outcomes, HR conversations shift meaningfully. Leaders stop asking why HR is investing in certain initiatives and begin asking how those investments protect value and accelerate execution. At that point, HR is no longer advocating for programs. It is shaping decisions.
Business Literacy Is Now a Core HR Capability
Maria brings a perspective that remains uncommon among senior HR leaders. Prior to leading enterprise talent strategy, she managed a 2.5 billion dollar P&L. That operational experience fundamentally shaped how she evaluates people decisions and how she communicates their impact.
Her guidance to HR leaders is practical and direct. Understand how the organization makes money. Know what leaders are measured on. Identify the operational constraints limiting execution. Position people initiatives as solutions to those constraints.
This is not about turning HR into finance. It is about building sufficient business fluency to anchor people insights in outcomes executives care about. In my advisory work, this capability consistently differentiates HR leaders who influence decisions from those who are asked to react to them.
Why This Matters in Data-Driven and PE-Backed Organizations
In organizations under sustained performance pressure, particularly private equity-backed environments, people data is no longer supplemental. It is increasingly reviewed alongside financial performance, operational metrics, and growth forecasts.
Boards and investors are asking questions such as where talent instability threatens value creation, which workforce investments improve execution speed, how leadership capability affects scalability, and what people risks could derail the operating plan. These are not HR questions. They are organizational questions.
HR becomes indispensable when workforce data is framed in a way that informs these decisions clearly and credibly.
What This Signals for HR Technology Providers
This conversation reflects a broader shift in how workforce intelligence is being designed and delivered.
In my advisory work and recent briefings, I consistently see leading platforms moving beyond descriptive dashboards toward decision support that enables action.
For example, Visier continues to set the bar for advanced people analytics by helping organizations move from reporting to insight, particularly in areas such as workforce risk, productivity, and scenario analysis.
Platforms like WorkTango highlight the growing importance of manager enablement, connecting engagement and feedback data directly to leadership action rather than treating employee experience as a passive metric.
From a planning and execution standpoint, Anaplan demonstrates how workforce data becomes materially more valuable when integrated into enterprise planning and modeling, allowing organizations to evaluate trade-offs across headcount, cost, capacity, and growth.
Meanwhile, modern HCM platforms such as Darwinbox illustrate how embedding analytics and insight directly into core HR workflows can improve adoption, reduce friction for managers, and bring decision support closer to where work actually happens.
Together, these approaches reflect a clear shift away from static reporting and toward decision-grade workforce intelligence that leaders can use to prioritize, model trade-offs, and execute more effectively.
Influence Comes From Clarity, Not Advocacy
HR does not earn influence by asking for a seat at the table. That phrase has become shorthand for frustration rather than progress.
Influence comes from making the path forward clearer. When HR leaders understand the business deeply and translate people data into outcomes executives care about, they become integral to how organizational decisions are made.
As Maria summarized in our conversation, the work begins with understanding how the business creates value and where execution breaks down. From there, people insights become a lever for results rather than a justification exercise. That is how HR moves from being consulted to being trusted.
You can listen to the full HR Tech Chat conversation with Maria Scarangella wherever you get your podcasts or on our website here: The Economics of HR – Speaking the Language of Business with Maria Scarangella