Good morning! For years, HR has cycled through titular rebrands, from employee experience to people operations or people and culture. But beyond the shifting name changes, little has fundamentally changed in how the department functions, argues Jessie Zwaan, who leads people strategy and operatio ns at HR software platform Leapsome. The change she is calling for is financial. HR leaders, Zwaan says, need to operate more like CFOs. Many cannot immediately cite their company’s EBITDA, and for Zwaan, that illustrates a gap in how closely HR is connected to key financial metrics.  “HR has been judged on the amount of tasks you can tick off, the amount of processes you can run, the amount of compliance you can achieve,” she says, “and less about the increase in ARR per head you can achieve.” That mismatch shows up in the boardroom. A CRO typically walks in with projections that tie every dollar requested to an expected return. By contrast, HR leaders often present investments in the employee experience without a clear link to revenue. In fact, 31% of surveyed HR leaders cite conflict between people and financial goals as a top obstacle, a recent study from HR and payroll platform HiBob found. The fix, Zwaan argues, is to start speaking the language of the PL. Just as marketing and sales teams calculate customer lifetime value—the total revenue a business expects from a single customer over their entire relationship—she suggests that CHROs measure “employee lifetime value,” factoring in salary, the revenue an employee supports, and the ongoing cost to retain them. In this way, HR teams can map specific investments to business outcomes. That does not mean bringing back the beanbags and snack walls of the 2010s perks era, Zwaan cautions. Instead, Zwaan points to targeted spending, like remote-first Dropbox’s investments in in-person offsites over office perks. Kristin StollerEditorial Director, Fortune Live [email protected] This story was originally featured on Fortune.com ...read more read less