What do you think when you see a CFO and a CHRO? Maybe two people with different expertise: one is hunched over spreadsheets, talking about ROI and EBITDA. The other is in a meeting about company culture, employee engagement, and maybe even the new office coffee machine.
Isn’t it?
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But that’s not the case today. CHROs are aspiring to grab a seat in the boardroom and talk the language of business that goes beyond people. Being business-focused is crucial to HR professionals, and ultimately, they have to be strategic with the workforce and talent they have as resources.
Therefore, it’s time for CHROs to think and move beyond people-focused roles and plan their next quarter budget along with the CFO.
In the recent episode of The CHRO Mindset, Aparna Chetan, CHRO, Torry Harris Integration Solutions, and a renowned HR expert who talks finance and P&L without hesitation, has revealed insights that will answer the HR question of 2025, “How to be a successful CFO this year?”
Then your search ends here. Implement Aparna’s practical advice on how you can be a CHRO as well as a fluent CFO without certifications or degrees, and don’t just navigate the talk but lead the boardroom.
If you get petrified by a P&L sheet but get fascinated with it as well, let’s get started.
Adopt a Data-Driven Approach to Present Your POV
To be a CFO, you need to start from where they start. It’s data. Now, once you have the financial sheets, dissect them into questions. That can be like:
- Where did the most profit come from?
- What drove the growth this quarter?
- What are the specific costs you can optimize?
These questions will unravel the direction you need to look at. And that’s the secret of how to be a successful CFO. For example,
Instead of just reporting a 15% turnover rate, dig deeper. Ask the CFO questions:
- What is the cost of that turnover?
- What’s the average time-to-fill for critical roles?
- How much is that costing us in lost productivity? And,
- Can we correlate employee engagement scores with departmental revenue or customer satisfaction?
Align your people initiatives with the measurable business outcomes you plan to achieve per quarter. For example,
If you plan to launch an employee well-being program, connect it with an anticipated increase in engagement and more productivity to eventually a rise in ROI. This clever boardroom strategy will help you prioritize your people without compromising on business results.
Keep track of the pre-and post-launch of your initiative program.
Give evidence of the positive impact of an initiative. For example,
- A particular training program led to a 10% increase in sales performance for that team.
- A wellness initiative reduced sick days, which directly impacts project timelines.
It affirms to the boardroom that you are not only focused on spending a fortune on the workforce but also interested in driving ROI from those. Because you’re optimizing a critical business asset—your people.
Your Checklist to Pin: Create a Data-Driven Narrative
- Quantify employee turnover costs.
- Connect engagement scores to business results (e.g., sales).
- Report ROI on all people’s initiatives.
Think in Terms of ROI, Not Just Opex
That’s inherent to every CFO. For them, every cent spent is nothing but an investment, and once they allocate the budget to your HR initiatives, they want to see the impact on the audit sheet. And you must be prepared. But no matter how difficult it seems, it is all possible. If you want an answer to how to be a CFO, here’s your action plan.
Before launching a new program, draft an outline on how it would benefit the business.
- Increased productivity?
- More engagement?
- Employee loyalty?
- Innovative excellence?
When you find the metric it touches, quantify it. Let’s understand this with an example.
You think that you are spending your highly productive time filling sheets, which is wasting your potential that you can utilize to design new policies, guidelines, or take an innovative step toward better business. Now you pitch for a new HR tech system. Rather than focusing from a people’s perspective, focus on the business one.
For example, don’t say, it’ll improve the employee experience, but:
- Will it automate a process that saves 20 hours of administrative work a week, allowing your team to focus on strategic initiatives?
- What’s the INR value of those hours?
And if you feel positive about the step, go for it. Just remember, you’re not just spending money but making a strategic investment that must yield a return.
Your Checklist to Pin: ROI Mindset
- Label every HR expense as an investment.
- Calculate hard and soft ROI for new programs.
- Track and report on projected returns.
Be a Visionary and Plan for the Future
Think ahead of time. That’s one superpower CFOs swear by. They are visionaries and not only can they remember a glitch or an expense pattern they found in the last quarter’s sheet, but they can also predict future market shifts.
For example, possible capital investments, a downfall in the marketplace, or an impact of a global event on business are diverse economic scenarios that they can easily estimate with changing industrial dynamics. It makes their financial proficiency highly accurate and infallible. You must develop this trait also.
Stop reacting to crises, start preventing them. Use data from balance sheets, global news, pulse surveys, sentiment analysis, product reviews from employees, etc., to estimate the current state of your workplace and workforce.
For example, if you realize a sudden trend in absenteeism, chances are high, your workforce is emotionally disconnected at work. You must address the cause before it turns into a revenue loss due to a sudden wave of resignations or altogether absconding.
Other examples may be team conflicts, indecisive succession planning, outdated tech or systems, and unfilled vacancies. HR professionals typically act as crisis managers, where they must act like crisis preventers to minimize the loss.
To tackle this, start by noticing minor disruptions in the workflow and envisioning the long-term ripples they will have. For example,
- What will be the expenses if an outdated HRMS gives login issues?
- What if an unresolved team conflict can lead to sudden and impulsive resignation from team members?
- What if an employee’s skill gaps are not addressed and they are wasting their potential working in a traditional, slow way?
Your Checklist to Pin: Predict Trends and Foresee Challenges
- Assess future talent gaps and upskill or hire accordingly.
- Build a succession plan with AI tools. Measure potential and past performances.
- Model different hiring scenarios like growth and leadership succession.
Challenge Current Expense Plans
A CFO is always focused on saving costs. While auditing sheets, they often ask questions on how much is being spent on a specific goal and what its relevance to business operations.
You may often find them questioning and asking for reconsiderations on costs spent. And that’s what makes them exemplary in saving businesses from financial investments that might not be returning any value.
As a CHRO, you must apply the same mindset to your HR budget and processes. Ask:
- Why are we spending this much on travel?
- Can we get a better deal on software licenses?
- Is this expense essential?
If you truly want to know how to be a successful CFO, this is a merciless prerequisite. But remember, you are still not a CFO and must think from the people’s POV. Scrutinize your HR processes in a more empathetic way, like this:
- Are there legacy systems or manual workflows that are slowing things down?
- Is your benefits package truly what your employees value, or could you reallocate funds to something more impactful?
- Are our recruitment channels the most effective and enhance employee experience?
- Are our performance management processes driving better results, or demotivating employees?
Your Checklist to Pin: Assess & Analyze
- Audit HR processes for time-wasting tasks.
- Replace ‘We have done it like this always’ with ‘Why do we need this?”
- Identify and cut low-ROI expenses.
What Did You Learn from This?
As a CHRO in the boardroom, present your people-centric costs as investments and not expenses. This even helps other CXOs to understand your perspective and align business decisions to ease employees’ load and be mindful that their company’s people are not just a source of work and productivity but the most valuable and critical asset.
Now that you know these strategic CFO habits to practice, it’s time to step into the boardroom and put your POV on the table just like Aparna Chetan did.