Episode 32 - Are you getting your money's worth from your HR function? Part 2 with HR Happy Hour's Trish Steed & Steve Boese
Plenty of executives believe they have an HR problem. The function feels slow. It feels reactive. It shows up after something breaks and rarely before. Trish Steed and Steve Boese of H3 HR Advisors offer an uncomfortable alternative explanation, which is that the HR you are complaining about may simply be the HR you bought. Part 1 of this series covered what HR absorbs that no one sees. Part 2 covers what business leaders are responsible for: the staffing ratios they set, the budget conversations they avoid, and the questions they never think to ask their HR partner.
What is the right ratio of HR staff to employees?
Trish Steed ran HR inside a Big Four accounting firm, a PR agency, a children's hospital, and an IT consultancy before becoming an analyst. Across all of them, the staffing math looked nothing like the benchmark.
"Ideally, I think it was said it should be like a one to 100 ratio. I have never worked in an environment where that was the case. In fact, it was usually like one to three thousand."
– Trish Steed, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, H3 HR Advisors
That gap is not a rounding error, and it determines what kind of function you get. At one HR professional for every two or three thousand employees, the team has no capacity for anything except the emergencies in front of them.
"You're handling only complaints. These exceptions that are gnarly and angry. You are 100% reactive."
– Steed
Move closer to one to 200 or one to 300, and the character of the work changes. There is room for proactive conversations, for early warning signals, for someone noticing a good employee sliding before the slide becomes a termination. The bigger the divide, Steed argues, the more command and control HR is forced to be, because compliance still has to happen no matter how thin the team is stretched.
The first assignment for any executive rereading this is arithmetic. Pull your HR headcount, pull your total employee count, and calculate the actual ratio. If the answer is closer to one to a thousand than one to a hundred, that number explains a great deal about why the function behaves the way it does.
How do you make the case for HR investment to a CFO who only cares about EBITDA?
Steve Boese starts by naming the contradiction that most cost-cutting conversations quietly contain. Executive teams want administrative overhead reduced, and they simultaneously want higher productivity, lower regrettable turnover, stronger managers, and a succession plan that survives the board meeting.
"It's hard to do both those things at the same time if you're trying to grind down the cost of a function and then also have, you know, tangentially what that function is helping to deliver to improve at the same time."
– Steve Boese, Co-Founder, H3 HR Advisors, and Program Chair, HR Technology Conference
What has changed recently is the tooling available to walk that tightrope. Service tickets, routine employee inquiries, scheduling, and large portions of the recruiting process can now be handled by technology at lower cost and higher speed. Boese described talent acquisition leaders from a nationally known convenience store chain who reported taking roughly 60 to 80 percent of the cost out of their frontline hiring process, largely through better tools for discovery, application, pre-screening, and interview scheduling.
The strategic move is what you do with those savings. Banking them to the bottom line leaves the function exactly as thin as it was. Redirecting them means a fixed HR overhead can produce far more, because the people you keep are pointed at the work where human judgment actually matters.
That distinction has limits worth stating plainly. Automation belongs on the problems that are already well understood, such as leave management and payroll reconciliation, where the goal is to be fast, accurate, and auditable. It does not belong on harassment investigations, executive coaching, or talent calibrations, where bias and false confidence carry real cost. The argument for AI in HR, made properly, is an argument for investing more in the human side of the function rather than less.
Steed adds the data half of the pitch. Her job as an HR leader included building the evidence that the function was not a cost center, whether through work opportunity tax credits, smarter hiring, or retention numbers she could put in front of a CFO. The advice for executives is to ask the question directly: what are we doing that demonstrates HR's contribution beyond cost, and can we see the numbers?
How do you know if you have a real HR business partner?
Boese frames the assessment around business fluency rather than HR craft. A genuine partner understands how the organization makes money, what it competes on, and what its strategic differentiator actually is.
"If your HR person is engaging in those conversations with you and pushing you, right, and asking those kinds of questions, that's, I think, you know, you've got probably a good partner there."
– Boese
He offered a cautionary example from an organization that pursued a new facility in another state. The conversations covered permits, land cost, construction, and tax incentives. The question of who would staff the site came late, and by then it was clear the local labor pool would not support it and that people were not inclined to relocate there. The deal looked good on every dimension except the one that determined whether it could operate.
Three questions follow from that. Does your HR partner understand the business and its results? Can they translate strategy into implications for people, culture, and talent? Will they name the trade-offs and bring you options with a recommendation attached?
Steed goes underneath all three to something more foundational, which is the relationship itself. Her prescription is unglamorous and specific: take your HR professional to lunch, get to know them as a person, set a regular meeting, and end each one by asking what you can do to help. She points to her own early career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where partners and senior managers invested the time to teach her the business she had been hired to support.
"If you feel like your HR leader, or maybe one of the people on your team is not giving you the support you need, I think it's on you as a leader yourself."
– Steed
What to do this week
Calculate your actual HR-to-employee ratio and compare it against the one to 100 benchmark. Bring the number to your next leadership meeting.
Schedule a standing meeting with your HR partner and close every one of them by asking what you can do to help.
Ask your HR leader how they would show a CFO the function's financial contribution, then ask what they could do with reinvested automation savings.
Confirm that your employees know your employee assistance program exists and what it covers.
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