Almost daily, I see a post from a People Ops leader defending the importance of their work and the need to resource it properly. That this still needs defending astounds me. So I’m adding my voice to the chorus.
The data could not be clearer: A 2025 McKinsey study found that companies that excel at maximizing their return on talent generate 300% more revenue per employee than the median firm. And yet, as another McKinsey piece put it, most organizations “continue accounting for labor spend only as a cost.” In doing so, they lose sight of the business case for talent investment. The companies that do measure and manage people investment with the same rigor as capital assets consistently outperform. Because when you maximize employee value creation, shareholder value follows.
OpenComp’s founder, Nancy Connery was employee #5 at Salesforce, an unusually early VP of People hire for a pre-seed startup.
But Marc Benioff understood the strategic importance of People Ops.Under Nancy’s leadership, Salesforce built its first 650-person foundation, a talent base that powered it through IPO and beyond.
Benioff planted a flag: Salesforce would be a people-first company. Twenty-five years later, it still is. And the results speak for themselves.
Just last week, I spoke with a fractional People Ops leader who was the first hire in a 350-person company. She inherited a comp structure that looked like a scatterplot: top performers at 25% of range, poor performers at the other end.
By the time you’re in cleanup mode, it’s too late and expensive. A Robert Half survey found that employees who are paid to stay typically leave within two years. Gallup’s 2024 study estimated the cost of low engagement at $8.8 trillion globally.
The pattern is consistent and completely avoidable.
Because the ROI on people isn’t just measurable, it’s an essential KPI:
Backfill is expensive. Why spend money fixing problems when you can invest in preventing them? And this isn’t just about pay or People team headcount. It’s also about policies: time off, leave, flexibility. Too many companies skimp on these, thinking they save money. But when you give people space to recharge, they deliver more. Especially in a world where everyone is always on.
People Ops is not overhead. It’s the foundation that makes companies succeed.
– Bobby Benfield, CEO of OpenComp
