Brid Scannell works with scaling businesses on workforce planning. Her argument — that surplus should routinely flow toward people costs — is still treated as idealistic in most finance conversations.
Why do finance teams resist allocating surplus to staff investment?
Because the return is harder to put in a spreadsheet. Capital expenditure has a depreciation schedule. A salary increase or a training programme does not produce a line item that satisfies a CFO review. So it gets deprioritised in favour of assets that look cleaner on the balance sheet.
But is the return actually measurable?
Yes, if you track the right numbers. Replacement cost for a mid-level employee — recruitment fees, onboarding time, lost productivity — typically runs between 60 and 90 per cent of annual salary. If a targeted retention investment costs 8 to 12 per cent of salary and reduces turnover by even one or two people per year, the arithmetic is straightforward.
Brid Scannell — The businesses that treat people investment as a surplus allocation decision, rather than an HR budget request, make better decisions about it. The framing changes the rigour.
What is the controversial part of your position?
I think businesses that consistently return surplus to shareholders while losing experienced staff are making a value destruction decision that their accounts do not capture. That is not a popular thing to say in a board meeting, but the numbers support it when you model replacement cost properly.