What Four HR Leaders Taught Me About Employee Lifetime Value

By Daneal Charney

A few weeks ago, I interviewed four senior People leaders from Canadian software companies that participated in a new benchmark study of 84 software companies. I was one of two researchers on the study, which introduced Employee Lifetime Value, or eLTV, as a financial metric for understanding workforce performance. This has been a decade long ambition so my conversation felt particularly meaningful.

What stood out most was this: eLTV gives People leaders a stronger business language. It helps shift the conversation from “people are our greatest asset” to “here is how people create value over time, and here is where we can improve the return on our talent investments.”These leaders were using eLTV to make better decisions about talent, productivity, retention, ramp time, AI augmentation, leadership, and business performance.

Coconut Software: Seeing eLTV as a Timeline of Human Potential

Melanie from Coconut Software described eLTV as a timeline of human potential. When Coconut looked at its eLTV curve, the data told a clear story: employees were not reaching their full impact potential, and they were leaving earlier than expected. Instead of treating retention, engagement, and productivity as separate problems, Coconut used eLTV to look at them together. Voluntary attrition became a strategic pause point, not an automatic backfill decision. The team asked whether roles still made sense, whether people could move internally, and where promotions could create more opportunity. They also mapped exactly when engagement was dipping — around the one-to-two-year mark and again around year five — giving leaders a much sharper view of where retention risk was showing up. The biggest lesson: eLTV helps companies stop guessing and start targeting talent investments at the moments that matter most.

Achievers: Benchmarks Are Useful, But They Are Not the Strategy

Brendan from Achievers offered a powerful reminder: benchmarks are not a strategy. The real value of eLTV is not in comparing yourself to the market and blindly chasing the median. It is in asking better questions. What strategy are we optimizing for? Why are certain teams outperforming others? Where should we focus first based on impact and effort? Achievers is using the benchmark data alongside its own internal benchmarks, looking at high-performing groups inside the company to understand what other leaders can learn from them. One of the most interesting experiments is around knowledge loss during offboarding. If tenured employees leave, what institutional knowledge walks out the door with them? Achievers is exploring AI knowledge capture as a way to preserve some of that value for the team. It is a fascinating example of eLTV in action: not just trying to reduce attrition, but reducing the productivity loss that happens when valued employees leave.

TouchBistro: eLTV as HR’s New Operating System
Jenny from TouchBistro spoke about eLTV as a kind of operating system for HR. What made her perspective especially interesting was the importance of looking at eLTV by role, not just company-wide. A customer support role, a sales role, and an engineering role all have different ramp times, productivity curves, retention patterns, and value ceilings. At TouchBistro, this lens is becoming especially important as AI transforms how teams perform work. For example, the future customer support role becomes more technical, more complex, and more valuable as AI agents take on more of the transactional work. That changes the eLTV equation. It is a shift toward higher-value roles, stronger technical capability, better training, and longer retention of the people whose knowledge matters most. The big takeaway: AI does not just change headcount planning. It changes the shape of value creation inside a role.

Jane.app: High Retention Is a Strength — and a New Leadership Challenge

Sandy from Jane.app shared a compelling example of what it looks like when strong retention, disciplined hiring, and culture work together. Jane has grown significantly while maintaining strong revenue per employee and retention above 80%, a threshold the study identified as a major eLTV inflection point. What stood out was Jane’s discipline: headcount decisions are treated as capital decisions, not reactions. But Sandy also named an important nuance. High retention is a strength, but it also creates a new challenge when expectations around pace, innovation, AI, and performance are rising. The question becomes: how do you unlock more value from the talent already in the company? For Jane, one of the biggest levers is manager effectiveness. Managers influence whether people stay, grow, stretch, and contribute at their highest level. The lesson: eLTV is not only about keeping people longer. It is about making sure longer tenure continues to translate into stronger contribution.

What I Learned From These Conversations

Across all four conversations, one theme became clear: eLTV helps People leaders make better business decisions.

It gives them a way to look at talent through a financial and human lens at the same time.

It helps leaders ask:

• Are employees reaching productivity fast enough?

• Are we retaining people long enough to realize their full value?

• Are we investing in the right roles, teams, and managers?

• Are we using AI to reduce friction and increase contribution?

• Are we making headcount decisions with the same discipline we apply to capital decisions?

• Are we looking at retention, engagement, productivity, and performance together — or still managing them in silos?

The best part of the interviews was hearing how each leader was applying eLTV differently based on their own company’s strategy.

For Coconut, eLTV highlighted the importance of ramp time, retention moments, and internal mobility.

For Achievers, it sharpened the use of benchmarks, internal comparisons, and AI-enabled knowledge transfer.

For TouchBistro, it reframed role design and customer support transformation in the age of AI.

For Jane.app, it reinforced the power of disciplined hiring, manager effectiveness, and performance coaching as the company enters its next stage of growth.

The Bigger Shift

For years, HR has been asked to prove the value of people investments. eLTV gives People leaders a more credible way to do that.

It does not reduce people to numbers. In fact, it does the opposite. It shows that value is created over time through better hiring, stronger onboarding, effective managers, meaningful career growth, thoughtful use of AI, and cultures where people can perform and stay.

The companies are not simply driving more productivity. They are finding the balance between performance, retention, engagement, and growth. More detail about companies who made it into our eLTV top 75 percentile below. 

eLTV gives leaders a practical way to see where talent is appreciating, where value is being lost, and where better decisions can strengthen both employee experience and business results.

Full study details here: New Canadian Study Introduces Employee Lifetime Value (eLTV) as a Financial Framework for Measuring Workforce Performance - TAP Network https://forms.sendpulse.com/f546724664/?utm_source=sendpulse_talent_benchmarking_results&utm_medium=Press+Release&utm_campaign=Talent+Benchmarking+Report&utm_id=Canadian+Talent+Benchmarking+Report