How HR and Finance Can Build the Case for Caregiving Support: Lessons From Cariloop’s CPO and CFO

Cariloop’s People and finance leaders explain how to build a benefits case together, starting with the workforce problem and agreeing on what an investment needs to accomplish.

“We’re solving the same problem; we’re just solving it from a different lens,” Chief People Officer Chelsey Hershey said during a recent Cariloop webinar, The CFO-Ready Case for Caregiving Support.

Hershey is often closest to the first signs of a caregiving challenge. She hears what employees and managers are experiencing and sees patterns in leave, burnout, absences, and requests for help.

Chief Financial Officer Ammar Bahrani looks at those same patterns and asks where they could affect coverage, capacity, continuity, and cost.

Neither perspective is a complete business case on its own. The case takes shape when HR and finance define the workforce problem together, determine which evidence matters, and agree on what a successful investment should accomplish.

How HR and finance can begin building the case together

“Don’t wait until you’ve selected the vendor and built the deck to bring finance in,” Bahrani said. “At that point, you’re just putting finance in a position to simply be asked to approve or reject the spend.”

An early partnership lets HR begin with what it knows: Here’s what employees and managers are experiencing. Here’s where we think it is affecting work. Then ask: What else would we need to understand before deciding how to respond?

People leaders can use three steps to guide that conversation:

1. Name the workforce problem before recommending a benefit.
2. Bring finance the available evidence and be clear about what is still an estimate.
3. Agree on what the investment needs to accomplish and how teams will measure it.

Hershey and Bahrani use a shared forecasting tool to evaluate benefits well before the budget is locked. It brings benefit costs, utilization, workforce needs, and administrative effort into a single view, giving both teams a common source of truth.

As Hershey put it, this shifts the conversation from knocking on Bahrani’s door to say, “I’d like some money, please,” to building the business case together.

What HR sees and finance can help measure 

Caregiving can show up at work through childcare disruptions, parental leave, elder care, new diagnoses, and other family needs. HR often hears about the difficulty before the organization has a way to measure its impact.

During the webinar, attendees were asked, “How is caregiving most impacting your workforce today?” Burnout and missed work tied for the top response.

• 40% employee burnout from caregiver-related stress
• 40% missed work or unplanned PTO
• 13% increased family leave claims
• 7% “I’m not sure”
• 0% higher turnover among parents and caregivers

These results offer a snapshot of the caregiving challenges HR teams are seeing. Burnout describes what employees may be carrying; missed work is one way the business experiences it. Both give HR and finance something to investigate, from employee feedback to absence patterns, coverage needs, and manager time.

How Cariloop connected employee support to business needs

When webinar attendees were asked which part of building the ROI case was most challenging, limited budget or competing priorities was the most common challenge, followed by connecting wellbeing outcomes to business metrics. 

Hershey and Bahrani illustrated how to make that connection through Cariloop’s parental-leave experience. In 2025, 9% of employees welcomed a baby. Employees already had access to caregiving support; the question was how that support could help them prepare for leave and return to work while helping the company plan for coverage and continuity.

For Hershey, the value was consistent support throughout that transition. Employees could use Cariloop’s caregiver support platform, and the leave process included opening a case with a Cariloop Coach. That support extended beyond formal leave, when childcare and other care needs could affect whether returning to work felt sustainable. It also gave managers somewhere to direct employees for help.

Bahrani saw how help planning for care and filling gaps could limit avoidable disruption and support business continuity.

“That’s really where the benefit becomes relevant to me,” Bahrani said. “Yes, we’re supporting the employee through an important life moment, but we’re also helping the business manage a predictable workforce event more effectively.”

What does finance need to evaluate a caregiving benefit?

“When Chelsey comes to me with something she’s seeing in our employee population, I don’t want her to immediately jump to, ‘Here’s the benefit I want to buy,’” Bahrani said. “I want to understand the workforce issue first.”

Once HR and finance agree on the workforce problem, they need enough evidence to compare possible responses and decide whether an investment is worth making. That doesn’t require HR to arrive with every answer.

“What we need is a well-defined problem, evidence that tells us how significant it is, a thoughtful view of the alternatives, the realistic economics, and a way to determine whether the investment is working,” Bahrani said.

To help build the case, he advised People leaders to use internal data where possible and be direct about the rest.

“Transparency matters more than the precision,” he said. “Be clear about what you know, and what you’re estimating.”

People leaders can start with leave records, absence data, employee surveys, manager feedback, benefit use, and workforce demographics.

From there, Bahrani recommended that HR and finance answer five questions together:

1. What specific problem are we solving?
2. How significant is it?
3. Why is this the right intervention?
4. What will it cost under realistic scenarios?
5. What will we examine a year from now to decide whether it worked?

He added a sixth question that benefits proposals often miss: What happens if the employer does nothing? 

“The status quo has a cost, too,” Bahrani said. That cost may show up in PTO, leave, turnover, manager time, or productivity.

Hershey and Bahrani’s advice gives People leaders a place to start when building a case for caregiving support: bring the workforce concern to finance while there is still room to shape the response together. The first conversation doesn’t need to end with an approval. It should end with agreement on the problem and what both teams need to learn next.

Watch The CFO-Ready Case for Caregiving Support: How HR and Finance Can Measure What Matters on demand to hear the full conversation with Cariloop Chief People Officer Chelsey Hershey and Chief Financial Officer Ammar Bahrani.

Download our CFO Value Scorecard for evaluating caregiving solutions.