As human resources executives look ahead from the fourth quarter to budgets for 2007, they face these perennial questions: How much say do we have in the budget process? Do we have enough pull to reap a payoff from the company’s investments in human capital?

According to the executives responding to our survey – and only a minority of them are in HR themselves – human resources doesn’t have as much say as it should. While only 37 percent of our respondents said HR had high involvement with the budget, 61 percent thought HR ought to.

To remedy this shortfall of budget influence, managers can take a page from firms in which HR has more budget power. These companies tend to be employers that measure the return on HR expenditure, usually in terms of costs avoided. For example, companies that give HR budget influence are more likely to track HR’s impact on the business. Specifically, they track cost per hire along with turnover and attrition; this helps HR make a strong argument to spend now on turnover reduction in order to save a greater sum on employee acquisition in the near future.

There’s reason to believe that it’s this cost-avoidance argument that gets HR the money it needs to carry out its mission: In firms where HR has budget influence, there’s higher emphasis on work-life initiatives, retention, and employee satisfaction.