An HR strategy does not start with HR, but with the corporate strategy

Ask ten management teams whether their company has a strategy and you get a clear yes ten times over. Ambition, target markets, growth plans: usually well documented and reviewed regularly. Ask those same ten companies whether there is also an HR strategy that carries that corporate strategy, and the answer becomes noticeably more hesitant. Often it is “well, sort of”, sometimes a reference to an outdated document, and occasionally a plain “no”.

A contradiction we keep coming across

A corporate strategy usually answers where a company wants to go: which markets, what growth, which investments. What is missing in many cases is the consistent translation of that ambition into the question of who is actually supposed to deliver it. Which roles does it take? Which capabilities? How many people, when, at which location? Either these questions are not asked at all, or only once the pressure is already there – because a position cannot be filled in time, say, or a target cannot be met for lack of capacity.

On top of that comes a second, often overlooked dimension: an HR strategy consists not only of hard facts such as capacity, roles and costs, but equally of soft factors such as corporate culture, the understanding of leadership and the question of how people are treated. This distinction between hard HRM and soft HRM goes back to the British HR researcher John Storey and has been around since the late 1980s. In practice, though, the two sides are rarely thought through together: some plan numbers without a stance, others formulate values and leadership principles without translating them into structures and resources.

What the figures show

The McKinsey HR Monitor 2025, for which around 1,000 companies and employees in Germany were surveyed, sums it up: 72 per cent of HR leaders say they carry out strategic workforce planning. Look more closely and it is mostly operational planning with a one-year horizon, not the strategic planning over three to five years that is actually meant. That this pattern is not new is shown by an older study by the HBM Unternehmerschule at the University of St. Gallen from 2014: around three out of four companies managed entirely without a written HR strategy at the time, and even where one existed, roughly one in two management teams did not even know about it.

The TÜV further education study 2026 confirms this today: 87 per cent of the companies surveyed consider the qualification of their employees important or very important, yet only about one in three has a written strategy for it. The will is there, the strategy is missing – and not only in Germany: the Swiss HR Benchmark 2022 shows that only around one company in two aligns its HR work with recorded principles, and only a third involves top management in formulating HR objectives. In the more recent HR Swiss Benchmark 2025, only six out of ten respondents are satisfied with how they are involved in defining objectives at leadership level.

What is driving HR strategies in 2026 is shown by the Gallup study “State of HR in Deutschland”: in first place, at 57 per cent, is cost reduction, followed by digitalisation and AI at 55 per cent and operating model transformation at 35 per cent. Notably, emotional commitment within the HR function itself is falling: only 31 per cent of the HR professionals surveyed show a high level of attachment to their own company. To us one explanation suggests itself: where an HR strategy is missing, HR itself also lacks direction, and that weighs on commitment. Added to that is the feeling of not having a say, or of still simply being seen as a cost centre.

Where it usually gets stuck

In our view it is rarely a matter of missing awareness; rather, five patterns keep appearing in our projects:

First, HR strategy is confused with day-to-day HR. Recruiting that works, clean payroll administration or a new HR tool are important, but they do not replace a strategic direction that comes from the company’s ambition.

Second, the consistent translation is missing: from “we want to scale” or “we are building a new business area” to the question of which roles, skills and capacity that specifically requires, and by when.

Third, ownership is unclear. HR strategy sits between a head of HR who is often heavily involved operationally and a management team that does not automatically see the topic as its own job. Without clear responsibility it is left lying somewhere in between.

Fourth, there are no metrics that make HR’s contribution to business success visible. Where the value cannot be measured, it stays a feeling – and feelings usually lose out to numbers when priorities are set.

Fifth, the soft side of the HR strategy – culture, the understanding of leadership and employee experience – is frequently handled separately from the hard facts, or left out altogether. Capacity and roles are planned, but how leadership should be exercised and which values should apply remains open. That leaves the strategy incomplete, even when the numbers add up.

What matters

An effective HR strategy does not start with HR itself, but with the corporate strategy and the requirements of the business. Only from the ambition, the priorities and the intended contribution to success can you derive what a short- and medium-term HR strategy has to look like – not the other way round.

Equally decisive is the translation into a concrete operating model: clear roles, defined processes and unambiguous responsibilities. Without that step the HR strategy remains a declaration of intent instead of an instrument that decisions are actually aligned with.

And finally, both dimensions are needed at the same time: the structural side with roles, processes and capacity, and equally the cultural side, that is, how leadership should be understood and lived. An HR strategy that only delivers numbers stays technocratic. One that only formulates values stays lip service.

A corporate strategy without an HR strategy answers where a company wants to go, but not whether it can actually get there with the people, roles and capabilities it has.

We would be glad to go into these and other questions with you in person.

Sources: HBM Unternehmerschule University of St. Gallen, study on HR strategy (conducted with Promerit AG, part of Mercer since 2017); McKinsey HR Monitor 2025; TÜV further education study 2026; Swiss HR Benchmark 2022 (Human Capital Academy / HR Bench Institute); HR Swiss Benchmark 2025; Gallup, “State of HR in Deutschland 2026”.