I was looking at Gartner’s new HR Strategy on a Page template.

It is tidy; it separates the current state, future state, assumptions and initiatives. It asks HR leaders to identify business scenarios before developing the strategy.

Then the business largely disappears.

The final page asks for four to seven metrics describing the current and target states. The examples are retention rates and successor coverage. Useful HR measures, certainly, but where are the measures of the business problem the strategy is supposed to help solve?

Where is the

• service performance?
• productivity?
• customer experience?
• operational risk?
• delivery time?
• quality?
• cost?
• organisational capacity?

An HR strategy should not simply demonstrate that HR activity has produced better HR numbers. Higher retention and greater successor coverage may matter. Better skills data definitely matters.

But these metrics matter because of what they enable the organisation to do. Without that connection, the page risks becoming a neat summary of HR priorities rather than an organisational strategy.

The missing question is simple:

What should improve in the organisation if this strategy works?

If that cannot be shown on the page, there is a fairly large hole in the strategy.