Most HR strategies live in a slide deck that no one else in the business reads, references, or holds the HR function accountable to.
OGSM for HR works by translating your company’s Strategies into people-function Goals and Measures. Instead of a standalone HR plan that runs parallel to the business, you build an HR OGSM that cascades directly from the corporate OGSM — so every people initiative traces back to a strategic bet the organisation has already made.
This guide shows you how to build an HR OGSM that cascades directly from the corporate plan — with worked Goal examples, HR-specific Strategies, and a section on how to use it in budget and leadership conversations.
HR strategy has a credibility problem. Not because HR leaders lack strategic thinking — it’s because the formats HR typically uses to communicate strategy (the 40-slide annual deck, the values posters, the competency framework) don’t connect to how the rest of the business plans. The CFO has a financial plan. The CPO has a product roadmap. The CHRO has a presentation.
OGSM changes that. A one-page HR OGSM, built from the same framework the board uses for corporate strategy, is something every executive in the room can read, challenge, and hold the HR function accountable to. That shift — from HR as a support function with a deck to HR as a strategic function with a plan — is what most people-leaders are actually trying to achieve.
Why Does HR Need a Strategy Framework at All?
The honest answer: because people decisions are strategic decisions, and right now most organisations don’t treat them that way.
Think about what’s actually inside an HR strategy: hiring plans, capability development, culture, performance management, compensation. These aren’t administrative choices — they’re the mechanisms by which a company builds the capacity to execute its strategy. Hire the wrong profiles and your growth plan stalls. Let attrition go unmanaged and your institutional knowledge walks out the door.
The problem is that annual HR decks tend to list activities — programmes, initiatives, policies to update — rather than outcomes. The result is that HR leadership spends a lot of time defending budget for things that are hard to connect to business results.
OGSM solves this by forcing the HR function to answer the same questions every other part of the business answers: What are we trying to achieve? How will we know if we’ve achieved it? What are we doing to get there? Expressed in a format that sits comfortably next to the corporate plan, not in a separate binder that only gets opened at the annual people review.
I’ve seen HR teams go from defending headcount in budget reviews to setting the strategic agenda, simply by putting a one-page OGSM in front of the leadership team. The framework doesn’t change what HR does — it changes how clearly HR can show why it matters.
How Do You Build an HR OGSM?
The process follows the same four-layer logic as any OGSM, but each layer is interpreted through the lens of the people function. If your leadership team needs a shared grounding in the framework first, the full OGSM guide is the right starting point — then come back here for the HR-specific application.
Step 1: Derive your HR Objective from the company Objective.
Your HR Objective should be a direct expression of what the HR function needs to achieve for the company to hit its corporate Objective. If the company Objective is “become the most responsive B2B software provider in the UK mid-market,” the HR Objective might be: “Build the hiring engine and talent capability to power our scale — attracting, developing, and retaining the people the company needs to win.”
The Objective is qualitative and aspirational, but it should be specific to your planning horizon. “Attract and retain great people” is not an Objective — it’s a job description. In my experience, the most common mistake at this stage is writing an HR Objective that sounds inspirational but doesn’t trace back to anything specific in the corporate plan.
Step 2: Set Goals in people metrics.
Goals in an HR OGSM are the quantified outcomes you’re committing to by year-end. They should be directly measurable and clearly linked to business impact. Good HR Goals typically come from three categories:
- Acquisition: time-to-hire, offer acceptance rate, quality-of-hire scores
- Retention and engagement: attrition rate, employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), regrettable loss rate
- Capability: internal promotion rate, learning and development hours, performance distribution
Aim for three to five Goals. Too many and the function loses focus. Too few and you’re probably not capturing the full scope of what’s at stake.
Step 3: Define Strategies as people programmes and directional choices.
HR Strategies are the choices you’re making about how you’ll move the needle on your Goals. They should be specific enough to brief a programme against, and they should map back to the company Strategies — each HR Strategy is the people-function response to a business-level strategic bet.
For a company scaling aggressively into a new market, an HR Strategy might be: “Build a structured talent acquisition capability, shifting from reactive hiring to a proactive talent pipeline in our three key skill families.” That’s a directional choice that implies resourcing, tooling, and process decisions.
Step 4: Set Measures as the KPIs you’ll track to know if the Strategies are working.
Measures in an HR OGSM are the leading indicators — the data points that tell you whether your Strategies are executing before you can see it in the Goal outcomes. If your Strategy is building a talent pipeline, the Measure isn’t “time-to-hire” (that’s the Goal) — it’s “number of qualified candidates in active pipeline by role family” or “percentage of hires from proactive pipeline vs. reactive posting.”
What Do Good HR OGSM Measures Look Like?
This is where many HR OGSMs stall — not for lack of data, but for lack of agreed benchmarks. Here are five HR KPIs that work well as OGSM Measures, with the ranges I’d treat as credible targets for a scaling organisation.
Time-to-hire: ≤21 days. Measured from job approval to accepted offer. Anything above 30 days in a competitive talent market is costing you candidates. The benchmark tightens for senior roles, but 21 days is a solid target for the majority of hires.
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): ≥30. Measured quarterly via a simple survey (“How likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work? 0–10”). A score of 30 puts you in the “good” range for most industries. Above 50 is excellent. Below 0 is a serious retention risk.
Internal promotion rate: ≥25%. The percentage of open roles filled by internal candidates. Below 20% is a signal that either your development programmes aren’t working or your hiring managers don’t trust internal talent. Above 40% may indicate you’re not bringing in enough external perspective.
L&D hours per employee per year: ≥20 hours. Twenty hours is roughly one learning day per quarter — achievable without dedicated learning infrastructure. Below 10 hours suggests learning is something the organisation talks about but doesn’t fund in practice.
Retention rate: ≥88%. Equivalently, voluntary attrition below 12%. Above 15% in most sectors becomes structurally expensive — replacement costs typically run 50–150% of salary when you factor in hiring, onboarding, and lost productivity.
These are starting points, not universal standards. Industry, company stage, and role mix all affect what “good” looks like in your context. But having explicit targets agreed at the start of the year changes the nature of the people review from a discussion about activity to a review of performance against plan.
How Do You Connect Your HR OGSM to the Company OGSM?
The connection is through cascade logic: every HR Strategy should trace back to a company Strategy. If you can’t make that link, the HR Strategy either doesn’t belong in the current year’s plan, or you need to go back to the corporate OGSM and ask whether it’s capturing the right things.
In practice, the cascade works like this. The corporate OGSM includes a Strategy: “Scale our commercial team to triple revenue in the DACH region.” That Strategy implies a set of people requirements: specific hiring profiles, a different onboarding model, possibly new compensation structures for a European market. The HR OGSM captures those requirements as HR Strategies and Goals — not in a generic way, but in direct response to the specific business bet.
This is the mechanism that gives HR strategy its credibility. When the CFO asks “why are we investing in this capability development programme?”, the answer isn’t “because L&D is important” — it’s “because Strategy 2 in the corporate OGSM requires us to build the product capability our current team doesn’t have, and this programme is the specific bet we’re making to close that gap.” That’s a different conversation.
For a deeper look at how cascade logic works across the whole organisation, the OGSM cascade guide is worth reading before you build the first draft of your HR OGSM. And if you want a template to work from, the OGSM template includes a format that translates directly to HR use.
The people function doesn’t need a separate strategy process. It needs to be built into the same one everyone else is using.
Rock on.