And that can quickly escalate into a significant issue for the entire business.
📉 When HR misinterprets trends or fails to recognize them early enough.
📩 When critical information arrives too late from stakeholders.
⏳ When planning horizons are too short to respond proactively.
These symptoms mean that HR can only react.
It's time to rethink and redesign the HR function. Especially in light of the following scenarios:
- Demographic change is leading to a shortage of labor.
- Technological progress is changing skill profiles.
- Strategic initiatives fail because the company lacks employees with the necessary competencies.
⚙️ Strategic workforce planning plays a key role in this realignment of HR.
I vividly remember an experience from 2010. After the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, we began working with strategic workforce planning for the first time.
Until then, our planning horizon had been the usual one-year budget cycle. Suddenly, we expanded our horizon to five years and beyond. We developed scenarios and observed how different areas were affected.
This new perspective changed the way we work.
📊 Fifteen years later, strategic workforce planning is more important than ever. Whether in McKinsey's HR Monitor 2025 or in the Chief People Officers Outlook (September 2025), the topic is omnipresent.
And yet many still don’t recognize the paradigm shift taking place. → Away from operationality and reactivity. → Toward strategic, design-oriented, and systemic HR work.
💡 This requires integrating three disciplines that have long been separate. Strategy - Organization - HR.
💭 If you could redesign HR from scratch, what would you change first?
