In a sector facing persistent recruitment challenges, changing workforce expectations and rising cost pressures, aligning workforce decisions with business performance is becoming essential to sustaining service both quality and financial performance across hospitality and tourism.

McKeever Hotels is a family-run hospitality group operating seven hotels across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. With multiple sites and diverse operational teams, the business recognised the opportunity to strengthen how workforce decisions were aligned across the organisation, ensuring that people capability supported long-term business performance.

The challenge

Like many hospitality businesses, McKeever Hotels already had strong visibility of workforce data.

Duty managers, heads of department and general managers regularly monitored wage percentages, weekly hours against sales and performance metrics. These figures were embedded in operational oversight and informed day-to-day decision-making.

However, there was less visibility on how those measures connected, or how they could collectively inform a longer-term workforce strategy.

Taking a more structured approach to workforce planning means understanding business demand, defining the skills and roles required, assessing current workforce capability and developing targeted actions to close any gaps. McKeever Hotels recognised the need for this through an organisation-wide approach.

The ambition was to build confidence in using existing data more strategically, strengthen alignment across teams and broaden ownership of workforce planning beyond HR.

The solution

To build capability across the business, McKeever Hotels engaged with the Six Steps to Strategic Workforce Planning programme.

The programme, developed by People 1st International and accredited by ICQ Awards, brings together HR and operational leaders to build in-house workforce planning capability through a structured, practical approach using the Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning®.

Delivered over a series of weeks in short, focused modules, the programme provided participants with structured workbooks and practical tools to apply and embed their learning between sessions, culminating in a tailored workforce plan for their division or site.

McKeever Hotels carefully selected a cross-functional group of HR and operational leaders, including duty managers and heads of department across housekeeping, kitchen and front of house, ensuring that workforce planning was considered through both a strategic and operational lens.

The impact

Broadening ownership beyond HR: Engagement with the Six Steps to Strategic Workforce Planning programme has started to change how workforce planning is perceived internally.

By bringing together HR and operational leaders, it strengthened dialogue between HR, finance and departmental leadership. Operational managers gained a clearer understanding of how workforce decisions connect across departments, while HR developed deeper insight into operational pressures and performance drivers.

Workforce planning became less HR-centric and more of a shared responsibility. Managers reported greater confidence in interpreting their own data and making informed decisions, reducing reliance on central HR for routine queries.

Increased confidence in working with data: A significant shift was the confidence participants developed in interpreting workforce data. Whilst duty managers, heads of department and general managers already had access to key metrics, they began to interpret the data differently. By linking business demand with workforce availability, managers gained greater clarity on how wage spend, recruitment patterns and operational performance interact and how they could be used collectively to shape longer-term workforce decisions.

From reactive replacement to workforce design: Conversations about recruitment patterns and workforce demographic profile became more analytical. Managers started to look more closely at how recruitment decisions influence cost and performance, what their workforce profile signalled about future risk, and how local labour market and demographic trends could impact future talent supply.

Instead of defaulting to like-for-like replacement, managers began considering whether roles needed to evolve, whether internal progression was possible, and how decisions made now would strengthen capability over time – with positive implications for retention, internal mobility, employee motivation and organisational resilience.