Strategy & Planning

How to run a retrospective or post-mortem as Small HR Teams

Strategy & PlanningFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your last post-mortem lived in a Google Doc that three people edited simultaneously, produced twelve action items nobody owned, and was never looked at again. The one before that was a 90-minute Zoom where the same two managers talked in circles while you typed furiously in the notes doc. You have no consistent format, no single place to store findings, no way to know whether last quarter's 'fix the onboarding handoff' action item actually happened. With 150 employees and a two-person HR team, you run retrospectives maybe quarterly — and each one starts from scratch because the institutional memory from the previous one is buried somewhere in Notion or someone's inbox.

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Strategy & PlanningFor Small HR Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A structured retrospective template stored in Knowledge Management so every post-mortem — onboarding cycle reviews, performance review launches, benefits open enrollment — follows the same format and the findings are searchable next time

Automatic meeting transcription and action-item extraction so you leave every retro session with a clean summary, assigned owners, and due dates — not a raw notes doc you still have to process at 6pm

A lightweight action-item tracker linked to each retrospective so you can check in four weeks later and confirm whether what you decided actually happened

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Meeting Notes Knowledge Management Task Manager

Data sources & config

Meeting Notes transcribes the retro call live. Knowledge Management connects to Notion through Starch's integration catalog (the agent queries it live) so you can pull in any existing docs or playbooks relevant to the session. Task Manager runs standalone inside Starch — no external integration needed. Slack is connected through Starch's integration catalog so action-item summaries can be posted to the relevant channel after the session ends.

Prompts to copy

Transcribe today's Q1 onboarding retrospective and extract every action item. Assign each action item to the person who said they'd own it. Flag any item with no clear owner.

Create a Knowledge Management page titled 'Onboarding Retrospective — Q1 2026' with sections for What Went Well, What Broke, Root Causes, and Action Items. Pull the action items from today's Meeting Notes summary and paste them into the Action Items section.

Create tasks in Task Manager for each action item from the Q1 onboarding retro. Set priority P2 for anything due within 30 days and P3 for anything longer. Due dates are in the retro doc.

Search Knowledge Management for all retrospectives tagged 'onboarding' from the last 12 months and summarize the recurring themes across What Broke sections.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Before the retro, ask Starch to search Knowledge Management for the previous retrospective on this same topic (e.g., last quarter's onboarding review) and pull out which action items were created and whether they have a completed status in Task Manager.

2 Open Meeting Notes at the start of the retro call. Tell Starch: 'Transcribe this meeting. I'll tag it as an onboarding retrospective when it ends.' You stop taking notes.

3 Run the retro using whatever format you use — Start/Stop/Continue, 5 Whys, plain What Went Well / What Broke. Meeting Notes captures everything said, including who said it.

4 When the call ends, Meeting Notes auto-generates a summary with key decisions and highlights. Review it for accuracy — takes two minutes, not twenty.

5 Ask Starch to extract all action items from the summary, flag any that have no named owner, and list them with the owner's name and any mentioned deadline.

6 Tell Starch: 'Create a Knowledge Management page for this retrospective. Use the sections: What Went Well, What Broke, Root Causes, Action Items. Populate it from the meeting summary. Tag it with the relevant HR process and quarter.'

7 Tell Starch: 'Create a Task Manager task for each action item from this retro. Priority P2 for anything due within 30 days, P3 for anything longer. Add a link back to the Knowledge Management page in each task description.'

8 Post a summary to the relevant Slack channel: 'Post the action items list from today's Q1 onboarding retro to #hr-team with owner names and due dates. Keep it brief — one line per item.'

9 Set a calendar reminder or recurring Task Manager task for 30 days out: 'Pull the open tasks from the Q1 onboarding retro and show me their current status.'

10 At the 30-day check-in, ask Starch to compare what was committed in the retro against what's marked complete in Task Manager. Surfaces exactly what slipped — no chasing people manually.

11 Before the next retro, ask Starch: 'Summarize recurring themes across all onboarding retrospectives in Knowledge Management from the past year.' You walk into the session already knowing which problems keep coming back.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 Onboarding Retrospective — 14 new hires, February cohort

Sample numbers from a real run

New hires who didn't have system access by day 1	6
Action items created in retro	9
Action items with a named owner after Starch extraction	9
Action items completed at 30-day check-in	7
Minutes to process meeting notes into structured doc	4

You had 14 new hires start in February. Day-one access provisioning failed for 6 of them — IT blamed HR, HR blamed the manager for not submitting requests on time. In the retro, three different people described variations of the same problem. Meeting Notes captured all of it; the extraction prompt surfaced 9 action items, including one that had no owner until you asked Starch to flag it (a process owner for the IT handoff that nobody had formally assigned). You created the Knowledge Management page in under 5 minutes instead of the usual hour of formatting. Thirty days later, the Task Manager check-in showed 7 of 9 items complete — and the two open ones were easy to spot because they had no recent activity. Compare that to the Q3 2025 retro, where you had a Google Doc with 11 action items and couldn't tell three months later which ones had happened.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Action-item completion rate at 30-day post-retro check-in (target: >75%)

Percentage of retro action items with a named owner at close of session (target: 100%)

Number of recurring issues that appear across 2+ consecutive retrospectives for the same HR process

Time from end of retro call to structured doc published in Knowledge Management (target: under 10 minutes)

Percentage of retro findings findable in Knowledge Management search 6 months later (vs. lost in a Google Doc)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Docs + Notion for notes and storage

Free and familiar, but action items fall out of the doc into nobody's queue, and searching across six past retros for recurring themes takes an hour you don't have.

Lattice or 15Five retrospective features

Built for performance review cycles specifically — not general HR process retros — and adds another tool your team has to log into and maintain.

Confluence + Jira for structured retros

More powerful for engineering teams running sprint retros, but heavyweight to configure for a 2-person HR team and requires someone to maintain the templates and project structure.

Otter.ai or Fireflies for transcription only

Good transcription, but you still have to manually extract action items, format the retro doc, and create tasks elsewhere — the processing work that takes most of your time isn't reduced.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — meeting notes, knowledge management, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We run retros in Zoom and everyone has their camera off half the time. Does Meeting Notes still work?

Meeting Notes transcribes audio, so camera status doesn't affect it. As long as people are speaking on the call, it captures what was said and who said it.

Our retros are messy — people talk over each other, go on tangents. Will the action-item extraction actually work?

It pulls out anything that sounds like a commitment or next step, including vague ones. You review before anything gets created in Task Manager — it's not automated without your sign-off. The flagging of items with no owner is where it earns its keep in messy sessions.

We already have a Notion wiki. Can Starch pull from there instead of replacing it?

Yes. Notion is available through Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live. You can pull existing retro docs or process playbooks from Notion into a Starch session, or write new retro pages back to Notion — you're not forced to migrate everything.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We're cautious about what we connect to HR data.

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified — that's on the roadmap. If that's a hard requirement for connecting payroll or HRIS data today, it's worth noting. For meeting notes and task tracking without sensitive compensation data, most HR teams find this acceptable in the interim.

What about retros that happen over async Slack threads instead of a live call?

Slack is available through Starch's integration catalog. You can ask Starch to pull a thread from a specific channel and date range, extract themes and action items from it, and format the same structured retro page in Knowledge Management — no live call required.

We do retros on processes that involve Paylocity data — like a payroll run post-mortem after a bad cycle. Can Starch include that context?

Yes. Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, payroll runs, time off. You can ask Starch to pull relevant payroll run data from the cycle in question and include it as context in the retro doc, so you're not screenshotting reports and pasting them manually.