Strategy & Planning

How to set quarterly okrs as Small HR Teams

Strategy & PlanningFor Small HR Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Quarterly OKR setting for a 2-person HR team usually means a Google Doc that someone started at 11pm, a Slack thread where managers gave half-answers, and a spreadsheet the CFO sent back with questions you can't answer without pulling numbers from Paylocity, BambooHR, and whatever lives in the recruiting channel. You're trying to write meaningful people-team objectives — headcount targets, time-to-fill goals, eNPS improvements — while simultaneously running the performance review cycle that's already three weeks late. Nobody handed you a template that connects to your actual data. You build the OKR doc, the tracking sheet, and the update email yourself, every quarter, from scratch.

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Strategy & PlanningFor Small HR Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An HR OKR tracker that pulls live headcount, attrition, and payroll data from your HRIS and payroll systems so your quarterly targets are grounded in real numbers, not last quarter's memory

A meeting-notes capture for your OKR kickoff and check-in calls that auto-extracts key decisions and owner assignments so nothing slips between 'we agreed to this' and 'who was supposed to do that'

A searchable knowledge base where your OKRs, supporting context, and historical rationale live — so when a manager asks why eNPS is an objective this quarter, you have a one-click answer instead of a fifteen-minute excavation

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

Knowledge Management Meeting Notes Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — headcount, payroll runs, time-off balances — so your OKR baselines reflect real numbers. BambooHR and Greenhouse connect from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your OKR app needs hiring pipeline counts or attrition breakdowns. Slack connects from the integration catalog as well, so you can post OKR summaries or reminders directly to manager channels without leaving Starch. Notion connects from Starch's integration catalog if you want to sync finalized OKRs back to your existing wiki.

Prompts to copy

Build me an HR OKR tracker for Q3 2026. Pull current headcount and attrition rate from our Paylocity data. I want to set objectives around time-to-fill, voluntary attrition, and manager NPS, with key results I can update each month. Show me a dashboard view and a summary I can paste into our board update.

During my OKR planning meeting with the leadership team, capture notes, flag every commitment a manager makes, and extract action items with owners. After the call, generate a one-page summary I can send to all managers.

Create a task list for our Q3 OKR planning cycle. I need reminders to collect manager input by June 15, finalize OKRs by June 22, and schedule monthly check-ins on the first Monday of each month through September.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity (or ADP) as a scheduled-sync source so Starch has current headcount by department, annualized attrition rate, and payroll cost — the three numbers your CFO will ask about before approving any people-team OKR.

2 Connect BambooHR or Greenhouse from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query live data on open roles, time-to-fill by department, and offer acceptance rates when you're setting recruiting objectives.

3 Describe the HR OKR tracker you want: tell Starch which objectives you're targeting this quarter (attrition, eNPS, time-to-fill, headcount growth), what the current baseline is, and what format you need for leadership review.

4 Starch builds the tracker as a custom app with a dashboard view, editable key results, and a status field (On Track / At Risk / Off Track) you update monthly — no spreadsheet required.

5 Before your OKR planning meeting with the leadership team, start Meeting Notes. It captures the conversation in real time and flags every moment a manager says 'we'll target' or 'I'll own that' so you have a clean action-item list before the call is over.

6 After the meeting, review the auto-generated summary. Edit anything the model got wrong (this takes under five minutes), then push it to the Knowledge Management app as the official record of how this quarter's OKRs were set.

7 Use Knowledge Management to write a short rationale page for each HR objective — why this number, what data it's based on, who owns it. This is the page you link when a manager asks 'where did 15% time-to-fill improvement come from?' in month two.

8 Set up monthly OKR check-in tasks in Task Manager: first Monday of each month, remind yourself to pull updated numbers from Paylocity and Greenhouse, update key result progress in the tracker, and flag any At Risk objectives to the CHRO or CFO.

9 At each monthly check-in, run a prompt like 'Show me our current attrition rate vs. our Q3 target of under 12%, broken down by department, using the latest Paylocity data' to get a status snapshot in seconds instead of rebuilding the spreadsheet.

10 When managers ask for a mid-quarter OKR update, tell Starch: 'Draft a one-paragraph status update for each HR OKR for the July all-hands, using current Paylocity headcount and the progress I've logged in the tracker.' Paste and send.

11 At quarter end, use Knowledge Management to archive the completed OKRs with final actuals, lessons learned, and a note on what to carry forward. Next quarter's planning starts with a searchable record instead of a blank doc.

12 Post the final OKR summary to Slack via Starch's integration catalog connection — one step, no copy-paste, managers see results in the channel they're already watching.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Q3 2026 HR OKR Planning — June 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Current headcount (from Paylocity sync)	148
Q3 headcount target	162
Current voluntary attrition rate (trailing 12 months)	16
Q3 attrition target (percentage)	12
Average time-to-fill, last quarter (days)	41
Q3 time-to-fill target (days)	32
Open roles in Greenhouse at planning date	9

In early June, your HR team has 148 employees on payroll and 9 open roles sitting in Greenhouse averaging 41 days to fill. The CFO wants to end Q3 at 162 and your CEO has flagged that voluntary attrition at 16% is too high for a company this size. You open Starch and type: 'Build an HR OKR tracker for Q3 2026. Pull current headcount from Paylocity, open roles and time-to-fill from Greenhouse, and set three objectives: get headcount to 162, reduce voluntary attrition from 16% to 12%, and cut average time-to-fill from 41 days to 32 days. Show me a dashboard and a board-ready summary.' Starch pulls the live Paylocity sync and queries Greenhouse from the integration catalog, builds the tracker in under two minutes, and produces a dashboard with current vs. target for each key result. You run your planning meeting with department heads. Meeting Notes captures the conversation — including the moment the engineering manager says he'll 'backfill the senior SWE role by July 15' — and generates an action-item list with four owner-assigned tasks before anyone has left the Zoom. You archive the kickoff summary in Knowledge Management with a rationale note: attrition target is based on the 12% median for Series B SaaS companies, sourced from the benchmark report your CHRO reviewed in May. On August 4, first Monday of the month, your Task Manager reminder fires. You type: 'What is our current voluntary attrition rate vs. our Q3 target of 12%, and how many of the 9 open roles from June have been filled, using the latest Paylocity and Greenhouse data?' Starch returns: attrition is now 13.8%, trending right; 6 of 9 roles filled, time-to-fill averaging 35 days, still above target. You flag engineering as At Risk in the tracker and send the Slack summary. That's the entire mid-quarter update, and it took eleven minutes.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Voluntary attrition rate by department (trailing 90 days vs. quarterly target)

Average time-to-fill by role level (days from open to accepted offer)

Headcount vs. plan (actuals from Paylocity vs. approved headcount model)

OKR completion rate at quarter end (key results marked fully achieved vs. total)

Manager NPS or eNPS score delta from previous quarter

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Lattice or 15Five OKR module

Good for goal cascading and check-in workflows, but doesn't connect to Paylocity or Greenhouse — your baselines still come from a spreadsheet you build manually each quarter.

Google Sheets + Notion

Flexible and free, but someone (you) has to pull the numbers from every system by hand, maintain the formulas, and chase managers for updates every month with no automation.

Workday or HRIS-native OKR tools

If your HRIS has a goal module, it's integrated with your HR data — but it's usually rigid, expensive to configure, and doesn't connect to Greenhouse, Slack, or anything outside its own ecosystem.

Asana or Monday.com

Good task and project tracking, but no HR data connections — you'd still be manually inputting headcount and attrition numbers every time you update the OKR board.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, meeting notes, 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 use BambooHR, not Paylocity or ADP. Can Starch still pull our headcount data?

Yes. BambooHR connects from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when your OKR tracker or dashboard needs current headcount, department breakdown, or attrition figures. It won't be a scheduled sync the way Paylocity is, but for most OKR use cases — monthly check-ins, quarterly planning — live queries are fine.

Does Starch store our employee data? We're careful about where HR data lives.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing before you connect sensitive HR records. Paylocity and ADP data does sync into Starch's database on a schedule when you set those up. BambooHR and Greenhouse data is queried live and not stored. If your team has a policy against syncing employee PII into third-party systems, you can scope what you connect — for example, use Starch only for aggregated headcount and attrition counts, not individual employee records.

We already set OKRs in Notion. Do we have to start over?

No. Notion connects from Starch's integration catalog, so the agent can query your existing Notion databases live. You can build a Starch OKR tracker that reads from Notion as a data source, or use Starch to generate summaries and push them back into Notion pages. You don't have to migrate anything.

What if our managers won't actually update their OKR status each month?

That's an accountability problem, not a software problem, and Starch won't solve it by magic. What it does help with: because Starch pulls headcount and attrition data directly from Paylocity and Greenhouse, a lot of the status update writes itself — you're not waiting for a manager to remember their time-to-fill number, Starch already has it. You still need humans to flag nuance and context, but the data layer doesn't depend on manager participation.

Can Starch help us build the actual OKR content — not just track it?

Yes. Tell Starch what your company priorities are, what your current HR metrics look like, and what the CFO cares about this quarter, and it will draft objectives and key results for you to react to. The output isn't magic — you'll edit it — but it's a better starting point than a blank doc at 10pm the night before your planning session.

Meeting Notes sounds useful — does it work with Zoom and Google Meet?

Zoom and Google Meet both connect from Starch's integration catalog. Meeting Notes is currently in development — request beta access on the Starch site to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the Knowledge Management app is live and you can use it today to store and search past meeting notes you paste or import manually.