Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write meeting notes as Small HR Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You run HR for 150 people with one other person. Every all-hands, every manager 1:1, every benefits Q&A call, every onboarding check-in produces decisions and action items that live in someone's head or a half-finished Slack message. You're the one who has to remember that Marcus's offer letter discussion landed on a May 1 start date, that three managers agreed to submit their review calibrations by the 15th, and that someone raised a PTO policy question that legal still hasn't answered. You don't have an EA. You don't have a dedicated note-taker. You have a Zoom recording that nobody watches and a Notion doc that's already three months stale.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A meeting notes system that transcribes every HR call, surfaces decisions and action items automatically, and archives them in searchable history so you can find 'what did we decide about the parental leave top-up?' in thirty seconds

An action item tracker that assigns follow-ups to the right manager or employee the moment the meeting ends — no more chasing people who don't remember what they agreed to

A connected knowledge base where finalized policies and decisions from meetings automatically feed the team wiki, so your Notion-that-nobody-reads finally has competition from something that actually stays current

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 Task Manager Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Meeting Notes runs as a standalone Starch app — connect your Google Calendar (Starch syncs your Google Calendar data on a schedule, pulling events 12 months back and 3 months ahead) so it knows which calls to capture. Task Manager stores action items extracted from meeting transcripts. Knowledge Management connects to Notion from Starch's integration catalog, querying it live so finalized decisions can cross-reference and update your existing docs. Gmail is also synced directly by Starch, so any meeting follow-up emails thread back into the same action item history.

Prompts to copy

Transcribe this onboarding check-in with Marcus Chen, summarize the key decisions, extract all action items, and assign them to the right people based on who was speaking

Create a task for me: follow up with Sarah (Engineering manager) on her Q2 performance review calibration submission — due May 15, mark it P1

Add the parental leave top-up policy we finalized in today's benefits review call to our HR knowledge base under 'Leave Policies,' and flag if it contradicts anything already in there

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Calendar to Starch — Starch syncs your calendar data on a schedule, so Meeting Notes knows every HR call on your calendar without you manually feeding it anything.

2 Open the Meeting Notes app from the Starch App Store and tell it which meeting types to prioritize: 'Capture all external interviews, manager 1:1s, benefits Q&As, and onboarding check-ins. Skip internal team standups.'

3 Join your next call normally. Meeting Notes transcribes in real time so you can focus on the conversation instead of typing shorthand you'll regret reading later.

4 When the call ends, Meeting Notes generates a summary with key decisions highlighted, action items extracted, and each item attributed to whoever committed to it during the call.

5 Review the action item list — usually takes under two minutes. Reassign or relabel anything the AI misread. Then push confirmed tasks to Task Manager with one prompt: 'Add all action items from the Marcus onboarding call to my task list with due dates as discussed.'

6 For decisions that affect policy — a PTO exception, a new onboarding step, a clarification on parental leave — copy the decision into Knowledge Management with a prompt like: 'Log this decision under Leave Policies and note the date and attendees.'

7 Set up a weekly Task Manager review: 'Show me all P1 and P2 HR tasks due this week, grouped by owner' — this becomes your Monday morning check-in instead of a Slack thread archaeology project.

8 When a manager says they never agreed to a deadline, search Meeting Notes: 'Find every mention of Q2 performance review calibration deadlines across all meetings in April.' You get the exact timestamp and speaker.

9 Use Gmail sync (Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule) to connect follow-up email threads back to the original meeting — so if a manager replies to your action item email, it doesn't disappear into a separate inbox silo.

10 At the end of each review cycle, run a prompt in Meeting Notes: 'Summarize all decisions made about the Q2 performance review process across every meeting in March and April' — this becomes your cycle retrospective without any additional work.

11 Share the Meeting Notes archive link with your HR partner so both of you have the same source of truth. No more 'I thought you were tracking that' conversations.

12 Quarterly, prompt Knowledge Management: 'Flag any HR policies that haven't been updated in 90 days and cross-reference them against decisions logged in the last quarter' — your Notion finally tells you what's stale instead of you guessing.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

April 2026 Q2 Review Calibration Kickoff

Sample numbers from a real run

Attendees	7
Action items extracted	11
Action items assigned to managers	8
Action items assigned to HR	3
Decisions logged to Knowledge Base	4
Time spent on post-meeting admin	12

You ran the Q2 calibration kickoff with seven managers across Engineering, Sales, and Ops — a 50-minute call that would normally produce a Zoom recording link and a frantic Slack message afterward trying to reconstruct who agreed to what. Instead, Meeting Notes transcribed the whole session, flagged the four policy decisions (calibration deadline of May 15, forced distribution waived for teams under 5, Engineering exempt from the new 9-box this cycle, HR to send the rating scale template by EOW), and extracted 11 action items with owners. You spent 12 minutes after the call confirming the task assignments and pushing the four decisions into Knowledge Management under 'Performance Review Process — Q2 2026.' When an Engineering manager emailed three days later claiming the May 15 deadline was 'news to him,' you pulled the exact transcript timestamp in under a minute and forwarded it. The deadline held.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Action item completion rate per manager per review cycle (are the people who committed to things actually doing them?)

Time from meeting end to action items distributed (target: under 15 minutes with Starch vs. 1-2 hours manually)

Policy documentation freshness — percentage of HR policies updated within the last 90 days

Meeting-to-decision traceability — can you find the source meeting for any live policy within 60 seconds?

Onboarding action item close rate — what percentage of new hire check-in tasks get completed before the 30-day mark?

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai

Good transcription, but action items still live in a separate system — you're manually copying to Asana or a Notion table, and there's no connection to your HRIS data or calendar context.

Notion AI meeting notes

Works if your whole team already lives in Notion, but action item tracking is manual and there's no automatic connection to who owns what in your HR systems.

Manual Zoom + Google Doc recap

Free and already in your stack, but someone has to write the recap — and that someone is you, adding 30-45 minutes to every meeting you run.

Microsoft Copilot meeting summary (Teams/Outlook users)

Strong transcription inside the Microsoft ecosystem, but if you're running on Google Workspace or a mixed stack, coverage is partial and there's no native connection to Paylocity or ADP data.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

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

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch record video or just audio/transcript?

Meeting Notes captures the transcript and generates a text summary — it's not a video recorder. Think of it as a real-time note-taker, not a Zoom replacement. You keep the Zoom recording if you want video; Starch gives you the searchable text layer.

We use Google Meet for most calls and Zoom for external interviews. Does Meeting Notes work with both?

Yes. Starch connects to both Google Calendar (synced on a schedule) and Zoom from Starch's integration catalog. If a meeting is on your calendar, Meeting Notes can see it. The workflow is the same regardless of which video tool you use.

What happens if someone joins late or there's a crosstalk problem — does the action item extraction break?

The AI does its best with messy audio, but imperfect transcripts produce imperfect extractions. The review step (step 4 in the workflow above) exists precisely for this reason — it takes about two minutes and you catch anything the AI misread. Honest answer: it's better than manual notes even when it's not perfect.

We store a lot of sensitive HR information — compensation discussions, PIPs, medical leave. Is this secure?

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified, which is worth knowing if your company has formal compliance requirements around data handling. If your legal or compliance team needs a SOC 2 report before approving a tool, that's a real constraint today. For teams without that requirement, Starch handles data with standard encryption at rest and in transit.

Can I use this for confidential 1:1s between HR and an employee — performance issues, accommodations, that kind of thing?

Technically yes, but think carefully about the access model before you do. Meeting Notes archives are searchable by whoever has access to your Starch workspace. If you're capturing a sensitive PIP conversation, make sure you've set up the right access controls so that summary doesn't surface to someone it shouldn't.

Our managers don't use Starch. Can they still receive their action items?

Yes. Action items can be pushed to them via Gmail (Starch syncs your Gmail so it can send follow-up emails), or you can export them manually. The managers don't need a Starch account to receive and act on their tasks — they just get an email like they would from any other follow-up.

How is this different from just using the AI summary feature built into Zoom or Google Meet?

Zoom and Meet summaries are siloed — they live in Zoom's interface or your Drive, disconnected from everything else. Starch connects the meeting output to your task list, your knowledge base, your Gmail, and your calendar context. The difference is whether your action items end up somewhere they'll actually get tracked, or in a PDF nobody opens.