Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write a weekly team update as Small HR Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Every Friday afternoon, someone on your two-person HR team is manually pulling together a weekly update for the company: headcount changes from Paylocity, open roles from Greenhouse, PTO balances from the Slack bot, any policy reminders, and whatever managers bothered to send you. You're copying numbers out of four different tabs, writing the same boilerplate intro, and hoping you didn't miss anyone who started or left that week. It takes 90 minutes you don't have, and it still feels incomplete because the data is always slightly stale by the time you hit send.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small HR Teams4 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An automated weekly HR digest that pulls headcount, PTO, and hiring data from your connected systems and drafts a formatted team update every Friday morning before you've had coffee

A structured inbox workflow that routes employee questions, manager requests, and benefits inquiries so nothing gets lost in a shared HR inbox over the weekend

A searchable archive of every weekly update — plus the meeting notes and decisions that fed into it — so when someone asks 'when did we announce the new PTO policy?' you can find it in 10 seconds

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

Email Agent Knowledge Management Meeting Notes Project Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule (employees, payroll runs, time off) so headcount and PTO numbers are always current. Greenhouse and Slack are connected from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live when the Friday automation runs. Notion is connected from Starch's integration catalog to pull in any policy docs or playbooks referenced in the update. Gmail is synced directly by Starch so the Email Agent can triage and draft from your HR inbox.

Prompts to copy

Every Friday at 8am, pull this week's headcount changes from Paylocity (new hires, terminations, transfers), open roles from Greenhouse, and any PTO requests submitted in Slack this week. Draft a weekly HR update in this format: [headcount summary], [open roles], [PTO snapshot], [reminder or policy note]. Email it to me for review before 9am.

Create a knowledge base section called 'Weekly HR Updates' and auto-archive each approved weekly update there, tagged by date and any topics mentioned (benefits, headcount, policy). Flag me if a topic hasn't been updated in 30 days.

After every HR team sync, transcribe the meeting, extract any action items assigned to me or my HR partner, and create tasks in Project Management with due dates. If an action item relates to the weekly update, tag it 'weekly-update'.

Triage my HR inbox every morning: label anything from an employee as 'employee-question', anything from a manager as 'manager-request', anything about benefits as 'benefits'. Draft a one-sentence reply for anything that matches a question I've answered before, and flag anything that requires a policy decision for me to handle personally.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity via Starch's scheduled sync. Starch will pull employees, time-off requests, and org changes on a recurring schedule — your headcount numbers will always reflect what actually happened this week, not what you remembered to update.

2 Connect Greenhouse from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live each Friday when the automation runs, pulling open reqs, recent offers, and any stage changes from this week.

3 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can read the PTO channel (or wherever employees post OOO requests) and include a clean snapshot in the weekly update.

4 Connect Gmail via Starch's direct sync and set up the Email Agent. Tell it to triage the shared HR inbox by priority, draft replies for repeat questions (benefits enrollment dates, PTO balances, direct deposit changes), and surface anything that needs a real decision.

5 Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog. Point it at your HR policies database so the agent can reference current policy language when it drafts updates or answers employee questions.

6 Start with the Knowledge Management app from the App Store. Describe what you want: 'Create a section for weekly HR updates, auto-archive each one by date, tag by topic, and surface related past updates when I'm drafting a new one.' Customize the structure to match how your team actually looks things up.

7 Set up Meeting Notes for your weekly HR sync and any all-hands or manager meetings you attend. After each call, Starch extracts action items and sends them to Project Management automatically — no copy-pasting.

8 Build the Friday automation: tell Starch in plain language what the update should contain, what format it should follow, and what time it should land in your inbox for review. The first draft is ready before you start work; you spend 10 minutes editing instead of 90 minutes assembling.

9 Add a policy-reminder rotation to the automation. Tell Starch: 'Each week, include one policy reminder pulled from our Notion HR playbook, rotating through topics in this order: benefits, PTO, performance reviews, onboarding.' You stop having to remember what you last reminded people of.

10 Wire the approval step: the draft goes to your inbox via Email Agent, you approve or edit, and one click sends it to the all-company Slack channel or distribution list. No separate email client context-switching.

11 After four weeks, ask Starch to generate a summary: 'What were the most common employee questions this month based on my inbox? What topics appeared in every weekly update?' Use this to update your Notion FAQ so the Email Agent can draft better auto-replies going forward.

12 Share the weekly update archive with your CHRO or CFO by pointing them at the Knowledge Management app. When they ask 'what was headcount in January?' they can look it up themselves instead of Slacking you on a Saturday.

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Worked example

Week of March 17, 2026 — Headcount spike after Q1 hiring push

Sample numbers from a real run

New hires this week	4
Open reqs (Greenhouse)	11
PTO requests logged	7
Benefits questions in HR inbox (auto-drafted by Email Agent)	9
Minutes spent assembling update	12

Your Q1 hiring push closed 4 offers in one week — two engineers, one account executive, and one customer success hire. Normally this would mean manually cross-referencing Paylocity to confirm start dates, checking Greenhouse to close out the reqs, and writing individual welcome blurbs. Instead, the Friday automation pulled all four new-hire records from Paylocity's scheduled sync, queried Greenhouse live to confirm which reqs were now filled, and drafted the weekly update with a 'Welcome' section already populated with names and titles. The 7 PTO requests pulled from Slack required zero manual entry. The Email Agent had already drafted replies to 9 benefits questions in your inbox — 6 were standard enrollment questions that matched past answers, so those went out with one click. You spent 12 minutes reviewing and editing the draft instead of the usual 90 minutes building it. The final update was archived automatically in Knowledge Management under 'March 2026,' tagged with 'headcount,' 'onboarding,' and 'benefits' — so when your CFO asked three weeks later how many people started in Q1, you had the answer in 20 seconds.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time to publish weekly update (target: under 20 minutes of human effort)

Employee questions answered via auto-draft vs. manually written (track monthly to see if your Notion FAQ is improving)

Open reqs filled vs. total headcount each week (sourced live from Greenhouse and Paylocity)

PTO balance accuracy rate — how often the update matches what payroll actually shows

Action item completion rate from weekly HR sync (tracked in Project Management, reviewed monthly)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Manually assembled Google Doc + Paylocity export + Greenhouse screenshots

Zero cost and works fine when your team is 20 people; at 150 employees across 4 data sources it's a 90-minute weekly tax on the person who can least afford it.

Rippling with built-in reporting

Rippling's reports are good for what lives in Rippling — but your open reqs are in Greenhouse, your PTO requests are in Slack, and your policy docs are in Notion, and Rippling doesn't glue those together into a narrative update.

Notion AI writing assistant

Notion AI can help you write faster once you're already in the doc, but it doesn't pull live data from Paylocity or Greenhouse — you're still assembling the inputs by hand before the AI touches it.

Lattice or 15Five update features

These tools have weekly check-in and update features, but they're manager-to-employee, not HR-to-company — and they don't pull headcount or PTO data from your payroll system automatically.

A third HR headcount hire

The actual alternative most 2-person HR teams consider when the manual work gets bad enough — Starch is meaningfully cheaper and faster to set up than a new hire, with the tradeoff that it doesn't attend your meetings or handle truly novel situations.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — email agent, knowledge management, meeting notes 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 Paylocity for payroll and BambooHR as our HRIS — can Starch pull from both?

Starch syncs Paylocity data directly on a schedule (employees, payroll runs, time off). BambooHR is reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your automation runs. You can build a weekly update that pulls headcount from BambooHR and PTO actuals from Paylocity in the same draft.

What if our Greenhouse data includes sensitive offer details we don't want in the all-company update?

You control exactly what the automation pulls and what it includes in the draft. In your prompt, you specify which Greenhouse fields to surface — typically just role title, department, and status. Compensation, candidate names mid-process, and internal notes stay out unless you explicitly ask for them.

Our PTO requests come in through Slack DMs, not a formal channel — can Starch handle that?

Starch connects to Slack from its integration catalog and can read channels the agent has access to. DMs are typically not readable for privacy reasons. If your PTO requests are informal, the cleaner fix is to route them through a simple Slack channel (even a private one) that Starch can watch — or ask Starch to cross-reference Paylocity time-off requests directly, which is usually the more reliable source anyway.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have employee data flowing through here.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. If your company requires SOC 2 Type II for any tool that touches employee data, that's a real blocker you should flag with your legal or compliance team before connecting Paylocity or ADP. Starch is honest about this limit — it's on the roadmap, not available today.

Can the Email Agent actually draft good replies to benefits questions, or will it hallucinate policy details?

The Email Agent drafts replies based on what you've told it and what's in your connected Notion policy docs. If the answer is in your Notion knowledge base, it will draft from that source. If the answer isn't documented, it will flag the email for you to handle rather than guess. The more you keep your Notion policies current, the better the drafts get — which is a good forcing function for keeping your documentation alive.

What happens if Paylocity has a sync delay and the headcount numbers in Friday's draft are a day behind?

Starch's Paylocity sync runs on a schedule, so there is a possible lag between a change being made in Paylocity and it appearing in Starch. For most weekly updates, a one-day lag doesn't matter. If you're publishing the update immediately after a payroll run or a batch of start dates, you can manually trigger a refresh before the automation runs, or just note in the update that headcount reflects data as of Thursday close.