Monthly Workday headcount and attrition brief for leadership

On the first business day of each month at 7am, produce a headcount and attrition brief from Workday and share it with leadership in Slack. Run on the first business day rather than the first calendar day, so the brief lands when people are at work.

Pull the numbers with Workday's WQL - Run Query. I want current total headcount broken out three ways: by department, by supervisory organization, and by location. I also want everyone hired and everyone who exited over the trailing month, meaning the calendar month that just ended. Count employees and contingent workers separately and label them clearly in everything you produce. A blended number is the single most common cause of arguments about whether the headcount is right, so never collapse the two into one total without also showing the split.

If we already have a headcount report in Workday enabled as a web service, use Report-as-a-Service - Run Custom Report instead and take the numbers from there, so the brief agrees with what HR already publishes internally. Prefer WQL or Report-as-a-Service over paging through the worker list endpoints: Workday's own guidance is that large extracts should go through the query and reporting services rather than looping resource endpoints. If you need to resolve supervisory organization names or hierarchy, Common - List Supervisory Organizations can fill those in.

Where a move is an internal transfer between supervisory organizations rather than a genuine hire or exit, treat it as a transfer. Departmental changes should net out correctly at the company level, and a team that grew because of a reorganization must not be reported as if it went on a hiring spree.

Before writing anything, read the tracking spreadsheet with Google Sheets Get Values so the brief can describe a trend rather than a single snapshot. Then append this month's numbers as one new row with Append Values: the month, total headcount, the employee and contractor split, hires, exits, the attrition rate, and the per department totals. Never overwrite earlier rows. The accumulated history is the whole point of the sheet.

Then write a short narrative summary and post it to the leadership channel with Slack Send a Message. Lead with any department whose headcount moved more than ten percent in either direction, so the outliers are read first. After that, cover which departments grew and which shrank, the month over month attrition rate, and the hire and exit counts behind it. Reference the prior months you read from the sheet so the reader sees direction of travel rather than an isolated figure.

Keep the message short enough to read on a phone: a few sentences of narrative plus a compact list. Write plainly for executives, cite real numbers instead of vague phrases like significant change, and if something in the data looks like a reporting artifact rather than a real workforce movement, say so plainly instead of presenting it as growth or loss.