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The retrospective process is where good intentions go to die: everyone agrees it matters, and it still slips, because every step needs someone to remember it. Automating the remembering is what keeps the process alive. Recipe 1 is a setting rather than a workflow. Recipes 2 to 4 are complete worked examples, each naming a trigger, its conditions, and its actions.

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Recipe 1: Control Which Incidents Get a Retrospective

Every incident already has a retrospective. Rootly creates the document when the incident is declared, and the Retrospective Created workflow trigger fires when the incident is first resolved, so you do not need a workflow to create one. See When is a retrospective created?. What you usually want is not whether it happens but which incidents it happens for, and that is configured under Skip and Mandatory Preferences, which decide whether an incident’s retrospective is skipped or required. Gate by severity there. The retrospective process conditions choose which process applies, not whether there is a retrospective. Gate on the severities your process actually requires. A retrospective created for every SEV4 produces a backlog of empty ones, which reads as a completion problem when it is really a configuration problem.

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Recipe 2: Schedule the Review Meeting

The step that slips most, because it needs a calendar and a quorum. Fields worth setting on the calendar action:
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list
Who needs to be there. The incident’s responders are the obvious set; add the people whose absence would make the meeting pointless.
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boolean
Set this. Without it, an incident resolved on a Friday evening schedules its review for Saturday, and the meeting quietly does not happen.
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string
Attaches a video link to the event, so nobody has to make one on the day. Google Calendar only — on Create a Outlook Event, the equivalent is the Enable online meeting checkbox. Set whichever your calendar action exposes; a review with no link is a review people join late.
Schedule the review a few days out, not the next morning. Far enough that people have slept and the logs have been read; close enough that anyone still remembers the detail. The calendar action’s Days until meeting field sets this, and Exclude weekends counts only business days.

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Recipe 3: Nudge the Owner

The draft condition is what ends the nudges. Rootly re-checks a workflow’s conditions before each repeat, so once the retrospective is published, Retrospective status is draft stops being true and the sequence ends. Publication is the signal to watch, because retrospective progress (completed, skipped) is not available as a workflow condition.
Set a maximum number of repeats or a time limit as a backstop, so a retrospective that is never published does not nudge indefinitely. See Stop Repeat Conditions.

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Recipe 4: Announce Publication

The one that makes the work visible, and the cheapest of the four.
Condition this on published, or the workflow also fires when a retrospective moves back to draft.
A retrospective nobody reads is most of the value lost. This recipe costs one workflow and is the one most likely to change behaviour, because it turns writing a retrospective into something visible rather than something filed.

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End to End

The four together cover the whole arc, and are worth building in this order:
1

Recipe 4 first

Announcements are the lowest risk and the highest visible value, and they tell you whether people care before you automate anything else.
2

Then Recipe 1

Set your skip preferences so retrospectives are only required where they matter. Watch the backlog for a fortnight and adjust the severity threshold before going further.
3

Then Recipe 2

Meetings are where the process converts into decisions. Automate the scheduling once you know the retrospectives are actually being created.
4

Recipe 3 last, if you still need it

If the first three are working, you may not. A nudge workflow added on top of a healthy process is the one people resent.

Retrospective Workflows

Triggers available on retrospectives and their noise characteristics.

Workflow Actions

Every action these recipes use.

Wait and Repeat

Delays, repeats, and stop conditions.