Engagement Module

The Engagement module covers peer recognition, awards and milestones, pulse/eNPS surveys, and self-reflections — the tools for reading and building company culture day to day.

Overview

The Engagement module provides:

Recognition Wall — peer-to-peer kudos, public and visible company-wide
Awards & Milestones — badges and auto-detected anniversaries/promotions
Surveys — eNPS and pulse surveys with reusable audience targeting
Self-Reflections — AI-prompted personal check-ins
Admin controls — per-feature toggles for recognition, pulses, micro-engagement, and awards

Recognition Wall

Navigate to Engagement > Recognition Wall to see company-wide kudos, or Give Recognition to post your own.

Giving recognition

Pick one or more recipients.
Write your message.
Optionally attach it to a company value or a badge.
Post — it appears on the wall immediately.

AI tone check: as you type, Sparko checks your message's tone and offers a suggested revision if it reads harshly or inappropriately. Your tenant can configure this as a soft warning or a hard block that prevents posting until revised.

Rate limits: there's a daily soft cap on how much recognition one person can give, with a warning before you hit the hard daily stop — this keeps the wall meaningful rather than spammed.

Scope tabs

The wall has four tabs:

My Own — recognition you gave or received. The Given / Received switch splits it.
Team — your team's recognition.
Company — everything public.
Private — your own inbox of recognition sent to you directly. Private recognition never enters the public feed, so this tab is the only place to read it. It is received-only, so the Given / Received switch does not apply.

Awards & Milestones

Milestones — work anniversaries and promotions are detected automatically and surface as milestone cards for acknowledgement.
Awards — badges (e.g. "Above & Beyond") that managers or admins can grant, visible on the recipient's profile and the Awards page.

Nominating a colleague

Anyone can put a colleague forward for a named award. The Nominate button sits on the award rows in your Home company feed. Pick the person, say why, and submit. You cannot nominate yourself, and you cannot nominate the same person for the same award twice.

Engagement > Awards has three tabs:

Awards — the awards themselves.
Nominations — the review queue, with a count. Only visible to reviewers. Each card shows who was nominated, for what, by whom, and the reason. Approve grants the real award to the nominee and notifies them. Dismiss closes the nomination without granting anything. Either way the decision is final: a nomination cannot be decided twice.
My nominations — everything you submitted, with its current status.

Nominating needs engagement.awards.nominate (every employee has it). Reviewing needs engagement.awards.manage (HR Admin and Super Admin).

Known limitation: there's a share action for awards in the API, but no button in the UI to trigger it yet — awards can't currently be shared out to the wall or a team feed from the Awards page.

Surveys (eNPS & Pulse)

Navigate to Engagement > Surveys. What you see depends on your role: survey admins get the full lifecycle console (drafts, scheduled, paused, closed, response rates), while everyone else sees the active surveys waiting for them with a Take survey button and a Completed state once they've responded.

Creating a survey

Choose a survey type and set the question set (or use a pulse template).
Target an audience — pick individual filters, or reuse a saved audience profile if your admin has set one up (e.g. "All of Engineering," "Managers only").
Pick a privacy tier — this is a promise Sparko enforces server-side:
- Anonymous — no identity is stored with answers; a separate server-side token prevents double-responding without ever linking anyone to their answer. Individual results (including written replies) stay hidden until at least 5 responses are in, so nothing can be traced back to a person on a small team. Below that, reviewers see AI theme and sentiment summaries only.
- Anonymous · de-identified — everything above, plus raw written replies are never shown to reviewers at any response count; AI theme summaries stand in.
- Identified — responses are attributed to the respondent. The survey says so up front.
Launch.

Taking a survey

Your answers save as you go, so you can close a long survey and finish it later. The page tells you which state you're in: saving, saved, or unable to save. If it says it couldn't load your saved answers, reload before you continue, otherwise what you type won't be kept.

Saved answers are held separately from responses and are deleted the moment you submit. On an anonymous survey that means the answers you submit are never linked to you: the only attributable copy is the half-finished one, and it stops existing at submission.

While a survey is running

A running survey can be paused and resumed mid-flight, not just opened or closed.
Open a survey's results with View results on its card in Engagement > Surveys. Results show a sentiment breakdown (positive / neutral / negative), AI themes, and — for anonymous surveys with 5+ responses — individual open-text replies without attribution.
For the cross-survey picture (participation over time, eNPS per survey, status counts), use the Surveys tab in Analytics.

Editing a survey that is already running

You can keep working on a live survey. Sparko allows the edits that cannot corrupt what you have already collected, and blocks the ones that can. A banner on the builder tells you the survey is live, and locked questions carry a lock icon.

You can still:

Rename the survey
Extend the close date
Add new questions
Edit a question that has no answers yet

You cannot:

Change the wording or scale of a question that already has answers. Old and new responses would no longer be comparable. Duplicate the survey as a new round instead.
Remove a question that already has answers
Change the anonymity promise. People replied on the old one.
Change the start date
Bring the close date forward
Move a live survey back to draft. Pause or close it instead.

Building pulses

Admin Settings > Engagement > Pulse has three tabs so the loop closes on one page:

Builder — a sticky question library on the left (Sparko-managed, Custom, Recently used) and the pulse canvas on the right. Drag a question across, set the frequency and day, group questions by theme. Nothing is written until you click Save pulse.
Templates — pulse shapes you saved, with a count. Loading one fills the builder canvas; it is still not saved until you save the pulse. Templates your company created can be deleted. A template a lifecycle survey stage depends on cannot.
Responses — past pulses with their reply counts, each linking to the same survey results page the rest of Surveys uses.

Save as template on the builder stores the current question set for reuse.

Pulses are confidential, not anonymous

Daily/weekly pulse answers are stored with your identity — that's what powers answer carry-over ("you answered this 3 days ago") and retention insights. Leaders only ever see aggregates, never an individual's answer. Pulse screens say Confidential to reflect exactly that contract.

Each survey's results page also shows a per-question delta vs the previous run of the same survey series (a "+0.2 vs prev" chip on every scale question, with the previous run named in the Summary rail). Deltas respect the same anonymity floor as results: if either run is below the minimum response count, the comparison stays hidden.

Known limitation: there's no dedicated Sentiment Dashboard page yet — sentiment is the 3-number breakdown described above, not a standalone trend view.

Lifecycle Surveys (Onboarding & Exit)

Some feedback is best gathered at a moment in someone's journey, not on a fixed calendar. Sparko runs these automatically. Turn them on under Admin > Engagement Settings > Lifecycle surveys.

Onboarding surveys fire a set number of days after a new hire's start date: Day 7, Day 30, and Day 90.
Exit surveys fire when an employee is terminated.

Pooling keeps small cohorts anonymous

A survey sent to one leaver would be a survey of one person, which can never be truly anonymous. So each stage pools everyone who reaches it in the same period into a single rolling survey, by joiner or leaver week, month, or quarter (you choose the window per stage). Responses carry no identity. Only the invite records who was asked, and that is used just to prevent double-responding.

The result follows the same anonymity floor as every other Sparko survey. Until a pool has at least 5 responses, individual answers stay hidden and reviewers see only AI theme and sentiment summaries. Once a pool clears 5, written comments are shown without attribution. The whole point of exit feedback is to read what leavers actually said, once the group is large enough that no comment traces back to a person.

Splitting exit results by regret

For exit surveys you can optionally split results into regretted and non-regretted attrition (HR classifies each departure). This is a toggle on the exit stage. Each slice carries its own 5-response floor, so a thin segment stays suppressed even when the overall exit pool is well over the floor.

Seeing the results

Track lifecycle results over time in Analytics > Survey Trends, which shows each stage's score by period, benchmarked against its own recent periods. Each stage uses a sensible default question set, and admins can point a stage at a different template.

Self-Reflections

Navigate to Engagement > Reflections (or from My Hub) to write a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or ad-hoc reflection.

Click New Reflection and Sparko AI generates a tailored starting prompt based on your recent OKRs, feedback, and 1-on-1s — you write from there rather than a blank page.

Feedback outcomes

Where to find it: the Feedback outcomes button on the Surveys page, or the section at the bottom of the Engagement Dashboard Summary tab. Anyone who can answer a survey can read it.

The themes a survey raised, the action plans opened in response, how far each has got, and whether the score moved.

Surveys ask for candour and then close. Response rates fall because nobody sees anything come back — this is the return leg.

Only work that actually started is shown. A plan still in draft is an intention, and showing intentions as actions is the exact broken promise this exists to fix.
Plans that stalled still appear, with their real item statuses. Filtering to successes would make this marketing.
Nobody is named. Action items show their title and status, never their owner — publishing who is responsible for fixing your complaint, to everyone who made it, helps no one.
Themes from a very small survey are withheld. "3 people mentioned management" on a four-person team is attributable, and these surveys are anonymous.
A survey with no themes and no plans is not listed, so the page never fills with rows that say only that nothing happened. The most recent survey is the exception: it stays visible while its themes and plans are still being worked out.

Editing a plan's action items

Where to find it: Engagement Dashboard, Action Plans tab. Click a plan to expand it.

Sparko drafts the items, and you edit them from there. Click an item's text to rewrite it. Set a due date beside it. Choose an owner from the picker. Use Add item at the bottom of the list for anything the draft missed, and the × on a row to drop one.

Renaming an item that is already tracked renames its goal too, and reassigning it moves the goal to the new owner. The item and its goal are one piece of work, so they never drift apart.

An owned item can be tracked as a goal, once the plan itself is linked to one. Use Tracked by at the bottom of the expanded plan to pick that goal first — Track as goal stays disabled until both are in place, and says which one is missing. Then Sparko creates a goal for that person, sitting under the plan's goal. They see it on their own Goals page and check in on it there. They do not see the plan itself.

The plan's progress is then the average of its tracked goals, shown as a percentage on the row. The row's summary line always states how many of the plan's items are tracked, so a plan cannot look finished while work nobody owns is still open.

The item controls — owner, due date, Track as goal, and × — appear when you hover a row, and are always visible on touch.

Goals created this way are restricted: only the owner, their managers, and people who can see all goals can read them. Other goals in Sparko are open to colleagues, so this keeps an action item's wording from carrying a survey finding out to the whole company.

Untrack stops the plan following that goal. The goal stays where it is, with its check-ins, because someone may still be working on it. Deleting an item asks separately whether its goal should go too.

Did the action plan work?

Where to find it: inside each expanded plan on the Engagement Dashboard Action Plans tab.

Each action plan has an outcome. Sparko snapshots the survey numbers when the plan is created and attaches every survey that closes afterwards, so the change is a recorded reading rather than a claim made later.

Three honest states, because "no result" is not "a result of zero":

Not re-measured — no survey has closed since the plan started, so there is nothing to compare against yet.
Not comparable — a survey closed, but one of the two readings has no eNPS.
Measured — a real change, up or down. A decline is reported as a decline.

Two rules keep the number honest: the baseline is taken when the plan is created, never chosen afterwards, and a survey only measures plans that already existed when it closed — so a plan written last week cannot claim credit for last month's improvement.

The change covers everything that happened in the period, not only this plan.

Retention risk mix

The Retention tab opens with the org-level picture: how many people sit in each risk band today, and how each band moved over the last 30 days. Every plan sees it. Each active employee is counted once, at their most recent score, so history never inflates a band and someone who has left is out of the mix.

The movement compares the people here today against where those same people stood 30 days ago. Someone who left in between is out of both readings, so the change is people moving between bands and never someone leaving the company.

These are counts, never names. The bands stay hidden until at least five people are scored, because below that a count points at a person; the tab says so rather than showing zeros. The 30-day movement needs seven, because two readings of a smaller group can be subtracted back down to one person.

The list of who is at risk, what is driving it, and the action plans that answer it sits below the mix and is part of the Business plan.

The dashboard's attention items (a team's scores trending low, action plans that have not moved, a spike in new critical signals, a pulse overdue to launch) each carry an x to dismiss permanently for the whole company. Dismissed items move to the Dismissed items list beneath the panel, where anyone with the same access can restore them, and every dismissal records who made the call.

Key drivers

The Key drivers panel on the Engagement dashboard shows which engagement dimensions actually track people leaving — measured against real departures, not against the retention score itself.

A negative correlation is the meaningful one: lower scores on that dimension went with leaving.
Nothing is reported until there are enough resolved departures to say anything. Below that, Sparko shows the dimension averages and explains why, instead of a number.
Six dimensions are compared at once, so the leader is a place to look rather than a conclusion. The panel says so every time it reports.

This is association, not cause.

Visible to people with company-wide engagement analytics access.

The Insights Card

Everyone gets an Insights card on Home. It shows at most three cards at a time, at most one new one lands per week, and an empty card that says "Nothing this week" is normal. Every card quotes the number that produced it and carries one button that goes somewhere real.

What you see depends on your role:

Managers see facts about their own management, never judgements about a person: a report reaching day 30, 60 or 90, a report you haven't had a 1:1 with in six weeks, several team goals at risk, two or more departures in a quarter, or a sharp team-level drop in check-in participation. Team engagement and retention signals only appear as aggregates, and only for teams of five or more.
HR admins see facts about the system: a review cycle ending with reviews still open, parts of the people framework not yet applied, or career levels with no requirements defined.
Employees see things they can act on themselves: skills we inferred with AI that are waiting for their confirmation, one of their goals falling behind, unused vacation, interviews they've run while their review is open for self-assessment, a nudge to send someone feedback, or what the next career level asks for. Employee cards are never comparative.

Every card has an x in its corner, so dismissing never requires expanding it first. Dismissing a card is permanent, and so is following its action: a card you acted on leaves the feed, its job done. HR cards are shared: they describe the system, not a person, so one HR admin dismissing or acting on one clears it for the whole HR team. Per-person retention risk is not a coaching signal: the team's risk picture lives on the Retention tab of the Engagement Dashboard as anonymised band counts.

The Insights card is part of the Business plan.

Known limitation: the Engagement Dashboard's Summary/Detailed tabs show your own personal engagement metrics (recognition you've received, your own awards) — there isn't yet a company-wide "how engaged is the org" view for admins. Use the manager signals above, or the Surveys tab in Analytics, for a broader read.

Admin Settings

HR Admins can independently enable or disable, at the tenant level:

Recognition
Micro-engagement
Pulses
Awards

Each toggle is enforced everywhere that feature's endpoints are called — turning one off actually removes access to it, not just the nav entry.

Permissions reference

Permission	What it grants
`engagement.recognition.give`	Post recognition
`engagement.recognition.view`	View the recognition wall
`engagement.recognition.react`	React to a recognition post
`engagement.milestones.view`	View milestones
`engagement.recognition.view_dms`	The Private tab on the recognition wall
`engagement.awards.view`	View awards
`engagement.awards.nominate`	Nominate a colleague, and the My nominations tab
`engagement.awards.manage`	Approve or dismiss nominations

System roles already include these by default — see your HR Admin if access is missing.

Related guides

Performance Module — OKRs, reviews, and continuous feedback
People Module — employee directory, profiles

Still need help? Reach us at [email protected].

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