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

  1. Pick one or more recipients.
  2. Write your message.
  3. Optionally attach it to a company value or a badge.
  4. 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.

Known limitation: private (direct-message) recognition can be sent via the API but there's no inbox to read it yet — stick to public recognition until that ships.

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.

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

  1. Choose a survey type and set the question set (or use a pulse template).
  2. 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").
  3. 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.
  4. Launch.

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.

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.

Manager Signals

Managers get proactive engagement signals (low-morale teams, stale action plans, flight-risk spikes, and reminders to launch a pulse) rather than having to go looking for them.

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.awards.view View awards

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

Related guides

Still need help? Reach us at support@sparko.app.

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