For organizations · Getting started
A rollout your HR team
can run in an afternoon
SPARKS does not replace your EAP, your benefits plan or your engagement survey. It sits alongside them and measures what they have never been able to measure. Rollout is deliberately light, because a preventative program that needs a change-management project will not survive contact with a busy quarter.
The first quarter
What actually happens, week by week
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Week 0: scope and baseline agreement
Decide the cohorts you want reported on, confirm they clear the minimum group size of thirty, and agree the measures you will hold the program to. This is the meeting that determines whether you can answer the renewal question in nine months, so it is worth doing properly.
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Week 1: launch to the population
Employees are invited to create their own private account. No last name required, masked email encouraged. Your comms say what the organization will and will not see, in plain language, because that is what determines participation.
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Weeks 2 to 4: baseline forms
People work through assessments at their own pace and get their own results immediately. Your side shows participation climbing. Nothing individual crosses the line, then or later.
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Month 2: first aggregate read
The first cohort-level picture with benchmark comparison. Usually this is the point where a function nobody was worried about turns out to be carrying more strain than the one everybody was worried about.
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Month 3: intervene and mark the date
Change something specific in the cohort that needs it, and note when you did. The before-and-after view is what turns your next budget conversation from an assertion into evidence.
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Quarter 2 onward: the loop
Trend, intervene, measure, report. Compare against your own HRIS attrition on your side of the line. Deloitte’s finding that early, organisation-wide intervention returns more than late in-depth support is the loop this is designed to run.
What we need from you
- A sponsor. One person in People or Benefits who owns the measures agreed at kickoff.
- A cohort map. How you want the organization grouped for reporting, with each group at thirty or more.
- One internal announcement. We provide the copy; it works better in your voice than in ours.
- Thirty minutes a quarter. To read the report and decide what to change.
There is no HRIS integration to build, no single sign-on project, and no individual data flowing into your systems, because none of that is compatible with the privacy architecture.
What we bring
- Onboarding and support, included in the organizational plan
- Launch communications you can send as your own
- Baseline report and benchmark context
- Quarterly reporting and a working session on what it means
- Custom content delivery when you want to push training to a cohort
Pricing
Organizational plans start from $10 per member per month, billed monthly, and include everything individuals get plus anonymous aggregate reporting, EAP and HR benefits integration options, k‑anonymity protected analytics, onboarding and support.
Fitting in
How SPARKS sits with what you already run
| You already have | What SPARKS adds |
|---|---|
| An EAP | Visibility into the roughly nine in ten employees who never call it, and a way to show whether the EAP is reaching the people who need it. |
| An annual engagement survey | A continuous read between surveys, and an explanation of mechanism rather than a score. The survey tells you morale dropped; this points at when, where, and among whom. |
| Manager training | Coaching that reaches the manager in the moment they are writing the difficult message, plus a measure of whether the training changed anything. |
| A benefits broker or consultant | Evidence for the renewal conversation, and cohort-level stress measurement through the SPARKS Strain Index. |
| A wellness app or two | The layer underneath them: what is driving the stress, rather than another tool for managing the symptom. |
Next step
Start with a single quarter
One cohort map, one baseline, one report. If it does not tell you something you did not already know, you will have found that out cheaply.
Sources
- Deloitte UK, Poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year, 17 May 2024.
- C. D. Brooks and J. Ling, “An Evaluation of the Utilization of Employee Assistance Programs,” Journal of Insurance Regulation, vol. 39, no. 8, NAIC, 2020.
- SPARKS, Pricing.