When running your remote team, feedback should be one of your highest priorities. Understanding how your team feels about their work and how you go about achieving your goals is critical to your success and your team’s wellbeing. Online polls are one of the most important tools in your arsenal for this purpose. Since Slack is a central communication hub for teams like yours, you have a few different options available to you. Let’s explore the power of polls in gathering quick, actionable insight, and how you can go about achieving that while using Slack.

Benefits of Slack Polls

If you haven’t attempted to poll or survey your remote teams, it’s time to start. Northern Illinois University Continuing and Professional Education explains that engagement surveys and polls on Slack can help an organization identify where it needs to improve and measure engagement changes over time.

Polling your team directly in Slack has a number of benefits. Depending on the kinds of questions you’re asking, polls can help improve your transparency and accountability by making your team’s opinions visible. Polls can also improve your team’s workplace engagement by transforming passive observers into active participants.

Polls can also facilitate more collaborative, data-informed decision-making. This allows teams to make decisions together and encourages open communication. Aside from decision-making, polls can also help teams identify trends and insights about their team. For instance, you might poll your team to discover availability for an upcoming meeting.

The Basics: How to Set Up Native Slack Polls

The simplest option is to set up polls using Slack’s built in features. Here’s how you can start a poll using Slack with no extra integrations:

1. Open the desired channel where you want to start the poll.
2. Write the question of your poll on the first line.
3. Make a line break with Alt + Enter.
4. Use blockquote formatting to list emojis as options for voting. For example, you might use a dog emoji for your team members to choose that they’re a dog person.
5. Once you have set all the options, send the message. Team members can now add corresponding emoji reactions to vote in the poll.

As you can imagine, this polling method doesn’t have any rich features and is just a quick way to get basic responses from your team. You can’t set a poll duration or be reminded when results are concluded. It’s also not a good idea if you want your poll responses to be anonymous, as anyone can see who reacted to the message with each emoji.

Getting More Advanced Polling Features Into Slack

Getting Slack polls with anonymous voting, set durations, and reminders when the poll has concluded can be a major asset to your remote team. Anonymous voting means that your team can speak their mind without fear of retribution, and automating the closing of the poll and getting a reminder when it’s finished can keep you from forgetting about the poll.

One of the best Slack integrations with polling features is CultureBot, which offers seamless Slack survey features that can achieve the same goals as a poll. With CultureBot’s in-Slack survey features, you can create a multiple choice question on the survey with different poll options. Then, you can publish the results of the poll afterward for the rest of the team to see without showing who voted for what.

Here’s how you can set up a poll with CultureBot in this way:

1. On the CultureBot home tab, click View/Add Forms & Campaigns.
2. Click Create New Form.
3. Start your new form and campaign from scratch. Click Create New Campaign.
4. Click the option to send out the form only once. You can also configure whether you want to send reminders to your team about the survey, who will receive it, and other options.
5. When the survey is over, you’ll be notified and can view the results on a dedicated page. You can then present the results of the poll manually to your team in any way you’d like!

Creating Effective Slack Polls

Creating a poll that serves your team effectively on Slack starts with a well-defined purpose. You need to understand why you’re creating the poll. Are you trying to gather feedback, pick a choice, or gauge interest about something?

After you’ve established your goal, you need to make sure the poll is simple and easy to understand. Don’t ask complex questions or list too many options. A great way to achieve this is to be specific. Ask clearly defined questions that have precise answers to avoid unclear results. A key aspect of this is to limit the number of options that respondents have to around 3-5.

Setting your poll’s deadline is critical. Make sure you specify how long the poll will last and when voting will close. Promote your poll so that everyone knows it’s happening, how to vote, and when the deadline will arrive. Make sure that you follow-up with your team to reveal the results of the poll, as well as start discussions about what they think about the results. Did the final answers surprise anyone? What do the answers mean?

On Anonymous Voting

Anonymous voting is a great choice when you want to encourage your team to answer honestly. This eliminates the fear of retribution or judgment. Anonymous polling is part of Louisiana State University’s survey best practices.

Why CultureBot Polls are Ideal

CultureBot polls using its survey features are the best option for your team compared to native Slack reaction polling because you get rich features like reminders and anonymous voting. You also have the freedom to present the results of the poll in any way you’d like. You might reveal the results through a simple message to your team, or you might consider creating a PowerPoint slide or infographic image to share the results. The choice is yours!

Great Uses for Slack Polls

There are a number of situations where a Slack poll can be useful for your team. Here are some ideas for how you can use Slack polls to enrich your team’s engagement and hear their feedback.

Team Decision Making

Sometimes your team needs to make a choice. Maybe you need to figure out what parts of a project to prioritize, or preferences on a meeting time. You can also use this to help you plan options for team engagement events, like what type of activity you want to take part in. This is a great opportunity to use CultureBot’s capabilities as a polling tool to gauge your team’s insights.

Gathering Feedback

While a poll can be a good heuristic for gauging employee feedback, CultureBot also offers more extended surveys and anonymous feedback options for your team that you can take advantage of to get insights about how your team is feeling about their work. As another example, you can use a poll to see what types of skill development workshops your team is interested in.

Brainstorming Sessions

Polls can be a great way to choose the best idea out of a brainstorming session. This can help you quickly identify the best options that came out of your meeting.

Fun and Engagement

Polls can also be just for fun! Ask your team some fun conversation starting questions and see how they respond! You might be pleasantly surprised at what your team thinks about a question!

CultureBot Enhances the Polling Experience

Whether you’re just using simple emoji polling or setting up more advanced surveying with CultureBot, setting up polls in Slack is easy. CultureBot makes anonymous polling through Slack possible, enabling you to get more accurate insights from your team — but that’s not all that CultureBot can do. CultureBot is a major asset to remote teams looking to increase their employee engagement and gain insights about their morale. With survey tools, games, shout outs, and more — all in Slack — CultureBot is a great choice for any remote team. Schedule a free 15 minute demo to see how CultureBot can benefit your team today!