How to do a poll in Slack?

The Slack app is intended for the collaboration of people, teams,or organizations, thus Slack has many features designed to facilitate and ease communication and organizing within its workspaces. While direct communication may often be the best means of organizing, due to the sheer number of people that need to give their input, it can be a daunting task even for the most experienced team leaders.

Sometimes anonymity may be a key component for workspace members to give honest answers and improve workspace relations, so direct messaging or public channels are not an option. One of the advantages of Slack is the ability to do polls, anonymous or not, thus allowing team leaders and organizers to keep their workspaces functional and effective, without the need to invest a lot of time to gather intragroup opinions. If Slack has been integrated into Focos, the same poll results will be gathered and productivity improved.

Popular ways of polling

Polling within Slack can be done in a multitude of ways. For more informal polls, people can simply respond to the posed question with Slack emojis, where each one can be clearly associated with a response, and in such a way workspace administrators can quickly and easily gauge the general opinion of the group.

One of the main advantages of Slack is the integration of many third-party apps, which are readily accessible in the Slack App Directory. Through the use of this tool workspace administrators can effortlessly select the app appropriate for their current need and implement it in the desired Slack channel. Some of the more popular polling apps are Polly and SimplePoll.

Polly

Polly is a popular app used for polls and surveys, as well as automated check-ins and social games. It is free to use and allows an unlimited number of one-off single question polls to be conducted. It also allows the creation of engagement surveys native to Slack, best used for acquiring more detailed information.

SimplePoll

SimplePoll is primarily intended for polling members of a workspace. Most of its features are free and it has multiple options for the user. Creating polls is simple and can be done right there in the desired channel through text commands. To create a Native Poll the user needs to type: “/poll “desired question” “answer 1” “answer 2”. For example, if the administrator wishes to find out which day would be best suited for a team meeting, they would type: ”/poll “On which day should the meeting be held??” “Thursday” “Friday”.

The respondents simply need to select the appropriate response and the poll is done. SimplePoll also allows the creation of anonymous polls. This leaves the responders anonymous and could reduce the bias of the received feedback. Similar to native polls, the administrator would type: “/poll “On which day should the meeting be held?” “Thursday” “Friday” anonymous”. Another, more informal, option is polling by custom emojis.

The pollster would use the same commands as before, with the difference being that the answers would be the commands for the emojis, such as “Pizza” or “Tacos”. An option available to paying users is the ability to limit the number of responses a person can give, by inserting the keyword limit and the desired number at the end of the poll, such as:”/poll “How many projects should be done in a week” “seven to ten” “ten or more” limit 1”.