9 Reasons to Use Live Polls To Drive Employee Engagement

We all know how valuable the insights and feedback from our team members is. While surveys and questionnaires can deliver us some data, there’s a better tool to help us understand what people really think right now — live polls. 

Let’s take a look at what live polls are, what you could use them for, and all the reasons why they’re ideal for driving employee engagement. 

What is a live poll?

A live poll is exactly what it sounds like — a poll, or set of questions, that your audience answers in real-time. 

Live polls can take place in different ways. You can host live polls in: 

• Video conferencing tools — like Zoom and Microsoft Teams
• Online messaging apps — like Slack
• Virtual event and webinar tools — like Hubilo

Different teams use live polls in different ways. They might become your go-to way to understand everyone’s preferred lunch option or help you make key business decisions based on people’s sentiments. 

Here are just a handful of great use cases for live polls:

• 😊 Share an emoji to celebrate someone’s achievement
• 🥡 Choose a lunch order option for the next virtual event
• ❔ Test your team’s knowledge on something you’ve just learned about
• 🚗 Learn more about your team members’ interests and preferences
• 👍 Take a pulse on how your team feels about their week
• 💸 Find out which perks and incentives to prioritize
• 🧍 Run a short employee engagement survey in real-time
• ➡️ Understand what your team members want you to focus on next
• 🎥 Host a fun trivia quiz for your team

Live polls are a great way to drive engagement from your team members. Use them at team meetings, town hall meetings, virtual retreats, hybrid meetings, virtual events, and in Slack channels to get real-time insights from the people around you.

9 ways that live polls can improve employee experiences

While employee engagement surveys can be useful, there’s nothing like a live poll for giving you instant feedback on an idea, question, or topic. They’re perfect for taking a pulse on what matters most to your team members, so you can act fast and make things happen. 

Not sure how best to use live polls? Here are some of our favorite ways to use live polls to increase employee engagement and create better experiences for your teams. 

1. Discover what’s on people’s minds

There’s no better way to capture someone’s current mood or sentiments than with a live poll. Knowing what’s on someone’s mind or how they feel about their work or environment can help you create more positive employee experiences. 

Use our remote insights pulse template to understand exactly what your team members are thinking, straight from the source. These super quick, multiple-choice polls give you an easy way to improve remote employee engagement and get valuable data, as you can monitor changes in sentiments over time.

2. Get feedback on key meeting topics in real-time

Getting an audience response during a meeting isn’t always easy. People don’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation, might feel nervous about speaking up, or simply want to agree or disagree with a point. With live polls, you can give your team members a way to share their thoughts without taking the meeting off course. 

Set a live poll to run in Slack or Teams during your next meeting to gather people’s opinions and feedback. Take advantage of our other meeting management tools to help you make your meetings even more effective. Schedule a meeting feedback polly for the end of the meeting to collect any thoughts that weren’t shared in real-time. 

3. Amplify diverse voices

Many of us are working towards greater diversity and inclusion at work, and the tools and way you communicate with your team members should follow the same path. Live polls empower everyone to contribute comfortably.

A live polling tool that allows anonymous submissions is a great way to build inclusivity into remote meetings. Polly’s poll feature empowers your team members so everyone can speak up and share their thoughts.

4. Source ideas and suggestions in the moment

Live polls are an excellent tool to help you drive instant engagement. Get ideas, suggestions, and inspiration from your team members through a series of multiple-choice questions and open text fields.

Look for a live poll tool that has integrations for the messaging apps you use (like Polly), so you can get insights from your team without leaving Slack. Running your surveys and polls in Slack is the way forward, with our customers seeing a 40% increase in engagement compared to traditional employee engagement surveys. 

5. Spark conversations based on fun live poll answers

While live polls are great for helping you make business decisions and take a pulse on team happiness, they’re also useful for those more relaxed moments too. Use fun live polls as a tool to help drive audience engagement and connections with other team members.

Make room in your schedule for opportunities for people to gather and enjoy a themed hot take or icebreaker together. Share the answers live on the screen (anonymous if you like) and encourage conversations based on the results. It’s a great way to get talking about someone’s favorite music genre, vacation destination, or bucket list goals. 

6. Give instant positive feedback to others

Many of us thrive on positive feedback, and live polls give you a simple tool to make that happen. Set up a simple emoji-based polly and use it to shower a coworker or team with praise, appreciation, and congratulations. 

Create your own employee awards ceremony, and invite people to join you to celebrate your coworkers. Set up a live poll with congratulatory messages as possible answers, then share the results live on the screen as a fun way to congratulate your award winners. You can also use live polls for this more casually throughout the week as a way to show appreciation for great work. 

7. Get more insights than traditional surveys

Traditional surveys aren’t the easiest to work with. The different question types can be overwhelming for your coworkers, and they’re hard to complete on mobile devices. Live polls and native Slack and Microsoft Teams surveys give you a better, more intuitive way to collect feedback and insights. 

Slack and Teams surveys aren’t just easier to use and more engaging, they drive results too. Our customers have found that switching from traditional surveys to Slack surveys generated 10x the response rate. Use a mix of live polls and longer employee engagement pollys in Slack to bring you even more valuable data. 

8. Share poll results in real-time

Live polls don’t just get you immediate feedback, they can be used to share instant results too. Display a word cloud, leaderboard, or chart of live results as they come in or shortly after the poll has finished to make your team members feel more involved in the process. 

Take full advantage of our real-time visualization tools to give your team members an immediate look at the results. Share the live poll results right into the channel where you hosted the poll so people can see what’s happening. This is a great way to boost engagement, especially if you want to bring people along with you on a journey of change or innovation. 

9. Move faster with instant decision-making

Running traditional surveys takes valuable time, and interpreting data takes even longer. This means there’s a disconnect between the information you get and the impact you can make. Switch to live polls to know what is or isn’t working now, and you can instantly make decisions to reach your goals faster.

Polly’s live polls and real-time reporting features are ideal for team leaders and internal decision-making. Host live polls to monitor progress, identify roadblocks, and get feedback on your plans so you can move and iterate at speed. No more waiting weeks for survey results — instead you can swiftly take action and make positive changes. 

10. Create a culture of candor

Live polls can be a really effective way of proactively capturing feedback, so problems get dealt with swiftly. The immediate response gives you a powerful signal on what’s working, what isn’t, and what your employees value the most.

With Polly’s open forum feature, you can create a new way to actively listen to concerns and ideas from your team members. Empower people to ask questions and amplify diverse voices in a space that’s dedicated to open feedback. 

Use live polls to create a more engaging employee experience

Live polls are a powerful way to get instant feedback and real results that you can use to quickly drive change in your business. Ask the right questions, get valuable insights, and share results with your team members — all without leaving Slack or Teams. 

Explore a better way to communicate with your teams — try Polly for free and see how we can help you use instant feedback to create a more engaging employee experience.

Try Polly for free to instantly improve your employee engagement.