Slack has taken many an office by storm by providing a platform for team communication. A major part of being a team is employing the aspect of democracy and leaving questions to a vote. So many questions. Sometimes too many questions.
Standuply understands this aspect, and has created a polling feature that can be added to Slack. These polls can be a one-time question or a recurring event through a schedule you select.
Polls can help Agile teams with checking their mood, as well as estimating stories from a project backlog. This may also be a huge time saver when the dreaded, “Hey, team, where should we go to lunch?” question pops up.
So how does it work? First, you create a poll. To do that, you select a schedule to run a Slack poll for your team. This can work with any time zone or to each team member’s local time. From there, you select participants, then customize poll questions and answers.
And, like any good vote in a democracy, results can be posted anonymously. That way Stephanie can anonymously complain about everyone “always picking Olive Garden for lunch.” (joke below)
i offered to buy the admin team lunch today bc they worked their asses off all month & i asked if anyone had any requests & a lady who tells me my head is stuck up my ass once a week said
“literally anything but olive garden”
enjoy all u can eat olive garden stephanie we family pic.twitter.com/lTgTxwGgq3— jesse hall (@_jessehall_) September 1, 2018
From here, based on a schedule, Standuply will then reach out to selected people and will survey them right in Slack. Team members will provide their answers, and a survey bot aggregates them to serve overall charts with survey results.
After the survey, results can be delivered to a Slack channel, or via direct message, email, or Webhook. Regular surveys can be automated, or it can just be a one and done thing.
Other examples of ways to use polls is to get a gauge from a remote team about where they worked from on certain days. Run enough of these polls and one can pose it against individuals’ productivity to see if a certain location helps or hinders an employee’s output.
Standuply is also working on a version to have Slash commands work within polling.
