Employee poll tools help teams collect fast, honest feedback at work.
Regular employee polls are key for keeping your team well-being in check, spotting opportunities for productivity improvement, and identifying both negative and positive patterns when it comes to your team performance.
Yet many companies don’t run employee polls, instead resorting to vague, abstract reports and ocassional unstructured meetings.
In this article, we’ll cover 9 employee polling tools that will help you to quickly set up and regularly run employee polls and start gathering reliable and actionable data directly form your employees.
Tune in!
Geekbot Polls
If you want to run efficient employee polls and your team actively uses Slack for communication, look no further than Geekbot.
Aside from being the leading app for boosting team productivity through automated asynchronous standups, Geekbot just recently launched two extended modules: Geekbot Surveys and Geekbot Polls.
To launch a Geekbot poll, write /geekbot in a Slack channel where you want to run the poll followed by your question (Make sure Geekbot is invited to the channel) and press Enter. Alternatively, you can open Geekbot dashboard and use one of the dozens poll templates to build a poll tailored to your immediate needs or create your own poll from scratch!
Below is a glimpse into a library of templates you can use with Geekbot:
You can customize each of the templates. If you build a poll from scratch, you will decide who will participate in your poll, how often you want this poll to run (regularly, or one-off), and whether your poll is anonymous or not (yes, it’s possible to run anonymous polls in Slack!)
After employees fill in the poll, you will have access to analytics through Geekbot dashboard. All the numeric poll replies will be presented as intuitive dashboards like the one below:
Advantages of Geekbot Polls:
- Run employee polls directly in Slack
- Free polls for small teams (up to 10 members)
- Anonymous polls
- A library of templates
- Visualz dashboards for ongoing analysis
- Export poll results as CSV, PDF
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is an established survey and polling platform with several features coined for gathering detailed employee feedback.
In regards to employee polls, SurveyMonkey helps create multiple-question polls that support different types of responses (open-ended, rating scales, multiple choice, etc).
An interesting feature is question randomization and flippings, that allow for mixing up poll questions to reduce answering bias and, potentially, boost engagement.
SurveyMonkey polls can be made anonymous. Additionally, you can collect custom employee data (e.g. department, location) and then filter responses to understand how different groups are responding. This feature will be particularly useful for company-wide polls.
SurveyMonkey polls have implemented AI functionality such as recommendations for questions and answer options.
Poll features of SurveyMonkey:
- Custom polls
- Anonymous polls
- AI recommendations
- Filters
- API integration
- Roles and permissions
- Email invitations
ZohoSurvey
Zoho provides several modules for employee feedback polls, including Zoho People, Zoho Connect, and Zoho Survey.
Zoho allows for quick poll creation either using a library of templates or creating your own polls from scratch. It supports multiple questions, multiple choices, and branching when you can hide or show follow-up questions based on employee answers.
ZohoSurvey supports anonymous polls and lets participants see results immediately or only after they vote. A notable feature of Zoho is multilingual support – you can add translations for each question.
Some prominent Zoho polls features:
- Scheduled polls
- Mobile support
- Anonymous polls
- Integrations with Slack, Teams
- Custom branding
Lattice
Lattice supports both full-engagement surveys and shortened pulse surveys to track changes in employee morale and feedback over time.
Lattice comes with a template bank from where you can quickly pull existing questions; you can also add custom questions, of course.
Surveys can be made anonymous, and you can control the level of anonymity protection in your surveys from basic (only withhold responses for segments that do not meet the anonymity threshold) to strong protection (segments that don’t meet the anonymity threshold are combined with a larger segment to protect the anonymity of all participants).
Lattice supports benchmarking your data against global (e.g. Mercer data) so that you could compare results with industry or locale standards.
Prominent features of Lattice polls:
- Benchmarks
- Comments
- Filters and segments
- Tasks
Quantum Workplace
Quantum Workplace is an all-around employee engagement platform that is designed to collect feedback and act on it.
It allows for creating short polls and in-depth surveys. Feedback and polls can be tied to specific employee lifecycle stages like onboarding, project sprint, and so on. To speed things up, Quantum offers a library of templates with step-by-step instructions.
To understand poll responses better, you can use detailed real-time dashboards and reports, and also use filters to segment specific layers of your audience or poll aspects.
Interesting features of Quantum Workplace:
- Benchmarks
- Audience segmentation
- AI guidance
- Retention risk tools
- “My Engagement” report
Spidergap
Spidergap is a tool built for 360 feedback with features that cover assessment and personal development of employees by focusing on structured feedback cycles (peer, manager, self, etc.), personal development, leadership, and growth aspects of employees.
To quickstart evaluation, Spidergap offers a library of best-practice templates for various assessments such as leadership, behavior, competency, and more.
After feedback is collected, Spidergap generates feedback, reports (for individuals) designed for easy understanding and comparisons. Reports and evaluation carts can be branded, meaning include the logo of your company so that you could share them with stakeholders.
Prominent employee poll features of Spidergap:
- Multilingual support
- Anonymous polls
- Import from Excel and HR systems
- Paper feedback option
- No login distribution
Leapsome
Leapsome presents itself as an employee experience platform, covering many HR and workflow aspects of employees, including targeted polls, engagement and pulse surveys, feedback and review cycles, learning polls, and so on.
If you want to focus on its polling capabilities, they are standard: short poll or pulse surveys, anonymous feedback gathering, and suggestion boxes.
You can build polls using a library of templates or customize your own polls from scratch. An interesting feature is automated polls or surveys that are triggered by employee lifecycle events, for example, a certain number of days after hire or before their exit. The tool can be integrated with HR software for precise syncing.
You can control visibility of your polls, decide whether comments are anonymous or not, and set thresholds for when results are visible.
Interesting poll features of Leapsome:
- Instant feedback module
- Anonymous conversations in comments
- Question rotation
- Triggered polls
- Mobile and mulit-lingual support
Culture Amp
Culture Amp is an employee experience platform, and while many of its features are for full surveys and performance cycles, it also has quite a few tools to facilitate poll-style feedback.
You can create short, recurring polls to check in on specific topics (engagement, morale, well-being) and Culture Amp offers 40+ templates built for organizations in mind.
Culture Am supports “Unattributed Surveys” with responses not tied to employee identity and there are flexible statistical privacy rules to keep anonymity.
After collecting responses, Culture Amp offers AI features for comment summarization, theme detection, sentiment analysis, and highlights.
You can filter poll results by department, location, tenure, etc.
Notable polling features of Culture Amp:
- 360 pulse surveys and polls
- Anytime feedback
- AI summarization
- Filters and segments
- API and exports
Workleap
Workleap is a talent management platform with features for ongoing employee engagement, feedback and performance measurement tools.
Within Workleap you can run regular short or complex polls and choose appropriate frequency, follow up on trends revealed during pulse surveys, and set up custom questionnaires to highlight specific issues you want.
The polls and surveys can be tied to prominent employee experiences such as onboarding polls, department polls, and so on. As most tools on the list, Workleaps support anonymous polls and surveys, allows for different types of responses, and filters to segment them.
There is a continuous feedback feature when employees can send feedback in real-time and follow-up on polls.
Workleap AI features help to summarize open-text comments and give suggested actions. Admins can access detailed poll and survey reports in a dashboard.
Notable features of Workleap:
- Automated polls
- Segments
- AI suggestions
- Survey templates
- Trend tracking
15Five
15Five is a performance management and employee engagement platform with tools for check-ins, feedback, pulse questions, performance reviews, designed to support continuous feedback and engagement rather than just one-off surveys.
One of the interesting features of 15Five is that employees can explicitly request feedback from colleagues on specific topics; feedback can be positive, constructive, or both. Beyond requests, employees and managers can share feedback in real-time (outside formal cycles), through 15Five’s Feedback feature.
Another one would be one-time metric questions in check-ins; admins have an option to include a question just once (not recurring) for a particular group, which is useful for ad hoc polls.
Prominent polling features of 15Five:
- Polls dashboard
- Strong privacy confidentiality controls
- Pulse and check-in integration
- Outcomes dashboards
Ready to Start Your First Employee Poll?
We hope this article helped you spot an employee poll tool that your team will love.
If you’re ready to take a next step, and if Slack if your preferable team communication platform, Geekbot offers a free 30-day trial (and a free version for small teams) that you can put to test right within seconds.
Good luck!