6 – Creating a Poll

Video Transcript: #

Today’s episode on Polling Within Microsoft Teams is from Part 1 of our series, Teams Basics And Beyond.

Millennials right now make up about 48% of the US workforce. Could be higher or lower in your organization. You might be a millennial yourself. These are people between the ages of say 24 and 40.

And they look at the workplace differently than a lot of people did before them. Millennials expect to contribute to workplace decisions in ways that older generations did not. My generation, for example did what we were told. Of course that was slightly after World War 1, so you know, what do we know.

Polls Effective With Millennials #

Most of them see poles as an effective way of communicating up the chain.

They trust that senior management is going to look for trends there, they’re going to care about what the troops are saying and they see polls as an effective way of delivering feedback.

Millennials also report that a polling solution, an internal polling solution, helps them feel empowered, recognized as individuals. They say that it’s a good method of engagement.

This is important.

You do not want to lose the talented people in that age group from your organization because they just feel like they’re going through the motions or they just feel like they’re a fifth wheel in their organization.

What you really want is for them to feel empowered, engaged, and connected to the people around them and the people above them in the organization. And polling is a good way to do that.

I’m going to ask Wes Boggs, our vice president of technology, to show you how you can conduct polls right within Microsoft Teams and benefit from all that you can.

How To Create a Poll Demonstration #

Hello, it’s Wes again and I’m back now to talk to you about creating a poll inside of a channel inside of Microsoft Teams.

So I’m in my company picnic channel that we created in the last example and I’m going to go ahead and make a poll because it turns out I should probably find out what kind of food people might want to eat.

So I’m going to go into the channel and I click the ellipses down here.

I’m going to look for forms. If forms is not in the list of suggestions you can type it in here and we’ll go and find it for you and I’m going to click forms.

Now anytime you’re in a poll you have the ability to allow the respondents to select a single answer or move multiple answers, but people may like different kinds of food and they might have more than one choice.

So for this poll specifically I do want to include multiple answers.

And now I’m gonna click next. When I click next is gonna give me a preview, so I can see what this poll is going to look like. If I need to go back and make changes, I can click edit to go back.

I can then go in and change say instead of brownies, I actually we’re thinking about cookies and not brownies. I’ll click next.

And once I’m happy with my poll, I simply hit send. So this is gonna publish the poll into the channel. Just happening in the background here. And now every person who is a member of the team and has access to this channel will be able to submit their votes one time.

So I like hamburgers, I’m good with some fried chicken, and I am a potato salad guy, but I don’t need any cookies. So I’m gonna submit my vote. It’ll take it just a second and you’ll see down below that it tabulates our results down here. It tells me that there was one response, but it doesn’t tell me you who responded what, so that is kept anonymous.

Now, at the same time, if I want to make sure everyone in the channel sees this so I’m gonna use our @channel. And use that specific keyword of channel to notify everyone in the company picnic channel. And when I hit enter there that’s gonna go out and send over the pop-up Teams notification to anyone who has the Teams app whether it’s on the web or on their phone or however, they access teams.