Introduction to Polls

Contents

• Introduction
• Understanding Polls
• Editing a Poll
• General Settings
• Poll Question Settings
• Poll Access Settings
• Poll Audience Settings
• Poll Summary Settings
• Miscellaneous Admin Actions on a Poll

Introduction

Polls in Engage are a great way to gain employee opinions on a focused and company wide scale, without needing to launch a survey that contains a multitude of questions. 

Understanding Polls

All of the company’s polls will be listed on the polls listing page. To navigate to this page, click the circled checkmark icon on the left side of the UI:

This will take you here:

This page shows varying columns, with different information about any created polls:

1. Name of the poll - this is created when a user creates a poll.

2. Poll category - different categories are created by admin users, which can be assigned to polls. You'll want to select the theme that best fits the poll (e.g. Administration, Company Culture, etc.)

3. Frequency - how often the poll is sent to employees. A poll can be sent once, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, or every 6 months. 

In addition, the Status column of the poll shows if it is in a Draft/Active/Paused/Closed state. The following actions are available for each Poll type:

Draft

• Edit poll - Return to the poll creation screen to continue editing poll questions, occurrence, audience, before launching the Poll.
• Delete - Permanently delete the Draft poll.

Active

• See report - Access all of the analytics for the poll and it’s iteration.
• Edit poll - Return to the poll creation screen to continue editing poll questions, occurrence, audience, before launching the Poll.
• Delete - Permanently delete the In Progress poll. Note: this will delete all data collected for the poll. This is not recommended if there is data that has been collected.
• Close - Close the poll, preventing any additional responses from being collected.

Paused

• See report - Access all of the analytics for the poll and it’s iteration.
• Restart Recurring Poll - Access to re initiate the periodic polls which have been paused. By enabling the polls it will pick up it’s cycle and subsequent iteration will set for launch.
• Edit poll - Return to the poll creation screen to continue editing poll questions, occurrence, audience, before launching the Poll.
• Delete - Permanently delete the In Progress Poll. This will also delete all data collected for the Poll.
• Close active iteration - Close the Poll, preventing any additional responses from being collected.

Closed

• See report - Access all of the analytics for the Poll
• Edit poll - Return to the poll creation screen to continue editing poll questions, occurrence, audience, before launching the Poll.
• Delete - Permanently delete the Closed Poll. This will also delete all data collected for the Poll.

Further Notes:

For "One-Time" Poll - The status will be "Active" as long as the poll is still accepting votes. Once the end date for the poll is reached, it will changed to "Closed", and will votes will no longer be accepted.

For "Recurring" Poll - The status will be "Active" as long as future poll schedules are in place. Schedules are set up within the settings for the poll (more info on this later in the article). These recurring polls can be paused while in progress, and the status will show as "Paused". During this state, all future iterations of the polls will not launch until a user manually resumes the polls.

Iteration column - This will show "Active iteration closes on MM/DD/YYYY" if an active poll iteration is in progress, and it will show "No active iteration" if no active poll is in progress.

Key Dates - For a poll launching in the future, this column will show its "Launch Date". For an active poll, it will display the next iteration date along, with last iteration sent out date.

Editing a Poll

After creating a new poll, or resuming work on a Draft poll, you'll be taken to the following initial Settings step of the 5-paged setup process:

Various settings can be set here. They are:

General Settings

By defining a Poll Category, you can assign a particular theme to a poll. This will help your employees have a broad understanding of what the poll is about. Categories include "Feedback", "Teamwork & Ownership", "Workload", and more. 

Clicking the checkbox next to "Show results to voters" allows anyone that submits their answers to the poll, to see the corresponding results once the poll is closed. 

Publishing

On the following section, users can set the cadence for often the poll is sent out:

Polls can have a recurring cadence to help you, as a manager, to gain further insight from your employees throughout various points of the fiscal year. Additionally, the poll can be published at a future date/time, and can have a hard stop on accepting further responses depending on the number of days you set for that option. For a recurring poll, the number of days set for when it will stop accepting responses will reset once the next iteration (if a recurring cadence is set) is launched.

Communications

How your employees will hear about the poll can be set up through the communications settings. If you wish to have an email notification go out to your users, click the checkbox next to "Email". If you don't, then you can simply launch the poll at the end of the setup process, and announce the poll to your employees through your preferred comms. When setting up an email to go out to your users, you can set the email subject, text body, beekeeper message, and a cadence for how often these email notifications will go out to your users. You can also utilize merge tags in both the email and text body to implement a more personalized messaging. 

Poll Question Settings

Second step in launching the poll is the question setting. Here you get to create the question you would like to ask the employees along with the answer options. Further, you can enable the option to capture comments and also include them for sentiment analysis in reports and dashboard.

Polls Question Type: There are totally 5 types of poll question which can be created for polls. 

• Likert: The answer options in this are predefined and cannot be altered. The result of this type of question only will be considered for favorability scores.
• Multiple Choice: You can enter custom answer option in type of question.
• eNPS: The answer option for this type of question is standard rating scale from 0 to 10. Learn more about eNPS here question and its results here. 
• Yes/No: This question type will have the answer option fixed to “Yes” & “No”.
• Open: This type of question needs to be selected when you like to capture qualitative data (only comments)

Additionally, options at the bottom of the page allow you to enable the option to allow employees to submit comments for the question they're working on, to include comments in the sentiment analysis, as well as factoring the poll answers in favorability calculation (the latter only applies to the Likert question type). 

Poll Audience Settings

This page is where you can define who should receive the poll you're working on. There are various ways to set up the eligibility criteria for your poll audience:

1. Send Poll to Every User in Engage

By default, it would be selected to “Send to everyone eligible”, this will enable the poll to be triggered to every active employee loaded in Engage:

2. Targeted Audience

To set-up a predefined audience that will receive this poll, un-check the “Send to everyone eligible” checkbox. The screen will change to give you the option to add multiple criteria, which will determine the audience for your poll.

Using criteria, you can select a specific dimension like a targeted department or location or any other user dimensions and launch a poll only to those users:

Clicking "Add Criteria" allows you to add multiple criteria, and narrow down the eligibility of users to a specific group of people. The number of users/recipients that fit under your criteria will appear next to "Recipients defined by criteria", as shown in the screenshot above. Please note: the limit to how many additional criteria you can add is the total number of dimensions you've created in Engage.

3. Adding Recipients by Email

The last method for setting up your audience is by simply adding the users' emails. The text box in the screenshot below will show all the available users' emails in the system, and from there you can select however many users you want:

You can also type in the email addresses, separated by commas, and our system will locate those users (if they exist in the system).

Poll Access Settings

This page will allow you to define who can access the poll results. By default, the super-admin & role based report access personnel only will have access to the reports and dashboards for that survey.

By checking the checkbox for “Give ‘View’ access automatically to all auto-defined managers as well?”, all reporting managers of the employees within Engage will have view access to the poll results/reports. The number of eligible managers will appear next to that text once the checkbox is marked. 

Another method for setting up poll access, is by selecting individuals manually by adding their email ID, or selecting from the dropdown, in text field, and clicking the "Add" button:

As you select your employees, they'll appear underneath the text field with their email address show in the first column, and then the "Source" and "Type of Access" columns subsequently. "Source" will give the role assigned to that user, and "Type of Access" allows you to give the user all access or none to the poll reports. 

Poll Summary Settings

This final page is where you can review the entire setup of your poll, and make any last changes before launching the survey. It will give you an overview of everything you've inputted before this final step.

Please note: once the poll is launched, the number of changes you can make to the poll is limited.

Miscellaneous Admin Actions on a Poll

Depending on the cadence of a poll, certain admin actions are available when you hover your mouse cursor over a poll. 

• For "One Time" Poll 
• The status will be "Active" once launched.
• From "More" options, you will have only "Close Poll" along with edit & delete. 
• On closing the poll, the status will change to "Closed"
• You will not have any option to reopen a one-time poll.
• For "Recurring" poll
• "Pause Recurring Poll" - this option is for deactivating the future iteration while allowing to collect votes for current iteration 
• "Close active iteration" - this option is for closing active iteration, while keeping all future poll launch schedules intact.
• Further, "Close Active Iteration' option will come only when there is an in-progress iteration.
• For “Paused” poll
• “Restart recurring poll” - By enabling this, the paused poll’s status will change to “Active” and the future iteration date would be set for launch.