Polling and survey glossary

An AMA, short for "ask me anything", is a session where one person or a panel answers open questions from a group, usually with the most popular questions answered first.

An anonymous poll records votes without showing who cast them: everyone sees the totals, and nobody can see which person picked which answer. In Simple Poll that includes the person who created the poll.

Approval voting lets each voter pick every option they find acceptable, as many as they like. The option with the most approvals wins.

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) asks employees how likely they are to recommend their company as a place to work, on a scale from 0 to 10. The score is the percentage of promoters (9 or 10) minus the percentage of detractors (0 to 6), so it runs from -100 to +100.

The Gallup Q12 is Gallup's employee engagement survey: twelve statements that employees rate on a five-point agreement scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The items are Gallup's proprietary material.

A Likert scale measures attitudes by asking people how much they agree with a set of statements, usually on five points from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree". Strictly, one statement is a Likert item, and the scale is several items scored together.

A multiple-choice poll gives voters a fixed list of options to choose from. Depending on the settings, each person can pick one option or several.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a loyalty metric built on one question: how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague, answered from 0 to 10. NPS is the percentage of promoters (9 or 10) minus the percentage of detractors (0 to 6), so it runs from -100 to +100.

An open-ended question lets people answer in their own words instead of choosing from a list. It surfaces things you didn't think to ask about, at the cost of answers you have to read and group yourself.

Plurality voting gives each voter one vote, and the option with the most votes wins, even if it has less than half of them. In single-winner elections it is also called first-past-the-post.

Psychological safety is "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking", as Amy Edmondson defined it in 1999. In practice: people can ask, disagree, admit mistakes and raise problems without fear of embarrassment or punishment.

A pulse survey is a short survey, usually one to five questions, sent to the same group on a regular schedule so you can see how things change over time. Common topics are workload, morale and engagement.

A quorum is the minimum number of members who must take part, by attending a meeting or by voting, for a group's decision to count. Under Robert's Rules of Order, the default is a majority of the entire membership unless the group's own rules set another number.

Ranked-choice voting asks each voter to put the options in order of preference instead of picking just one. The term usually means instant-runoff counting: the last-placed option is eliminated round by round until one option has a majority.

Response rate is the share of people you asked who actually answered: the number of respondents divided by the number of people invited, times 100.

A retrospective is a meeting at the end of a piece of work where the team looks at how it worked, not what it built, and picks changes to try next time. In Scrum it closes every sprint.

A single-choice poll lets each voter pick exactly one option. The result shows how a group splits when everyone has to commit to a single answer.

A slash command is a message that starts with a forward slash, like `/poll`, and runs an app or a built-in Slack action instead of posting text to the channel.

A straw poll is an informal, non-binding vote that shows which way a group is leaning before a real decision is made.

Survey fatigue is when people are asked for feedback so often, or at such length, that they stop answering or start answering carelessly.