How to create an anonymous poll in Slack

Nobody sees who voted for what: not the channel, and not you as the creator. Each option shows how many votes it has, with a check mark or emoji per vote instead of a name. The same holds for free-text answers on a short text poll and for questions on a q&a poll: the words show, the author doesn't.

Because you can't see voters, you also can't see who hasn't answered. Use a reminder (Premium) to bring the poll back to the bottom of the channel instead.

Make it anonymous whenever an honest answer could cost someone something: how a project is going, how a manager is doing, workload, morale, whether a meeting is worth keeping. Named votes on those questions mostly measure what people think you want to hear.

Leave it named when you need to act on individual answers: who is coming to dinner, who can cover on-call, which time works for each attendee. An anonymous lunch poll gives you a headcount you can't use.

Say it in the question or the description: "Anonymous. Nobody, including me, sees who voted." People who have seen named polls before will assume this one is named too unless told.

Small teams need extra care. In a channel of four, a lone "Overloaded" vote is easy to attribute even when it's anonymous. Wait until most people have voted before you share the results, and talk about patterns, never about the one outlier.

For more than one question, put anonymous in the header of a survey (Premium) and it applies to every question. Combine it with hide results when you don't want early answers to sway later ones. The team mood check-in and weekly pulse templates are built this way.