On a remote team, Slack is the office, and a lot of what an office does for free has to be asked for on purpose: who is around when, how people are doing, where to meet up once a year. Polls are how you ask without scheduling another call.
The common thread: everything has to work asynchronously. Give each poll a long enough window that the person nine hours ahead of you can answer it during their own working day.
Paste any of these into the message box in Slack.
Choice poll. Availability across time zones, open for two days so everyone gets a turn.
/poll "Weekly sync: which slots can you make? Times in UTC." "Mon 14:00-15:00" "Tue 08:00-09:00" "Wed 16:00-17:00" "Thu 13:00-14:00" close after 2 days
Premium: closing automatically
Close automatically: after 2 days
Scale from 1 to 5. A Friday mood check-in. Anonymous, so the answers are real.
/poll "How was your week?" "Rough" "Meh" "Fine" "Good" "Great" scale anonymous
Free
Anonymous
Choice poll. The dates poll, with a reminder before it closes.
/poll "Which week can you travel for the team meetup?" "First week of March" "Third week of April" "Second week of May" "None of these" close after 7 days remind 1 day before closing
Premium: closing automatically, reminders
Close automatically: after 7 daysReminder: 24 hours before closing
Short text with voting. A Monday icebreaker for the social channel.
/poll "Best thing you ate this weekend?" short text :joy:
Free
Write the options as time ranges in one named time zone, and say which one in the
question: "Times in UTC". Mixing local times is how a team meeting ends up at 3am for
someone. Leave multiple choice on (no limit), because you want every slot each person
can make, not their favourite.
Give it at least a full day so every time zone gets a working morning to answer. The meeting time template has more on choosing slots. For a recurring meeting, rerun the poll when the team changes shape, not every quarter by habit.
In an office you can see when someone is having a bad week. Remotely you cannot. A short anonymous mood check-in once a week gives a team lead the same signal. Use a five-point scale with labels that sound human ("Rough", "Meh", "Fine", "Good", "Great") rather than numbers.
Weekly works if you look at it. If nobody reads the result, monthly is better than weekly noise. Set it up as a recurring poll in Slack (Premium) so it posts itself.
The annual meetup is the one decision where everybody has a strong opinion and nobody
wants to own it. Split it into two polls. First, dates: multiple choice, so you can see
which week the most people can travel. Then location: limit 1 (Premium) between two or
three places you have already priced. Do not combine them; someone who can only make
March will vote for the place that is nice in March. The
offsite location template covers the second poll.
A Monday icebreaker poll in a social channel ("Best thing you ate this weekend") gives people a reason to talk who otherwise only meet in pull requests. Keep it light and optional. Never mandatory, never in a work channel.
When you need to find a slot that works for a group and calendars alone don't tell you who can really make it.
/poll "Which of these times can you make for quarterly planning next week?" "Mon 10:00 UK / 05:00 ET" "Tue 15:00 UK / 10:00 ET" "Wed 16:00 UK / 11:00 ET" "Thu 14:00 UK / 09:00 ET" "None of these work" close after 1 day remind 2 hours after posting
Premium: closing automatically, reminders
When you want an early, honest signal on how the team is feeling, before it shows up as missed deadlines or resignations.
/poll "How are you feeling this week?" "Rough" :rain_cloud: "Meh" :cloud: "Fine" :partly_sunny: "Good" :sunny: "Great" :rainbow: anonymous limit 1
Premium: vote limits
When you are planning a team offsite and want the team to weigh in on where and when before you book anything.
/poll "Where should we hold the spring offsite?" "Lisbon, 2.5h flight" "The Lake District, 3h train" "Berlin, 1.5h flight" "Stay local, rent a venue" ranked close after 3 days
Premium: closing automatically
When a channel is all work and no chatter, a new team is forming, or remote teammates need an easy way to get to know each other.
/poll "Coffee, tea, or neither?" "Coffee" :coffee: "Tea" :tea: "Neither" :droplet:
Free
When calendars are full of meetings and people say they can't get focused work done, and you want the team to choose and own a meeting-free day.
/poll "Which day should be our no-meeting day?" "Tuesday" "Wednesday" "Thursday" close after 2 days
Premium: closing automatically
At least 24 hours if the team spans more than a few time zones, so everyone gets a working day. Decisions that need travel or budget can take a week, with a reminder.
Put every option in one time zone and name it in the question. Ask people to convert, rather than having the poll author convert for everyone.
You can repost the poll at the bottom of the channel with remind ... before closing
or remind ... after posting (Premium). It reposts for the whole channel. On Premium you
can also send a direct-message reminder from the poll in Slack, only to the people in the
channel who haven't answered yet.
When you need to find a slot that works for a group and calendars alone don't tell you who can really make it.
When you want an early, honest signal on how the team is feeling, before it shows up as missed deadlines or resignations.
A poll that never closes never quite decides anything: votes trickle in, the result shifts, and nobody knows when to act. An automatic close fixes the deadline up front. In Simple Poll you add close after and a duration, and the poll closes on its own. Automatic closing is a Premium feature; anyone can close their own poll by hand.
A recurring poll posts itself on a schedule you set, such as every Monday at 10am. You write it once and Simple Poll reposts it, so your weekly pulse or standup check-in never depends on someone remembering. Recurring polls are a Premium feature.
A team lead's job is mostly two things: deciding, and finding out what you do not know. Both get easier with a handful of well-timed polls. The point is not to vote on everything. It is to stop spending a meeting on questions a poll answers in an hour, and to hear the things your team would not say to your face.
Simple Poll is the #1 polls and surveys app for Slack. 945,000+ teams use it. Free to start: type /poll and your first poll is live.