Polling in business is important. It gives firms key insights into the thoughts of feelings of their employees and customers.

The results of these polls can inform many important processes. After all, even the government sources information this way, keen to establish consensus and provide useful data that others can use to guide and forecast their activities.

Though many things hinge upon a successful poll, not all firms conduct their own with an eye on quality. These efforts must be optimised to their utmost potential. So, what can be done here?

Keep reading for some of the key qualities of a successful poll.

Clear Purposes

Polls must be created with noble intent. A colleague or customer is doing you a service by giving you some of their time, and wasting it will lead to ignored, incomplete, or even bitterly filled-out polls.

Some polls provide useful insights, while others serve no useful purpose at all. Falling on the right side of that line isn’t always easy. Ensure that each question in your poll is of value to yourself and the participant. Keep things concise, and word things with perfect clarity where you can.

Remember, overlong polls can meander and test the patience of the participant. Even if they complete the thing, they may tune out or start plucking random answers out of thin air to finish up faster. You can always send out another poll on another occasion if you want to cover more ground.

It’s also important to establish a sense of neutrality. A question like ‘how did you find your experience with our business?’ is far more effective than ‘how great do you think our business is?’. Providing positive and negative multiple-choice answers creates fairness and balance too. Neutrality will enable you to capture more reliable data from responses and highlight the pure intentions of your poll.

Integrated Polls

Timing a poll isn’t always easy, especially internally. Your colleagues will be busy, and even if they have a break in their schedule, they may not always want to spend it answering questions.

Therefore, it’s best to get the poll out of the way during another activity. If you’re running a Zoom meeting or presenting a PowerPoint, these situations could be the perfect time to present your questions. That way, nothing’s lost, and the poll results can be evaluated and discussed in real time instead of at a later time.

You can integrate your live polls into Zoom and PowerPoint by working with Vevox, who are keen to help you. Their staff will bring you up to speed on how to get started, and you can start polling your colleagues and audience in no time. Your Zoom meetings and presentations will have a more interactive flair, too, improving engagement with each.

Multi-Channel Approaches

Why stop with Zoom and PowerPoint? There are so many ways to present a poll to the masses.

You could approach people on the street or at work conferences. Polls could also be sent as an attachment in an email, text message, or in social media feed. Context is key here. While it’s still best to only approach your colleagues at an opportune time, you should still cast a wide net in how you engage with others.

A multi-channel approach will help you more easily target certain demographics. Hashtags on social media, important email addresses, and PowerPoint presentations with specifically invited audience members all help you reach who you need to with more precision. Still, ensure you’re not sending multiple poll requests to the same people, as you shouldn’t want to risk bothering them.

Spaced Out Questions

Remember that annoying business interactions with people can be a matter for the police if you persist with them. In addition to not doubling up on your target audience, you should also avoid bombarding them with similar questions in the same poll.

Some polls have a very specific focus. Consequently, their questions can sometimes be strikingly similar, especially if you’re looking for nuanced answers. The same ‘what if…’ questions might be posed, or similar hypothetical scenarios mentioned. It’s understandable, even if too much repetition is a danger.

Spread those questions out in the poll if you can. That way, it will feel like your poll is more well-rounded and interesting.

Invited Specificity

The creators of a poll sometimes have a natural inclination to feature multiple-choice and box-ticking questions. They yield snappier answers and respect the participant’s time.

That said, it’s also a good idea to invite specificity occasionally. Requesting that the participant write their answer in a sentence or two rather than tick a box gives you more data to work with. If you don’t want to do this for every question, that’s valid – simply include an optional question at the end that invites personal comments to be made.

Written answers enable you to better assess the individuality of every response and place more value on any strikingly similar answers between participants. They can also reveal answers you may not have considered in any multiple-choice offering.