Employee satisfaction plays a critical role in any business. Employees who are happy and satisfied are more productive and motivated, which can lead to a positive working environment. However, a recent report of 5,000 U.S households discovered that only 45% of employees were satisfied with their job, demonstrating a significant reduction in satisfaction levels over the past two decades.   

Consistent employee engagement surveys matter

Surveying employees regularly is an ideal way to find out if everyone on your team is satisfied in their position. Because at the end of the day, satisfied employees are engaged employees. And engaged employees are the employees that will help your business or brand reach the success that you dream of. Employee engagement surveys are also an opportunity for a company to implement strategies that will provide the foundation for a positive working environment that employees will thrive in.

Polly is bringing polling and surveys to the next level in Slack

Let's imagine that you're in your Slack team's engineering channel and everyone just got a poll asking for feedback on the most recent Sprint Retrospective meeting -- but none of the options the author has given you are on par with your opinions and there is no easy way to add comments, answer open-endedly, or add in your option without being booted off to the web interface.

Why small things like dialogs matter in user experience

When one of the few important attributes to Slack's large success can be boiled down to an exceptional, near-perfect execution of their product, the small pieces that make up the product matter a lot. It's not rare to have a pretty good, or even really good product, but that alone is no longer satisfactory for the ever-evolving needs users have towards products that they use every day. To give you an example -- marketers have an average of 65 apps in use per enterprise organization. With that many applications to manage their workflows and processes, there's less tolerance towards small user experience frustrations and higher expectations of meeting what the user needs. While there are a lot of other factors that play into Slack's overall success, a large and very important part of it is the design of the product.

At Polly, our mission is to change the culture of polls and surveys at the workplace. And we’re doing this by providing a solution that’s for everyone - engineering, sales, support, marketing, and others - not just HR.  Almost 2 years ago we launched our first version of Polly for Slack and set the company on a course to achieve this mission.

For the first time in the history of software, there is a dedicated distribution channel for developers to easily reach tens of millions of enterprise users. That is a big deal.

Enterprise Messaging Platform Wars

Google has been making a big push into the enterprise over the past year with Google Cloud, and they’re continuing down that trend with today’s announcement of their new Hangouts Chat. Hangouts Chat will be distributed alongside GSuite, and is meant to compete with collaborative enterprise messaging platforms like Slack and the upcoming Microsoft Teams.

Over the past 10 years, employee surveys have traditionally been run via a combination of email and the web. Employees typically get an email, need to click on a link, then complete the survey on the web.