Polly for HR Professionals

Remote work was always coming, but 2020 was its tipping point. With that continental shift came a need for new approaches to supporting employees and getting work done together.

As an HR professional, you already know this.

You’ve probably been thinking about a remote work future long before it came to be—and you’re painfully aware that the systems most organizations have in place aren’t well prepared for it, even now.

Work changed forever, and it changed whether your team is fully remote, partially remote, or co-located. Those who stay ahead of that change will have an easier time attracting, engaging, and retaining employees.

Why HR teams and employees love Polly

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of tools dedicated to helping HR professionals support their team. Unfortunately, many of those tools rely on strategies developed in a time where face-to-face communication was still common and electronic means were supplementary to that exchange.

Slack and Microsoft Teams lay a solid foundation for modern organizations to communicate and collaborate. Polly builds from that foundation to help bring your current work processes up to speed and to open the door to new possibilities.

Let’s take a quick look at how that works, and why so many HR teams choose Polly to capture their most vital insights.

Reach your team where they work

You need to capture insights about your team to better serve them, but getting those insights is a challenge. Email is interruptive. External links are interruptive. Emails with external links are doubly disruptive.

None of these options produce quick results.

Polly breaks that cycle by meeting your team right where they work, and in the context of their work. That laser focus means less distractions, greater participation, and higher-quality data captured in a matter of seconds instead of weeks.

Ask questions in context

Context is everything, and switching context is expensive.

Want better data on work processes? Make gathering that data integral to the process rather than external to it. You get more accurate answers faster, and your team spends less of their mental bandwidth swathing tasks or trains of thought. Everybody wins.

In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at some easy ways you can ask questions in context, and how other teams are using this strategy to build peerless employee experiences.

Spark instant engagement

The less friction you add to a process, the more likely someone is to complete it right away. That’s the simple magic behind instant engagement.

Surveys are an effective tool for gathering first-party data from your team, but as anyone who has sent one before knows, it can be difficult to get responses back in time (or at all).

It’s common for Polly users to see 7-10x response rates compared to traditional methods like forms and surveys, and those responses often come in much more quickly.

Take the Keap team’s experience, for example. By replacing their employee sentiment survey with a quick, contextual Polly, they got the same amount of responses they’d normally receive over multiple weeks in a single day.

Empower diverse voices

Every voice on your team is essential, but some are heard more often than others. With fine-tunable anonymity controls, Polly gives everyone on your team a safe venue to share and receive the feedback you need to provide support and foster growth.

Share results, learn, and grow together

Gathering good data instantly is the first step toward building greater organizational efficiency and a stronger employee experience. The second step is to share it with the people who can use it most effectively.

Data alone is powerless to enact change. Sharing the data you capture with the right people at the right time is just as important as gathering it.

Polly makes it easy to share results instantly with any audience, whether it’s organization-wide, with the respondents themselves, with a select group of stakeholders, or only among admins.

How to improve every stage of the employee journey with Polly

There are two immediate ways Polly can help you and your team achieve your goals of building a peerless employee experience:

• Improving your current processes
• Opening the door for new processes.

With that in mind, we’re going to take the next section to follow the employee journey and walk through some of the most common use cases HR teams love Polly for.

If you’ve struggled to gain traction with some of these practices before, consider implementing (or re-implementing) some in Polly’s quick, contextual format and see if the results improve.

Interview loop feedback

Capturing, aggregating, and sharing interview feedback with stakeholders quickly can have a meaningful impact on both the candidate experience, as well as the experience of interviewers.

Doing this immediately after the interview can help provide fresher, more meaningful insights from individual interviewers. Aggregating and sharing those insights makes it much easier to reach team consensus quickly.

Speeding up the deliberation process empowers your hiring team to give candidates feedback and move them through the hiring process more quickly, instead of waiting days or weeks for answers.

Standardizing the feedback collection process for every interviewee also eliminates groupthink bias when collecting candid feedback in person or through an email thread.

Bringing your interview loop into Polly is simple, whether you’re in Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Use Polly for interview loops in Microsoft Teams:

• Click on the Polly tab in Microsoft Teams
• Click "+Create"
• Click "Template"
• Click "Interview Candidate Feedback"
  

To use Polly for interview loops in Slack, click the button below:

Candidate experience feedback

Candidate experience will always be a central theme in an effective recruitment effort. If a candidate has a great experience, they’re more likely to join your team with excitement. If a candidate has a poor experience, that memory may stick even if they accept the position.

Word travels quickly, and it’s common for candidates to share their experience (good or bad) with others in their network. This was true even before tools like Glassdoor put a spotlight on the candidate experience.

One of the best ways to gauge and improve your organization’s candidate experience is simply to ask new hires which parts of the candidate experience the found positive, and which areas could benefit from some additional effort.

Keep these questions objective and focused on specific elements you have control over changing. For example:

• How well does your role match the description we posted?
• Did you feel like you had enough, too little, or too much time to complete the exercise?
• Did you get enough time to talk to everyone?
• Rate your experience as a candidate overall

Employee Onboarding

Whether you’re co-located or fully remote, employee onboarding is one of the most important aspects of the hiring process. It can rapidly accelerate a new team member’s ramping period, or leave them searching for answers.

As many teams transition to a partially or fully remote structure, onboarding strategies shifted from face-to-face office tours to video chats and direct messages. Without a way to structure and track those interactions though, it’s easy for some to get missed.

Polly makes it easy to ensure new employees have an engaging onboarding experience and nobody slips through the cracks by bringing the onboarding experience directly into Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Send a polly to new employees on their first week, their first 30 days, their first 60 days, and their first 90 days to check in on key factors like:

• How often have you met one-on-one with your manager?
• My manager has made me feel welcome.
• Have you been properly introduced to other staff?
• I have a good understanding of my role within the organization.
• I am able to be productive and effective in my position.

Employee Engagement

Engagement impacts everything from productivity, absenteeism, and workplace safety to retention and satisfaction. Although employee engagement is such a crucial success factor, many organizations struggle to improve it.

Measuring engagement is essential for any organization working to improve it, and two keys to effective measurement strategies are speed and context.

• How relevant are the themes?
• How quickly can employees answer?
• How quickly can you get the results back and take action?

Polly makes it easy to integrate engagement assessments into daily work so that you don’t need to rely exclusively on a quarterly or annual engagement survey. A lot can happen, even in the space of a week or month that won’t likely be captured in an annual survey.

Engagement is multi-faceted, but some common themes organizations use to measure engagement are:

• I believe in my company's mission.
• I receive valuable feedback on my work that helps me improve.
• My accomplishments are recognized by others.
• I know what is expected of me at work.
• I am enthusiastic about the work that I do for my team and am enabled to do my best work.

If you’re not ready to let go of your quarterly or annual survey right now, start by bringing an element of your larger engagement surveys into Slack or Teams with Polly. Gauge your team’s response and add from there.

Use Polly for interview loops in Microsoft Teams:

• Click on the Polly tab in Microsoft Teams
• Click "+Create"
• Click "Template"
• Click "Quarterly Employee Engagement Survey"

Measure engagement with Polly in Slack:

Open, anonymous ad-hock feedback (the suggestion box)

Suggestion boxes never go out of style. They’re a simple, yet powerful way to gather anonymous (and therefore candid) feedback you can use to improve nearly any process at work.

For some categories (like seasonal events), you can post a periodic suggestion box. It can also be helpful to keep an ongoing suggestion box where employees can post ideas and feedback on any topic anytime.

Using Polly as an anonymous suggestion box makes it easy to track and collate feedback, while easily routing it through Polly’s sharing feature to the people who can take action.

Add a suggestion box to Microsoft Teams:

• Click on the Polly tab in Microsoft Teams
• Click "+Create"
• Click "Template"
• Click "Suggestion Box"

Add a suggestion box to your Slack workspace

Employee happiness pulse

Even if you’re able to ask every employee face-to-face whether or not they’re happy at work, you still might not get as candid an answer as you might hope for, and that answer is likely to change over time.

Having a light, frequent pulse gives you a clear snapshot of your employee happiness at any given time, making it easy to track changes and better understand how those changes correlate with other events.

It’s a much smaller ask of your team than a long, multi-question survey that might take half an hour or longer to complete, but it provides some crucial information you can use to inform initiatives.

A happiness pulse is simple to kick off with Polly. You can follow the instructions below, or customize it to fit your needs.

Run an employee pulse in Microsoft Teams

• Click on the Polly tab in Microsoft Teams
• Click "+Create"
• Click "Template"
• Click "Team Happiness Pulse"

Run an employee pulse in Slack

Benefits feedback

Competitive pay is table stakes for top talent. Keeping great employees means giving the room and the environment they need to grow. As a distributed global team, we’ve revisited our own benefits multiple times to make sure we’re giving everyone on the team what they need to do the best work of their career.

The easiest way to know if the environment you’re providing is the one they need is simply to ask, and ask often—so we do.

If you want to know how well your benefits package is aligned with your own team’s goals, you can use polly to check in, both on the current package, as well as test the waters on new ideas to find out if they’re popular.

Benefits feedback for Microsoft Teams

• Click on the Polly tab in Microsoft Teams
• Click "+Create"
• Click "Template"
• Click "Benefits Feedback"

Benefits feedback for Slack

Remote employee check-ins

Remote work is more prevalent now than ever before, but the majority of organizations are still learning what works and what doesn’t work on the fly. That’s ok, and it’s natural. The problems come when you don’t learn, or don’t act on what you’ve learned.

Employees could be happier than ever working from home, or they could be facing monumental challenges just to get their basic work done. This is why it’s absolutely crucial to have a line of communication open.

Don’t expect employees to proactively volunteer that information. They may feel as though they don’t want to complain, or can put up with an inconvenience without knowing that you’re trying your hardest to root out those pain points and relieve them.
To get the information you need, it’s most helpful to ask, and ask in a format that shows you’re already working to address the issues—you just need their help finding them.

A few key questions we often ask our team range from simple and high-level to specific. It’s also helpful to ask a quantitative question, but make room for a qualitative response.

For example:

• How’s your week going so far?
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    
    • anything else to add?
• How would you rate the connection you feel with your coworkers lately?
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    
    • anything else to add?
• Do you have everything you need to get your job done remotely?
  • Definitely, mostly, not really, not at all.
  • anything else to add?

These are just a few common themes you can cover to better understand and improve your team’s remote experience. You can start with these or add your own to a scheduled Polly in Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Run an employee pulse in Microsoft Teams

• Click on the Polly tab in Microsoft Teams
• Click "+Create"
• Click "Template"
• Click "Remote Insights Pulse"

Run an employee pulse in Slack

’Stay’ interviews

You can learn a lot about employee experience in your organization through exit interviews. Unfortunately, the data you capture during an exit interview comes at a great cost.

So how do you gain similar insights without losing a valuable member of your team? Conduct mini ‘Stay’ interviews on a regular basis.

The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) has a great list of ‘stay’ interview questions you could use Polly to deliver in context in Slack or Microsoft Teams. A few examples are:

• What talents are not being used in your current role?
• What would you like to learn here?
• What motivates (or demotivates) you?
• What can I do to best support you?
• What can I do more of or less of as your manager?
• What might tempt you to leave?

Bringing a few of these to direct reports at a time can help leaders on your team make sure they’re providing the type of work environment employees need to meet and exceed their personal and professional goals.

Bringing your own unique practices into Polly

While Polly is a great replacement for the types of employee polls and surveys HR teams often run, there are many other ways HR teams can use Polly to capture and share feedback.

As Draftkings’ Laura Zhang mentions, “Set aside the notion of polls or surveys, and brainstorm ways that immediate feedback would be helpful."

If you need help transforming traditional HR processes that aren’t listed here into Polly, check in with our customer support team. They’re experts in bringing more speed and engagement to the human side of business.

In conclusion

These are just a few of the HR processes you can improve with Polly, but it’s just the beginning. It’s the first step toward building instant engagement into your HR tech stack, and the employee experience.