Using Company Polls
HR Partner's Polls feature is a great way to check in with your employees and gain quick insight into how they feel about a particular topic or collect ideas for the next team-building activity. Polls provide a straightforward and fast way to collect their opinions. It's important to note that while the votes are tallied, the specific choices made by individuals remain confidential.
Creating a Poll
You first need to click on the 'News/Poll' option on the far left-hand menu in HR Partner. This will show you a list of news articles and polls already in the system.
To add a new Poll, click on the green "+ Add A New" button on the top right, and select the Poll option. On the next page, you'll go through the poll's setup.
| Category | You set up different categories of News (e.g General, Urgent etc.) and you can allocate a poll to any of these categories. |
| Description | This is a a short explanation of the poll that tells your employees more about what they're voting about. |
| Publish On | This is the date that you want the poll published on. You can 'pre-load' polls in the system and then set the date at which they will appear on the employees' portals. |
| Publish Until | This is the date that the poll will be automatically removed (not shown) to your employees. You can leave this field blank to make the poll stay up indefinitely, or else put an end date in for polls with a designated lifespan. |
| Poll Options | These are the options your employees will be able to vote on. |
| Active | You can nominate whether this poll is active, i.e. will be shown on the employee portal. There may be occasions where you need to remove a poll for a short time - instead of deleting it, you can simply make it 'not active'. |
| Highlight Poll | This option allows the poll to be visible to your employees from their ESS Portal Dashboard on the Highlighted News & Polls widget:
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| Allow employees to post comments on this poll | You can opt to allow your employees to enter comments on a poll, or not. It is entirely up to you as to how much discussion you wish to encourage. |
| Allow employees to select more than one option at a time on this poll | This allows your employees to select multiple poll options to vote for. If you want your employees to be limited to voting for only one poll option, ensure this is unticked. |
| Department Access Allowed | This allows you to restrict the poll to those only within specific departments. Leave this blank to give access to ALL departments. |
| Broadcast | You can tick this box to send a broadcast email to all your employees alerting them that there is a new company poll that has been published on their portals. Do this for any urgent items that you need to gather their opinions for. |
A poll has most of the same pieces of information as a new article, except that it has no 'Contents' section, instead, it has an area where you can add the individual poll selections or options.
You can add as many options as you want on each poll, but we suggest keeping it to 10 or fewer options to keep it manageable. You can even drag and drop the poll options to sort them into the order you want.
Warning
You CANNOT change a poll option description once you save the poll. The only thing you can do is delete the option later and add another one. But bear in mind if you delete a poll option, you will lose all the votes for that option that your employees have already entered.
Note
There is an option in the polls to allow employees to select more than one option. By default, they can only vote for ONE option, but there may be circumstances where you might want them to select more than one option.