Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – P is for…

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – P is for…

There’s SO MUCH going on in Microsoft Teams as a product, how do you even start to talk about it?! In this blog series I’m going to attempt to work my way through the letters of the alphabet, talking about as many features as I can think of in turn.

If you’re new to Teams, hopefully this helps you find your way around. If you’re not new to Teams, maybe you’ll still get some new ideas. Here we go…

P is for Polls

Did you know that you can run polls really easily in Microsoft Teams meetings?

Yes, I already knew that.
No, I didn’t know that – this idea has blown my mind and you need to tell me more.

(See what I did there…)

If you answered b – here’s all the info for you!

Here are some reasons why you might want to poll people during a meeting:

To find out your team’s preferred cuisine for the next team meal
On a company update you might want to poll people to see how they’re feeling about the new HR system that you’ve had a whole internal comms campaign about (or whether they’ve missed all the comms completely… it happens)
To find out what types of subject categories people would like to know about on your next meeting

I bet you can think of loads more.

Here’s how you actually run a poll in a Teams meeting. (You need to be a meeting organiser or presenter to do this.)

When you’re in the meeting, choose the Apps option and search for poll:

Then you’ll find Polls:

Press Add.

You’ll get a quick overview and you’ll need to hit Save:

Then you’ll see Polls appear at the side of your meeting window:

There are some handy suggestions for you to get started if you need a bit of inspo. (You can turn those off by clicking on the light bulb)

Clicking on the clock button will show you polls you’ve created in the past 90 days in case you’d like to reuse one, which is pretty handy.

If you choose New poll, you can create polls of all different kinds:

Multiple choice – this would be good for that ‘Where shall we go for our next team dinner?’ scenario I mentioned above.
Word cloud – this works like a normal word cloud, pretty good for gauging sentiment (if you can encourage poll takers to be honest!)
Ranking – This would let people rank things in order of importance to them, eg “What features are most important to you in a company intranet?”
Quiz – This tests people’s knowledge, so you can see if they’ve taken in the training you’ve just delivered.
Rating – this lets people show you how much (if at all) they love your ideas!

Once you’ve chosen the best type of poll that suits your purpose, Polls walks you through the rest of the poll creation, and lets you choose whether to save it as a draft for later in the meeting, or launch it straight away:

There’s also the option at the bottom to launch an ‘instant’ poll:

Depending on the option you choose, this immediately flashes up the 2 choices for people in the meeting to choose between. In this scenario someone in the meeting would ask the question verbally and get a quick-fire reaction from people. This is what people will see in front of them when you launch it: