Public vs Anonymous Polls. How to understand your team?

1. Anonymous poll

The "anonymous poll" checkbox turns the survey into a team-wide event that immediately appears on the home page. The survey automatically closes when the deadline set by the author expires.

When to use:

• For evaluating decisions. To understand how the team actually perceives key decisions or management actions. For example: "How much do you agree with the recent decision to change project priorities?"
• For testing initiatives. Before launching a new idea, to understand if there's majority support, not just polite silence.
• For discovering hidden blockers. For example, a survey "What prevents you from completing tasks on time?" with suggested answers will help identify the most common causes.

When are anonymous surveys harmful?

• When you're not ready to change anything. If the team speaks honestly and nothing happens after the survey, trust will burn faster than if there had been no survey at all.
• In small teams. When you're 5-7 people, it's difficult to be anonymous, and the survey can create unnecessary tension.

2. Public poll

The second scenario is creating a survey as a separate topic.

What's the difference?

You choose the audience yourself, it can be either a specific department (for example, only designers) or a list of specific employees. The rest of the company won't even see this survey, to avoid creating information noise.

A public survey is considered active until all participants from the list have voted (or until the system limit of 30 days expires). This is an excellent tool against "silent ones." You immediately see who's slowing down the decision-making process.

By the way, the system is flexible: if an employee changes their mind during the discussion, they can change their vote.

When to use:

• Making decisions in a working group. Approving mockups, choosing a release date.
• Distributing tasks.
• Recording agreements. Instead of arguing by voice for half an hour, create a public survey and wait until everyone votes.

💡And one more important point: all completed surveys are saved in the Survey Archive, which eliminates many disputes in the future.

A remote team lives not only in tasks, but also in emotions, expectations, fears, hopes. If you don't see this layer, decisions start to "not land," people quietly burn out, and the manager is genuinely surprised: "We did everything right."

Public surveys provide transparency and a sense of involvement. Anonymous ones provide honesty without fear. Remote.team allows you to use both formats in the same environment where the team works every day, without unnecessary workarounds and external forms.

If you want to truly understand what's happening inside your team, start with a simple action: ask it a few honest questions and give people a safe way to answer. Everything else can be built from there.