Multi Voting Technique in Business

Multivoting tool helps teams prioritize and simplify long list of ideas after brainstorming

Multi voting is actually a team decision making approach useful to reduce the amount of information to a certain workable list of ideas and items using an organized group of votes. The outcome of multivoting is usually a short list determining what exactly is top priority and important for the group.

You can use multivoting every time a brainstorming exercise offers a really long list of items which is difficult to manage and work with at the same time. Considering the fact that multivoting gives a fast and simple method for the team to recognize the best ideas as well as the top priorities on the list created with brainstorming, this specific management tool can help whenever a team has to work with a really long list of ideas or items.

Brainstorming is great for generating many ideas in a short period of time during team meetings but sometimes it can produce a really long list of issues and ideas and you need a way to reduce the list to a manageable degree – this is when you can use multivoting to help your team.

You can use the multi voting approach when you need to:

• Greatly reduce a long listing of ideas to some practical number which is easily manageable
• Prioritize a big list without having a scenario during which there can be those who win and those who lose in your team – multivoting provides a simple solution which is acceptable by everyone
• Determine the key priorities for the team out of a big list of ideas, issues, opportunities or problems – sometimes the long list of ideas has to be prioritize or group into a few top priorities so going further the team can work effectively

The process of using multivoting:

1. Start with a big listing of things which were produced by a brainstorming session or other suitable concept you use to generate many ideas
2. Designate some sort of letter to each item on your list in order to prevent any potential misunderstandings associated with the item designations
3. Voting. Every team member chooses the most significant 1 / 3 (or no more than half) of the items from the list by using the particular letters that show up alongside all those items. The voting might be carried out by using a display of hands but also the voting can be done by using some sort of document ballot in case it is more appropriate for the team to preserve privacy and confidentiality.
4. Tally the actual votes by putting a new checkmark alongside every item for every vote it has obtained. Keep the items with more votes for the following round of voting.
5. Now you can do it again. Within the 2nd round, every person once again chooses the best 1 / 3 from the items on the list. You can repeat the voting in order to get to the point where just a few items will remain (however you’ll need more than one item at the end of multivoting).

   At the end, those items (ideas, issues, opportunities, problems…) which were not among the important ones should be kept on another list as a backup information which can also be useful in some other future use by the team when working on improvement initiatives.

   As a conclusion, multivoting is a great solution when your list of possibilities should be narrowed down and the final decision should be made by your entire team.