Decision-Making Methods for the Workplace

the Workplace

Every day every person is faced with different choices. Every day we choose how we will spend our day, what we will do, what to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, when to get up, what to wear, and so on. These are ordinary elections, they do not carry any serious consequences, and do not particularly affect life. But there are choices that affect more global things in life. For example, this is the choice of a country for residence, an educational institution for education, a place of work in order to work and receive money. And each of these choices quite globally affects the life of every person. And if in the case of breakfast or clothes, even if we make a mistake, the consequences will be small, then in the case of work or education, the consequences of a wrong choice will haunt the victim for the rest of his life. Each person should make such choices very carefully, carefully considering all the options for the development of events and how this will affect life in the future and many other things.

People who work in any position in any place are also constantly faced with choices that relate directly to work and career. Are these choices important? More than that, since they will influence the life and career of not only one specific person, but also how the company will develop, what will happen to it. And this, in turn, will affect all the other employees of this firm, of which there can be a lot. And the higher the position and the larger the company, the more deliberately you need to make any decisions, although in fact careless decisions of even not very high-ranking people can destroy the company’s reputation and its stability, if not completely destroy it. And in such vacancies, the adoption of any decisions should be as careful and deliberate as possible, and if you have such skills and you have experience in such work that brought many positive moments for the development of the company, you can apply now for jobs in Qatar, which you can check on Layboard, that require responsible and cautious people who will be able to make the right decisions and have experience in such work in the right field. 

Decision making at work

There are many popular methods for making the right decisions that you need, which are used by many people, and which involve a thorough comparison of all the pros and cons of a particular choice, their visualization, which will help you see the big picture.

What is the easiest way to make a difficult decision?

The adoption of any significant, and not significant decision is an individual and reasonable choice of the most suitable option for oneself from all available and most probable. When making a difficult decision in the workplace, it is imperative to pay attention to the following aspects:

Problem to decide: What problem will your choice solve? What does this problem mean for the company and how does it affect it? How does this problem affect each employee? What happens if this problem is not resolved?

Consequences that the choice will bring: What and who exactly will be affected by your decision? How big will be the scale of possible consequences? Who will suffer and who will benefit from the decision? How will your decision affect the reputation and position of the company? What are you risking? What will happen in case of success, and what will happen in case of failure?

Responsibility: Which person will be responsible for all the consequences you or he takes? How might this responsibility affect their careers and futures?

In order to understand the situation more clearly, and to make room in your head for reflection, I would recommend that you write down all your thoughts on paper so that you do not accidentally forget or lose sight of anything while thinking about the decision.

Methods for making decisions

In total there are two methods that I like the most, and which are the most understandable and simple for ordinary workers, and not just for management.

   Method 1 – SWOT Matrix

You need to create a matrix that will contain the following 4 indicators:

  • Strengths – the benefits or positive aspects and consequences of your decision. That is, what in your solution will be the strength of the solution, how you can improve the situation or even solve the problem;
  • Weaknesses – disadvantages or negative aspects and consequences of your decision. What is the disadvantage of this or that solution, what will you have to sacrifice. You need to be careful and carefully calculate everything, so that later it does not turn out that there are more disadvantages than advantages;
  • Opportunities – opportunities known to you that you will receive thanks to this decision now, or in the future;
  • Threats – what threatens you with making this decision, what can harm you later, and what are the risks of this decision, is it worth it or is it better to think about another possible solution;

For each available solution method, you need to create this matrix, and based on the data obtained, choose exactly the option that will be the least bad for you and the company, and which carries the least risks and dangers for you and the place where you work. Of course, this method, like all the others, takes a lot of time, but in order to make a really important and difficult decision, it is better to spend a lot of time than to live and suffer all your life with the results of a choice that hurt you so much, although you didn’t spend much time making it. a lot of time.

Method 2 – Pareto Chart

This method will require a little more data and time, and in general this method is quite complicated and confusing, but if you wish, your result will help you a lot. Building a correct chart will consist of 7 steps:

  1. Search and definition of the main problem, the solution of which we need to find.
  2. Writing a list of everything that creates this problem, that is, the root causes. Finding the source of a particular problem and solving the original problem can solve more than one issue, and sometimes the search needs to go deeper in order to more effectively solve all the company’s problems.
  3. Determination of the time of occurrence of all these problems and how they are interrelated. Perhaps their occurrence coincides with some events that occur in your life or the life of the company.
  4. Creation of a sample table with all the data collected, which should be arranged in descending order of their importance.
  5. Displaying data in a coordinate system. This is quite difficult for those who do not know what it is and how to do it, but in fact everything is simpler than it seems. In order to get the desired result, you need to depict on the abscissa axis, that is, the vertical scale is a list of all influencing factors, respectively, the ordinate axis or the horizontal scale displays the magnitude of the various factors that are invested in solving the problem.
  6. After that, you need to enter all the other data in the diagram, each individual cause of the problem has its own column. The height of the columns must decrease from left to right in order for you to get the result you are looking for.
  7. At the end, analyze what you got as a result.

These methods really visualize all the data, since it is the visualization of the data that helps to perceive them better. Use these methods and get the desired result!