You know what success looks like if you could just get there.
If only you could find a simple, incredibly powerful, transformative method that works.
Search no further. You can apply the IDEOS™ mantra to how you think and accelerate your path to success.
IDEOS™ is about working smarter, deliberately, and following a plan of continuous improvement. This simple mantra increases capacity to serve more clients and staff, keep operational costs from climbing, improve the client experience, flexibly scale your business without sacrificing profit margins, and create a sustainable integration of work and life.
It’s as simple as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
WHAT IS IDEOS™
IDEOS™ is our Mantra for continuous improvement.
This mantra helps everyone devise solutions to streamline business, staff, and client experience.
When you think or document a repeatable process, ask yourself the following for each task in the process….. How Can I Integrate, Delegate, Eliminate, Outsource or Staff this task to improve it?
By adopting this mantra, your mind becomes comfortable cycling through it with every business decision, every process, and every initiative. You can use it to evaluate every aspect of the organization. It also is a communication tool to empower staff to become co-creators, tap their gifts and skills, provide a sense of ownership, and instill that the business can evolve when you have a sense of purpose and motivation.
Here is what each word means:
- INTEGRATE: turn on a data flow or integration to lower the work and improve the output
- DELEGATE: delegate this work to somebody else that has more capacity, skills, or passion to learn and do
- ELIMINATE: can I eliminate this work or automate it so no one has to do it
- OUTSOURCE: send this work to a provider already on my team, and that has the capacity, skills or passion so I can free a team member to work on higher-level items
- STAFF: should I shift this work to a different person and if so, what is the impact on my staff? Will I be making someone feel less valuable? Do we need to hire someone to take on this work so others are free to rise up? *This step is critically important – you want to avoid toxicity and culture killers*
WHY DOES THIS MANTRA WORK
It encapsulates Lean and Six Sigma. Lean® refers to any method or tool which helps in the identification and elimination of waste. Six Sigma® refers to tools and techniques used to improve processes. These methodologies promote flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: continuous improvement and respect for people. In other words, it is organizing employee activities to deliver more value while eliminating waste.
It is a mnemonic that is easy to remember.
WHEN AND HOW TO ADOPT THIS
This mantra and visual can be shared in your next staff meeting.
Then re-explain the mantra in a subsequent staff meeting.
Then in staff meeting 3, identify which labor intense process should be improved, assign team members to review the process, and ask them to apply the mantra and share new improvement ideas in the next staff meeting.
