Gap Analysis
A Gap Analysis is used to identify strategic and operational gaps in health and safety performance.
It analyses the gap between your current capabilities of your company and its future development.
Unless you know UK Health and Safety legislation it is difficult for companies to determine if they are complaint, as it can be a mine field.
What’s involved in a gap analysis?
There are 3 steps to a gap analysis:
1. Company’s Current State
Without understanding the company’s current state, you will not know what needs to be addressed. This is done by analysing current business processes by collecting relevant data on performance levels through:
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Reviewing current goals
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KPI’s and objectives
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Vision and mission statement
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Interviewing employees
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Incident data documentation
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Observing how employees behave in the workplace.
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Systems, Processes and Behaviours
Once all the data has been collated and analysed it will be placed into three categories.
2. What systems, processes and behaviours are working?
This is the category that is always forgotten about, but this is the area you need to focus on the most to ensure sustainability.
What systems, processes and behaviours need to be adjusted?
Your systems, processes and behaviours may just need some slight adjusting to improve where they are today to get to where you need to be.
3. What systems, processes and behaviours need to be started over again?
This is when the existing systems, processes and behaviours need to be erased and started again from scratch.
Once all the data has been collated and analysed it will be placed into three categories.
Set Your Gap Analysis Objectives
A strategy will be created, with input from the Senior Managers and various groups of employees, with more realistic goals, KPI’s and objectives being set.
It is important to ensure the new strategy is communicated to all employees, so everything is transparent. By involving employees in the process they are more likely to buy into it and be more proactive in ensuring the strategy is complied with. This leads to higher moral and an increase in productivity.
Other benefits include:
A clear Health and Safety Strategy which gives transparency for the way forward
Reduction of accidents and an increase of near miss reporting.
