Using Gap Analysis to Improve Team Performance

How to make business more profitable, efficient, and primed for growth? In doing so, you need to be top on what you do. Every work done must be done as perfectly as possible. You should be having precise knowledge about investing time and resources. To reach the peak of business success, you should do an in-depth market analysis and figure out your business shortcomings. Setting out goals enhances business productivity as it sets a defined roadmap to hit your target. One proven and tested method is conducting Gap Analysis.

What is the Gap Analysis?

A Gap Analysis methodology assists in identifying the difference between where you intended to be and where are you now. Gap Analysis Assess and examines your current performance, which helps businesses in identifying how far it has to come further for reaching their goals, intending to develop a concrete strategy to bridge the gap.

Business or the corporate world has a diverse environment, and there’s always be room for improvement. You need to identify those improvement gaps if you need to improve. When these gaps don’t get addressed, they tend to get bigger and eventually lead to business loss. It is also sometimes known as Fit Gap Analysis.

Gap Analysis considers these three elements:

• Where are you now?
• Where you wanted to be? Ideal situation
• What be done to bridge the gap?

Gap Analysis can also be termed as ‘’need-gap analysis’’, ‘’need analysis’’, or ‘’need assessment’’. Business by conducting Gap Analysis can have a better knowledge of how to improve efficiency, product, and profitability by pinpointing the gaps in the company. Gap Analysis Tools can also help to optimize time, money, and resources spent on your business.

Levels of Team Gap Analysis

When Gap analysis is applied at a team level, it features the competencies of your team, which doesn’t reach to the desired level to hit the goals. The improvement allows the team to grow and meet the desired target. The Team Gap Analysis needs to be done on multiple levels:

• At Individual Level:  Acknowledge each member of your team, as each individuals’ efforts lead the team to success. Being a leader, you must clearly state each member’s role. What is each member responsible for? Do each individuals’ responsibilities is suited to their capabilities?
• Team Level:  For conducting Gap Analysis at a team level, firstly analyse the trends of Gap analysis at the individual level. You can find the common gap or ways to fill gaps. Review your goals and again conduct the Gap analysis process at the team level.

When to Conduct Gap Analysis?  

It’s good to conduct a gap analysis regularly. But there are certain indications which state that Gap Analysis has to be conducted.

• Team member gets a poor performance review
• The team performs poor in a project or a task
• Staff Changes and new recruitment has to be done
• When new technology is adopted
• When business growth changes the overall goals of the company

Gap Analysis Process

Gap Analysis visualizes the difference between your current stage with the target of your organization, which makes it easy for the employees to see where still needs to grow. The process of Gap Analysis can be broken down into four simple steps:

• Identify the Current State: The initial step for conducting a Gap Analysis is to pick the area you want to analyse. Now analyse your current situation by collecting relevant data. The source can be interviews, brainstorming, etc.
• Setting Your Goals: A company without a desired goal or target is baseless. Goal binds the different units of an organization. Set your desired target. In order to achieve it, analyse how you are performing today and where you really want to be.
• Measure the Gaps: As you know, the current business state and where you intended to be. It’s time now to bridge the gaps and reach the topmost level. Develop strategies, plans to fill gaps between current and future states.
• Bridge the Gaps: Now, as you have all actionable plans, steps to go from the desired state to future state. It’s time to utilize all the gathered information and to deliver a complete solution to bridge gaps. To feature your plans which strikes the mind of your teams. You may use some splendid Gap Analysis templates.

 Conducting a Gap Analysis always shows some gaps. It can be small or sometimes can be bigger gaps. As you have started work on Gap Analysis on your own, be sure to follow up on improvements. Otherwise, the solutions you have engineered will fall through cracks. Moreover, you should not try to close many gaps at once. Sometimes the gaps are inter-related, and it’s easy to close at once. But sometimes, gaps are big and can end up causing stress on the organization, and no gaps can be closed, which will initially lead to loss of time and resources.