Making Sure Your Floor Is Safe

Among all the dramatic risks a factory or warehouse environment can pose it’s easy to forget about the real danger of slips, trips, and falls. Slips, trips, and falls result in thousands of workplace injuries every year. They can cause everything from cuts, bruises, and fractures to broken bones, brain damage, paralysis, or even death.

What Causes Slips, Trips, and Falls?

Some common causes of slips are:

• Spills of liquids or certain solids, like sawdust for example.
• Wet cleaning methods.
• Sudden changes in floor surface, such as from concrete to polished wood floors.
• Ramps with steep inclines.
• Dusty or sandy floor surfaces.

Common causes of trips include:

• Ridges in flooring or carpets.
• Worn or broken floors or floor coverings, such as tiles.
• Changes in floor level.
• Power cables run along the floor.
• Obstacles in traffic areas
• Loads that obstruct a worker’s view when walking.

Falls are generally caused by either slipping or tripping near a ledge where there is insufficient protection against falling.

Safe Floors for Steady Footing

Luckily there is a range of warehouse equipment, technologies and procedures you can use to greatly minimise these risks, keeping your employees safe and your business running smoothly and efficiently. Follow our simple advice below and you’ll have safer floors in no time.

1. Design for Safety

The best way to prevent slips, trips, and falls is to eliminate potential hazards entirely, either in the design stage or by renovating an existing space. Examples of designing for safety include avoiding level changes wherever possible, choosing ramps with a shallow incline over stairs, and installing drains and floor grates anywhere where work tasks are likely to generate liquid or water.

2. Upgrade Your Floors

Improving the floor surfaces in your workplace by increasing their grip can greatly reduce the chance of slips occurring. One of the best and most cost-effective ways to do this is with textured plastic floor matting, which gives good slip-resistance and allows for easy drainage.

3. Keep Floors Clear

An effective way to prevent tripping is simply to keep floors clear of trip hazards. Improving your shelving solutions with quality storage equipment such as steel shelves or bulk storage containers can help to keep floors clear. Installing more power outlets can also reduce the need for extension cords running across the floor and creating trips hazards.

4. Make Preventing Falls a Priority

Most falls in the workplace are the result of slips or trips, so it might be tempting to think that taking care of those risks has you covered for falls too. In reality, falls have much greater potential to cause serious injury or death, so they require safety measures of their own. If there are any raised platforms in your workplace, or any drops, the ledges around them must be marked off and made safer with railings, fencing, or bollards.

5. Employee Training and Safe Practices

An educated, aware workforce is one of the best weapons against slips, trips, and falls at work. Make sure your workers are aware of slip, trip, and fall hazards and how to avoid them. Make sure that spills are cleaned up as quickly as possible and that dangerous areas  are isolated. Of course, proper safety gear must be worn at all times to reduce the risk of accidents and protect employees when they do occur.

Combining design, education, implementation and the best products is the best way to create safer floors at work. Browse the range of barriers and fencing and floor mats and find out if you need to update your workplace.