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How Do You Make a Floor Less Slippery?
To make a floor less slippery, you need to identify the actual cause of the risk, then address it at source, whether that’s contamination, cleaning practices, or the floor surface itself. This usually means measuring the floor’s current slip resistance, fixing the specific cause, and maintaining the improvement afterwards. Adding a mat or a sign can help in the short term, but neither changes how slippery the floor actually is.
The short why
Slip risk isn’t always visible, and it isn’t always caused by the same thing. A floor can be slippery because of a cleaning product, a worn surface, a contamination point, or all three at once. Reducing risk properly means working out which of these applies before deciding what to fix.
Start with what’s actually causing the risk
Before choosing a fix, it helps to run through the CHIMES framework, which covers the main factors behind slip risk:
- Contamination: water, grease, food or cleaning residue sitting on the surface
- Heel: the footwear typically worn in that zone, and how it interacts with the floor
- Individual: who’s exposed, and how often, staff on long shifts versus guests passing through once
- Maintenance: whether current cleaning products or methods are helping or reducing grip
- Environment: lighting, gradients, and transitions between wet and dry areas
- Surface: the floor material itself, and its current, measured slip resistance
Most slippery floors have one or two of these standing out as the real driver. Fixing the wrong one wastes effort and leaves the actual risk untouched.
Why a sign or a mat isn’t the fix
This is the belief worth challenging directly. Many venues respond to a slippery area with a wet floor sign and consider it handled. A sign warns people a hazard exists. It does nothing to change the floor’s actual grip, and the moment the sign comes down, the risk is exactly where it was before.
Mats work a little differently, since they add temporary grip in the exact spot they cover. But they only manage risk in that specific location, and do nothing for the floor beyond it. A safe floor needs control, not just a sign or a mat standing in for it. Genuine control means addressing the floor’s grip directly, not managing the hazard around it.
Match the fix to the actual cause
Once you know what’s driving the risk, the right response usually falls into one of these categories.
If it’s contamination: better cleaning protocols, faster spill response, or drainage improvements at the specific point where water or grease collects.
If it’s maintenance: reviewing the cleaning products and methods in use, since the wrong product can quietly reduce a floor’s grip even when it looks clean.
If it’s the surface itself: an anti-slip treatment or coating, which changes the floor’s actual slip resistance rather than managing conditions around it.
Applying a treatment to a floor whose real problem is a poorly managed spillage point won’t help. Equally, no amount of cleaning will fix a floor that’s simply worn smooth over years of footfall.
Does fixing the cause actually reduce incidents?
Addressing the genuine cause, rather than adding a mat or sign as a stopgap, is what produces a measurable difference. Slip Safety Services has found that organisations who follow a measure-then-fix approach, rather than relying on isolated measures like signage, see a 57%+ average reduction in slip incidents. The improvement comes from treating the actual cause, not from the presence of a warning sign or a single mat.
What to do about it
Start by identifying your highest-risk zones, typically entrances, bars, kitchens and poolside areas, and get each one measured for its current slip resistance, wet and dry. That measurement tells you whether you’re dealing with a contamination problem, a maintenance problem, or a genuine surface issue, and each of those points to a different fix.
Next step
If you’re not sure what’s actually causing the risk on your floors, the Slip Risk Scorecard is a quick way to get a clearer picture. For the fuller method behind measuring, fixing and maintaining floor grip, Slipology by Christian Harris covers the full process.
Related questions
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