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Sliptember: Most Organisations Have a Grip Problem, Not a Slip Problem
Sliptember is an annual campaign highlighting that most slip risk goes unrecognised because organisations judge their floors by incident history rather than measured grip. A grip problem is a floor with poor measured slip resistance, regardless of whether an incident has happened yet. No incidents doesn’t mean no problem. It often just means nobody’s tested the floor.
No incidents feels like proof you’re safe. It isn’t.
If you’re a Health & Safety Manager across a multi-site organisation, “we haven’t had any serious slip incidents” probably sounds like a reasonable answer when someone asks how your floors are doing. It’s the kind of line that closes a conversation, not one that invites more questions.
The trouble is, that belief rests on the wrong evidence. Most slips go unreported, and near misses are the real warning sign, not the absence of a headline incident. This is what Sliptember exists to challenge: the idea that a quiet incident log means a safe floor. Most organisations don’t actually have a slip problem. They have an unmeasured grip problem, and the two are not the same thing.
What is Sliptember, and why does it matter now?
Sliptember is a campaign built to give slip prevention the same visibility other awareness months have given other causes, using the fact that slips and trips remain one of the biggest causes of workplace injury in the UK. The campaign’s core message is simple: it’s not a slip problem, it’s a grip problem, and grip can be measured.
The reason this matters for a Health & Safety Manager specifically is that slip risk sits differently to most other risks you manage. A trailing cable or a broken guard rail is visible. A floor with poor grip usually isn’t. It can look clean, dry and perfectly normal, and still fail a basic test of slip resistance.
Why “no incidents” is the wrong measure of safety
This is the belief worth challenging directly. An incident log tells you what’s already gone wrong. It doesn’t tell you what’s currently at risk of going wrong. Treating a clean incident record as proof of a safe floor is a bit like judging a car’s brakes by the fact you haven’t crashed yet.
Near misses are a far more honest signal, and they’re routinely under-reported. Someone who slips and catches themselves rarely files a report. Someone who slips and falls usually does. By the time an incident makes it onto your log, the underlying grip problem has often existed for months, sometimes across multiple sites.
What actually drives a grip problem?
Rather than guessing where risk sits, the CHIMES framework gives you a structured way to look at what actually determines whether a floor is safe.
- Contamination: water, grease, food or cleaning residue on the surface
- Heel: the footwear typically worn in a given zone, and how it interacts with the floor
- Individual: who’s exposed, and how often, staff on long shifts versus visitors passing through once
- Maintenance: whether current cleaning products and methods are helping or quietly reducing grip
- Environment: lighting, gradients, and transitions between wet and dry areas
- Surface: the floor material itself, and its current, measured slip resistance
None of these six factors show up in an incident log until something has already gone wrong. That’s exactly why relying on incident history alone leaves a genuine grip problem invisible until it isn’t.
How would you actually know if you have a grip problem?
The only reliable way to know is to measure it. A floor’s slip resistance is assessed using pendulum testing, which gives a specific, comparable number for how much grip a surface provides, wet and dry, in a specific zone.
Without that measurement, you’re relying on how a floor looks, how long it’s been since the last incident, or how confident your facilities team feels walking across it. None of those are reliable indicators. A floor can look immaculate and still test poorly, particularly in high-traffic areas that have worn smooth over time, or wherever contamination builds up regularly.
Why does this matter across multiple sites?
For a Health & Safety Manager overseeing more than one site, the grip problem rarely looks the same from one location to the next. One site might have a genuine contamination issue at a busy entrance. Another might have a surface that’s simply worn out. A third might look fine everywhere except one poorly lit transition zone nobody’s thought to check.
Treating slip safety as a single, organisation-wide policy misses this. Slip Safety Services has found that organisations who move from assuming their floors are fine to actually measuring them see a 57%+ average reduction in slip incidents, because the improvement is targeted at the real cause in each specific location, rather than applied as a blanket assumption across every site.
What good looks like
An organisation managing this well doesn’t wait for an incident to prompt a floor assessment. High-risk zones across every site, entrances, kitchens, transition points, are measured on a sensible schedule, not just checked visually. Near misses are treated as genuine data, not dismissed because nobody was hurt. And when a Health & Safety Manager reports on slip risk, the report is built on PTV readings and dated records, not on how many incidents happened to be logged that quarter.
None of this requires a dramatic overhaul. It requires a shift in what counts as evidence.
The takeaway
An empty incident log tells you what hasn’t happened yet. It doesn’t tell you whether your floors are safe. The belief worth carrying into Sliptember, and beyond it, is simple: most organisations don’t have a slip problem, they have a grip problem, and a grip problem can only be found by measuring it.
Next step
If you’re not sure whether your organisation’s confidence in its floors is backed by evidence, the Slip Prevention Scorecard takes a few minutes and gives you a personalised picture of where you actually stand. For the full method behind measuring, improving and proving floor grip, Slipology by Christian Harris covers the process in depth.
FAQ
What does it mean to have a “grip problem” instead of a “slip problem”?
A grip problem means a floor has poor measured slip resistance, whether or not an incident has occurred yet. A slip problem implies incidents have already happened. Most organisations have the former without realising it, because grip isn’t visible without testing.
Why do slip incidents often go unreported?
Most people who slip and catch themselves don’t file a report, since no injury occurred. This means incident logs typically understate the real level of risk, and near misses are a more honest indicator of where a genuine grip problem exists.
Can a floor look safe and still be a slip risk?
Yes. Grip is not something you can reliably judge by eye. A floor can appear clean, dry and well maintained while still testing poorly for slip resistance, particularly in worn or heavily contaminated zones.
How is slip risk actually measured?
Slip risk is measured using pendulum testing, which records how much friction a floor surface produces under a simulated heel strike. This gives a specific, comparable number, known as a PTV, rather than relying on visual inspection or assumption.
Is Sliptember relevant if my organisation hasn’t had any slip incidents?
Yes. The entire point of Sliptember is that an absence of incidents doesn’t mean an absence of risk. Many organisations only discover a genuine grip problem once they actually measure their floors, rather than relying on incident history.