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How Do You Build a Slip Prevention Plan?
You build a slip prevention plan by measuring your floors, particularly your highest-risk zones, then improving whatever the measurement reveals, embedding the right standards across your team, and maintaining those standards through ongoing checks. This follows four stages: Assess, Amend, Advocate, Assure, with a final Affirm stage to document and prove the improvement over time. It’s an ongoing process, not a single document or a one-off project.
The short why
A slip prevention plan only works if it’s based on evidence rather than assumption. Floors change through wear, cleaning and footfall, so a plan built on how things looked when it was written quickly becomes outdated. The process needs to be continuous, not a document you file away once it’s finished.
Start with measurement, not assumption
The first stage of any genuine slip prevention plan is Assess, measuring your floors using pendulum testing, focused on the zones most likely to pose a risk. Entrances, kitchens, bars and any area prone to spillage or moisture should be the priority, since these are where the majority of slip risk sits.
This step matters because a floor can look clean and safe while still testing poorly for slip resistance. Without measurement, a “plan” is really just a set of assumptions about where problems might be, rather than a documented picture of where they actually are.
Why “we’ll deal with it if a claim happens” isn’t a plan
This is the belief worth challenging directly. Many venues respond to slip risk only after an incident forces the issue, treating each claim as an isolated event to be dealt with individually. That approach means you’re always reacting to yesterday’s problem, at the one location where it happened to surface, while the same risk likely exists elsewhere unaddressed.
A proper plan treats prevention as an investment made ahead of time, not a cost absorbed after the fact. Slip Safety Services has found that organisations who build a structured, ongoing prevention plan see a 57%+ average reduction in slip incidents, because the risk is being addressed before it turns into a claim, not after.
Use CHIMES to know what to actually improve
Once you’ve measured a zone and found an issue, the CHIMES framework helps identify what’s actually driving it, so you’re fixing the right thing:
- Contamination: what’s ending up on the floor, and how quickly it’s dealt with
- Heel: whether footwear in that zone is contributing to the risk
- Individual: who’s exposed, and how often
- Maintenance: whether current cleaning products or methods are helping or reducing grip
- Environment: lighting, gradients, or wet-to-dry transitions
- Surface: the floor material itself, and its measured slip resistance
Running through these six factors for each high-risk zone tells you whether the fix is a cleaning change, a treatment, a matting adjustment, or something else entirely.
A plan needs buy-in and maintenance, not just a document
Measuring and fixing a floor once doesn’t make a plan. The Advocate stage means getting genuine buy-in from staff and site teams, so improved standards are actually followed day to day, not just written down centrally. The Assure stage means maintaining that improvement through ongoing cleaning practices and scheduled re-checks.
Without these two stages, even a well-measured, well-fixed floor can quietly drift back into risk over time, as cleaning routines slip or conditions change.
What to do about it
Start by identifying your three to five highest-risk zones, and get them professionally tested rather than relying on a visual check. Once you have that data, address what it reveals using CHIMES as your guide, then set a schedule for re-testing so the improvement is maintained rather than left to fade.
Next step
If you’re not sure where to begin, the Slip Prevention Scorecard takes a few minutes and gives you a clear starting point. For an actual reading of your highest-risk zones, a professional slip test gives you the full picture. And for the fuller method behind building this out properly, Slipology by Christian Harris covers the process in depth.
Related questions
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