Keep Your Facility Safe & OSHA Compliant

A workplace safety solutions guide from Staples Business Advantage

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Ensuring the physical safety of every person on your property is a daily priority for facility managers (FMs). We all know why it should be a priority. The challenge for most FMs is knowing how to make it a priority.

Here, we’ll explore some specific actions you can take to make your facility safer for tenants, employees and visitors.

Preventing slips and falls is a smart place to start. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), floors and flooring materials contribute directly to more than 2 million fall-related injuries each year.

We’ll also help you become aware of government safety standards, and we’ll provide some tips on how you can make sure your facility complies with them.

Floor Mats: Your First Line of Defense

ISSA, the worldwide cleaning industry association, estimates that 60% of bacteria and debris are carried into a building via shoes. So, the best way to prevent slips inside the building is to prevent all the outside stuff from getting in.

The solution is simple: floor mats.

Floor mats often have different names. Sometimes they’re called wiper/scraper mats or walk-off mats. They clean debris and bacteria from shoes to prevent them from spreading throughout your facility.

Placing a rubber floor mat on the outside of an entryway will give employees and guests a place to remove debris from their shoes. A carpeted floor mat on the interior side of the entryway helps to prevent water from accumulating on the floor.

Your interior floor mats should be sized specifically for your entryways.

The general rule is the width of the floor mat should be at least 80% of the width of the entryway.

If you have a standard exterior door that’s three feet wide (36 inches), then your mat should be at least 28.8 inches wide. Do you have entryways with two doors? Double the width of your floor mats (57.6 inches).

If the width of the mat is too narrow, it won’t provide enough surface area for people to easily step onto to wipe off their shoes.

Now let’s look at the length of the mats.

Ideally, your mat should easily allow a person to step on it twice (once for each foot). A length of at least six feet should be adequate to accomplish that two-step goal. Industry surveys reveal that six feet of floor matting removes about 40% of debris from shoes.

Buy why stop there? If you have the entryway floor space available, increase the length of your interior floor mats. Twenty feet of floor matting can remove 80% of the gunk you don’t want on your floors.

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Wet Floor Signs

US courts of law have established that property owners are required to keep their buildings safe. If a person is injured on the property, the owners may be subject to legal recourse.

Plus, it only takes a quarter cup of water to saturate an area three feet wide, which is all the help gravity needs to cause a fall inside.

It’s no accident that most premises’ liability cases include slips and falls. Any time you come across a wet floor in your facility, it becomes your duty to protect all persons currently on the premises from the hazard.

The first step is making people aware of the hazard with an iconic yellow “Wet Floor” sign. And unlike other communication signage, such as “STOP” or “No Trespassing,” people tend to notice and pay attention to the wet-floor signs.

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When to Place Wet-Floor Signs

1. When Mopping

Place the sign before mopping to mark which areas of the floor are or will soon be slippery. Leave the signs up over areas that you have mopped, placed 10-15 feet apart to mark further wet-floor areas.

2. When a Puddle Is Detected or Created

It’s no surprise that 100% of people surveyed prefer to be informed of a slippery floor via the yellow sign versus discovering it right before they slip. Whenever there’s a puddle, place a wet-floor sign over it. Leave the sign in place for up to an hour after the puddle is mopped away.

3. When Water Is Tracked in From Outside

The minute bad weather hits, get the yellow signs ready. Place them at every entrance.

4. Until the Mop Water Evaporates

Mopping can clean up other spills and keep your floors clean on a day-to-day basis, but it still leaves some water behind, which is a hazard until the floor is dry. Don’t move the sign until the dry part happens.

Once the sign is in place, a puddle of any origin becomes an identifiable hazard for everyone in the building. You have fulfilled the first part of your duty: you made them aware.

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