Business owners want their workplaces to be safe environments for their employees, customers, and potential clients. While proper training may seem like enough, sometimes, a little more effort is required to ensure this safety. This effort comes in many forms, but most often, it’s expenses. However, there is a difference between expending on a quick fix and investing in a long-term solution. Affordable, quality non-slip mats are the ideal preventative measure against slips and falls in areas that are accident prone. Acquiring anti-slip matting for your workplace is an investment—something that will continue to reward you, eventually recovering its initial cost. As you can guess, preventable workplace accidents often result in expensive, onerous lawsuits. And damaged flooring costs a fortune to fix or replace.
What Does a Nonslip Mat Do?
A nonslip mat is a way of resurfacing your existing flooring, converting it to a non-slip surface. In other words, anti-slip floors turn your hard and slippery floors into safety surfaces that are comfortable and slip-resistant. Having a non-slip floor in your workplace is the first and most important step in preventing an accident that could result in serious human injury and, consequently, in steep expenses that devastate your business. When it comes to anti-slip solutions, the best material for non-slip mats is rubber. Rubber has a naturally high coefficient of friction, which means that rubber works great as a traction surface. After all, we use rubber to make car tires—things that require an enormous amount of traction to function properly. Now that you know what does a nonslip mat do, check out our list of the eight most common retail areas where installing an anti-slip floor is practically necessary. By the end of this article, the answer to your question, “do anti-slip mats work?” will be obvious.
Places Where Anti-Slip Matting is Necessary:
1. Non-Slip Mats for Kitchens:
Kitchens often see spills and always need cleaning. Moisture, greases, and oils quickly accumulate on a kitchen’s floors. Busybodied staff constantly shuffling around can make these floors dangerous hazards. One slip and fall can put your business in jeopardy. That’s why anti-slip matting is a kitchen essential. For any long pathway in a commercial kitchen, non-slip runners are available to cover the entire length of the walkway. While non-slip rubber mats prevent slips and falls from happening in the first place—because they are rubber, they also protect the flooring underneath them from suffering the damaging effects of impacts, abrasions, and chemicals. Kitchens are places where slipping is always a high risk. By installing rubber non-slip mats over your kitchen’s floors, you are investing in a protective measure that will ultimately pay dividends.
2. Non-Slip Mats for Food Courts and Cafeterias:
Any time food or beverages leave the hands of servers or patrons, there’s a cause for concern. Why? Even the most experienced servers sometimes drop dishes. Food courts and cafeterias, places where servers and patrons maneuver food alike, are rife with drops and spills. Food and drinks get everywhere, and they make floors slippery. Non-slip mats are the ideal way to prevent slips and falls before they happen, ensuring that food and drinks don’t accidentally cause serious injury. Furthermore, rubber products are effortless to clean, requiring a very basic lineup of cleaning supplies. Therefore, installing non-slip rubber mats is the most sensible choice when it comes to anti-slip flooring.
3. Non-Slip Mats for Buffets:
People make mistakes. Clumsiness is intrinsic to the human condition. Even when food is contained inside of a plate or tray, one mishap can send that food on a one-way trip toward the ground. This is especially a problem in places like buffets, where people stand in serving lines for prolonged periods of time, holding precariously stacked towers of food. By installing rubber non-slip mats along the walkways of buffets, you are accomplishing a few things. For one, as they suggest, non-slip mats protect patrons from slipping and falling, a danger of which buffets are common culprits. But aside from enhancing floor slip-resistance, non-slip rubber mats also work well as protective surfacing, guarding the buffet’s expensive flooring against the impacts and abrasions that accompany heavy foot-traffic. Furthermore, while non-slip safety and floor protection are essential, non-slip rubber mats are also easy to clean. With so much food and liquid moving around, ease of cleaning is an underdog quality that adds substantial value to installing non-slip mats in a buffet. Again, think of a non-slip rubber mat as an investment. It’s an investment that will ultimately recuperate its initial cost.
4. Non-Slip Mats for Laundry Rooms and Laundromats:
Laundromats and laundry rooms are places of perpetual moisture. Whether it be water seeping from wet clothes or busy patrons dragging liquid across your floors—excessive water is commonplace. Combined with the use of detergents, this excess water can sometimes become extremely slippery, posing a threat to the safety of everyone who uses the appliances. Thus, non-slip mats are an incredibly valuable investment for protecting people from slips and falls while they are near laundry machines. These places may seem innocuous—a perception that one all-too-human accident can completely shatter. In addition to improving flooring slip-resistance, non-slip rubber mats are naturally resistant to water. Thus, while being easy to clean, they also protect your subflooring from the potential damage that prolonged exposure to moisture often causes.
5. Non-Slip Mats near Dishwashers and Sinks:
Dishwashers and sinks are drenched in water around the clock. Water is always running—which is why non-slip flooring has so much potential around these appliances. First of all, rubber safety mats—having a naturally high coefficient of friction—protect users from slips and falls. But, they are also inherently water-resistant, making them perfect for conditions in which they are constantly exposed to moisture. The qualities that make rubber traction mats so desirable in other applications such as buffets make them just as valuable here—near dishwashers and sinks.
6. Non-Slip Mats near Drinking Fountains and Beverage Dispensers:
The relationship between spilled water and human slippage is describable as something of a universal constant. But, water isn’t always the only issue. Beverages such as teas and soft drinks are liquids that, while nourishing our cavity-craving hearts, are water’s stickier, messier cousins. Beverage dispensers come either alone or with their drinking-fountain sidekick. In either case, sticky, sugary messes aren’t so rare—especially on the floors immediately surrounding these dispensers. Thus, non-slip mats, while protecting patrons from the dangers of slips and falls, are also easy to clean. Rubber slip-resistant floors need only the most basic household supplies to be cleaned of even the stickiest stains. In addition, because beverage dispensers are so heavy, they risk damaging your precious floors. Because rubber naturally absorbs shock, rubber safety mats provide a layer of protection that guards your building against the damage that heavy machinery too often does to floors.
7. Non-Slip Mats near Soap Dispensers:
We live in a strange world. Among all the zany phenomena is the decision for designers to place soap dispensers above a bathroom’s floors and not its sinks. People usually use soap dispensers while their hands are still wet, which means that water will often drip onto that bathroom’s floors. What’s more, soap is extremely slippery itself. After all, it's designed to make your hands too slippery a surface for bacteria to cling onto. Together, having sudsy water constantly plaguing your bathroom’s floors poses major risks of slipping and falling. A non-slip bathroom mat is the optimal choice for reducing the amount of risk associated with slippery bathrooms. For a bathroom, rubber flooring is best because it’s also effortless to clean. When it comes to bathrooms, rubber non-slip mats are a worthwhile investment.
8. Non-Slip Mats for Building Entrances:
Building entrances are outside, which means that they are always exposed to the weather. Rain is just one of the many outdoor conditions that can endanger the safety of unsuspecting travelers. The entrances themselves can become slippery, calling for the installation of non-slip matting. But, that’s not it; building-goers often drag all that outside moisture and debris into the facility, creating a mess that is not only unsightly, but dangerous to those who occupy the premises. Thus, outdoor safety matting or slip-resistant tiles are solutions that are cheap, considering how expensive the consequences of not implementing them can be.
Do Anti-Slip Mats Work?
Anti-slip mats certainly work. They do their job, introducing slip-resistance to any surface—indoors or outdoors, residential or commercial. As we at Rubber-Cal have shown you, not only do anti-slip mats work—they are essential to most commercial and retail applications. Many workplace and customer environments lack the safety surfaces which greatly reduce risks of injury. Anti-slip matting is the primary option for creating a nonslip floor. As we’ve emphasized, non-slip rubber mats are an investment—they protect you from a plethora of burdensome expenses. Above is a list showing you only examples of where non-slip matting is applicable. The situations that call for slip-resistant flooring are virtually endless.
