FLOORCARE & MAINTENANCE
A clean floor isn’t a safe floor
A high-gloss finish is often a mask for a high-risk environment. Even a seemingly shiny floor can hide unseen risks that impact the safety of your workforce, as Cheryl Wallace, European Product & Commercialisation Manager at New Pig explains.
Slips, trips and falls remain the single most common cause of major injury in UK workplaces. They aren’t just HR headaches: they are a financial drain, costing employers approximately £512m annually in lost production and legal liabilities.
While most point to ‘poor housekeeping’ or ‘accidental spills’ as the culprits, a more insidious threat is hiding in plain sight. Often, the very protocols designed to keep a facility safe, such as daily mopping and high-shine buffing, are the factors making the floor more dangerous and contributing to the accidents and incidents themselves.
It is time for professionals to look past the shine and address the microscopic reality of floor safety.
The hidden threat
Every floor, from brushed concrete to polished marble, exists on a spectrum of friction. Even a surface that feels smooth to the touch is composed of ‘microscopic mountains and valleys’ which provide essential traction and help to guard against a slip and fall incident.
The texture of a walking surface might or might not be visible. Some flooring materials, such as linoleum and laminate flooring, feature textures deliberately added to increase traction. Other surfaces are buffed, brazed, sanded, acid-etched or otherwise treated to increase traction.
This traction is measured as the Coefficient of Friction (COF). However, COF isn’t a static number: it is a living metric that changes with foot traffic, age, and, most
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critically, cleaning methods. In fact, improper cleaning can quickly make a floor unsafe. When we focus only on how a floor looks, we ignore how it performs.
Improper cleaning increases risk
The most common ‘hidden’ danger is a process called polymerisation. Improper cleaning leaves behind microscopic layers of dirt and soap residue. Over time, sunlight and harsh chemicals like bleach or ammonia bake this residue into the surface. This fills the microscopic valleys that provide grip, creating a glass-like smoothness that is lethal when wet.
What many don’t realise is that cleaning can be part of the problem. Dirt and soap residue quickly fill up the floor’s valleys, levelling them with the mountaintops. This change often goes unnoticed – especially if floor cleaning and drying happens when a building is unoccupied – because it happens gradually, and the floor still looks ‘shiny’ to the naked eye.
Addressing the invisible threat
How do you identify a hazard you can’t see? For cleaning teams, it’s important to look for two red flag indicators.
One simple way to check for problems from polymerisation is to find an area of the floor that's been covered by something such as a piece of furniture, an appliance or a piece of equipment. If you move the item and find the area
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