How to Choose the Right Safety Mats for Your Business?

How to Choose the Right Safety Mats for Your Business?

A safe workspace should be a priority for all employees and their employers alike. From installing hand sanitizers to improving fire protection, there are many ways to prevent workplace accidents. One of the most common injuries workers sustain are the direct result of falls and slips .

Whether it’s an unsecured ledge or simply a wet floor, once you lose your footing, no one knows how gravely you might end up injuring yourself. The best prevention against slipping and falling in the office are safety mats. Since they come in all shapes and sizes, here are a few tips on how to choose the right safety mat for your business.

Placing the mat in front of an entryway

Even if a professional cleaning service mops your floors regularly, the area near the entryway is likely to be dirtier than the rest of the office. Moreover, it is constantly going to be wet, with puddles creating every time someone walks in from the outside when it’s raining.

Depending on the type of flooring you have, this first step can be the last a person makes inside the office, as they lose grip instantaneously. If you place a safety mat right in front of the entryway, the person entering will be safer and they will not carry water and dirt all around the house.

The best mat for this purpose is one that has high absorbing power. Ideally, it should imbibe all the water from shoes and keep it in one place. Of course, you’ll need to empty it now and then if many people enter the building during a downpour or snowy weather.

Hallway safety

We all remember the hallway monitors from our high school days but corridors safety is actually quite important in any office space. Don’t expect grownups to run in the hallways but they can still slip and fall. However, if you line the floor with rubber safety mats, the chances of anyone falling down and hurting themselves decreases significantly.

These mats are thinner than the ones used in front of the door because they need to cover large surface areas. Also, they are custom cut and often run from one wall to another. The point behind laying the floor with this thin layer of rubber is to increase friction , effectively preventing falls. If you fancy the idea of covering hallways and aisle ways of your business with safety mats, know that they are rather cheap and easy to install.

Anti-fatigue safety mats for workstations

Once the worker is safely through the door and down the hallway, there is no need for a safety mat at his or her workstation, right? Wrong, because people are more likely to hurt themselves at their workstation than they are traveling to work.

Whether a person works behind the counter in a bar or they operate a piece of heavy machinery, they will benefit from placing anti-fatigue rubber safety mats to the same extent. Namely, as time goes by, workers lose their focus so you cannot really blame them when they make the wrong step. However, if you have places a rubber safety mat underneath them, then serious injury will be prevented.

Warehouse safety

If the first quarter of 2020 has taught us anything, then it’s the fact that delivery people are among the essential workers who make our world function. However, they work dangerous jobs because of all the heavy equipment in the warehouses they sort and take deliveries.

Anti-fatigue mats can help warehouse workers as well so they are often placed on floor areas in order to decrease stress among workers if nothing else. In addition, anti-fatigue mats improve workers’ posture and boost their energy levels. 

Don’t play with electricity

Every job post comes with a unique set of risks but in most cases, rubber anti-fatigue mats get the job done (no pun intended) quite efficiently. However, people who work near high-voltage equipment, switchboards, and electrical panels, should have a more suitable kind of safety mats.

These mats are also made from rubber but they are designed and produced in such a way they protect the person standing on them from electrical shock. Basically, mats intended for people working near high-voltage machinery are a combination of the characteristics of anti-slip and anti-fatigue and anti-slip safety mats.

Special mats in front of and inside freezers

Anti-fatigue rubber safety mats are ideal for hospitality businesses and kitchens. However, if front of the walk-in freezer kitchen staff should have another type of safety mats. Like in the case of entryways, wet areas should be covered with drainage matting that allows fluids to naturally drain through the mat. Since most kitchen floors have tiles on them, a dry and non-slip surface is essential. Finally, there are special mats with an extra-abrasive surface that are placed inside freezers.

As you have seen from our examples, there is no single safety mat that is ideal for your business. From high-voltage equipment to the inside of a restaurant kitchen, the right safety mat for your office varies from room to room.