Elevating Floor Care To Floor Safety

There was a popular song many years ago that made light of slips and falls. Someone emulating the shaky voice of a young child sang, “I fell down and went boom...and now that certain place is hurtin’.” Today, the subject is a bit more serious — especially for those who have felt the bite of a slip-and-fall lawsuit.

Cold, hard statistics bear this out. According to both the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, more than one million people seek medical attention from a hospital emergency room for slip-and-fall accidents each year. More than 12,000 people die.

“Many of these accidents are often caused by a floor hazard — usually a wet floor — and wind up costing business owners and building service contractors (BSCs) millions of dollars in insurance claims, medical expenses, litigation costs and insurance rate increases,” says Russell J. Kendzior, executive director of the National Floor Safety Institute, in Southlake, Texas.

BSCs bear much of the burden — they pay an average of $6,300 per slip-and-fall claim, while their clients pay $3,000. As much as 65 percent of a BSC’s general liability insurance costs go to pay for slip-and-fall accidents.

Kendzior maintains that “elevating floor care to floor safety” is a major trend in the industry today.

Dan Draper, president of Nationwide Janitorial Service, South Bend, Ind., agrees. “Because of escalating health care costs and our litigious atmosphere, people are ready and eager to sue. And we receive the brunt of that.”

As BSCs and in-house cleaning staffs have become more aware of the human and monetary costs of accidents, they’re recognizing that preventing slips and falls is a lot less expensive than intervention.

“By emphasizing safety, all the way from the top to the bottom of the corporate hierarchy — and vice versa — the obvious benefits accrue: through effective job analysis, engineering controls, prevention techniques and team work, employers increase production, reduce insurance costs and enhance employee safety skills,” says Paul Malmstrom, president of Good Armstrong and Associates, a Milwaukee-based occupational health and safety training and consulting firm. “Safety becomes a money-saving and natural part of the routine business operations.”

Donald Zerivitz, president and CEO of Pro Clean Building Maintenance in Winter Park, Fla., agrees. “A strong emphasis on safety is a very proactive tool for us. It’s costly and time consuming, but the end result is that we’ve seen an immediate and dramatic decline in injuries on the job, both with our employees and our customers. ”

Zerivitz, who started his BSC business about 14 years ago, says when his company decided to get serious about safety, he knew it started at the top.

“One of the first things we decided to do was to communicate the importance of safety throughout our company on a frequent, ongoing basis. We knew we had to put the message out because we needed to make safety a top-of-the-mind subject for each person who worked for us, regardless of what position they held.”

College Pride
Dave Jackson is assistant to the director and assistant vice president of the Facilities Services Group of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. “With about 14.5 million square feet of interior space, a diversity of floor surfaces and a variety of seasonal weather conditions, we’re always concerned about customer safety and our floor conditions. So we do everything we can to minimize the risk of slips and falls on campus,” he says.

Jackson’s employees use products that are engineered for slip protection, such as floor surfaces and cleaning and maintenance products. They place carpet runners in extended lengths at entrances in winter months to absorb additional moisture, ice, snow and sand that gets tracked into the buildings. “And we routinely use signs and cones, and we react to wet areas by mopping and drying floors where the elements are tracked inside,” he says.

The university understandably emphasizes the importance of training for its cleaning staff. “Training is perhaps the most important factor in making expectations clear to staff that a safe workplace is essential for all customers and staff,” he says.

Brian Webber, lead certified training custodian for the Brevard County Public School district in Florida, is another strong advocate of training to prevent slip-and-fall accidents.

“We’ve got 94 schools in our district with about 70,000 K-12 students. So we’re well aware of the importance of training our custodial staff to follow all safety practices on a daily basis. Training plays a very big role and it’s important not only for new employees but for experienced ones as well. It’s vital in a school setting because the custodian not only has to watch out for himself, he has to be very aware of the teachers and students around him.”

OSHA and local fire departments have increased their presence as well, Webber adds. “Our department, makes sure that our custodians clean all our schools to our written standards. We provide training, on site, for all new employees.”

The consequences of poor training can be serious. Webber recalls one instance when a custodian thought he could make a floor look and smell better by using three times as much chemical in the water. “He used an oil-based chemical and mopped the entire cafeteria. He put wet signs down, but a teacher walked through anyway and slipped. She sued to recover her medical bills,” he says.

William Engle, owner of Wolf Enterprise in Hammond, Ind., is also proactive when it comes to floor care safety. “I basically do a lot of training of my employees to ensure that they’re all aware of the hazards involved in cleaning and maintaining floors. We give them a combination of classroom and on-the-job training about tripping hazards and about what chemicals can do to floors when cleaning or walking across them.”

Safety awareness and training, according to Engle, is improving. “If you work hard to make people aware of potential hazards, they’ll try to eliminate them. That’s a worthwhile effort.”

Jordan Fox is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer.