When you’re designing or renovating a commercial premises, it can be easy to treat the entrance matting by the doors as an afterthought. After all, it’s not the main flooring throughout the building and won’t any kind of mat do here?
However, entrance matting plays a more important role than you might imagine and there are a multitude of reasons why you should select the flooring you lay by the doors of your building with care.
These include:
- Safety
- Hygiene
- Protecting your other flooring
- In some cases, branding.
Why is barrier matting important for safety?
Barrier matting is a non-slip surface which is crucial in a country like the UK where it is often raining or wet outside. If people are transitioning from outdoors to indoors, they will bring the weather in with them!
Having a slippery floor in your entrance way is certainly not what you want. It makes it much more likely that someone will slip and could injure themselves.
According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), slips and trips cost UK employers £500 million every year, while the overall cost to society is even higher at £800 million per year.
The right kind of barrier matting will absorb moisture and other dirt that comes in on people’s shoes, preventing the floor by the door from being slippery and also preventing this from being walked further into the building.
Why is entrance matting important for hygiene?
The reason most of us have door mats at our homes is to allow us to remove dirt from the soles of our shoes before we come inside. Entrance matting serves the same purpose. In fact, it is one of the simplest but most effective ways of keeping the floors clean in your building.
This type of flooring can remove a considerable amount of the dirt on people’s shoes, ensuring that the floors in the rest of your premises stay cleaner.
For example, the textile Forbo barrier matting is designed to both retain moisture and scrape dirt off the soles of shoes. This means that it captures a great deal of dust and dirt, preventing it from going any further. What’s more, this material is designed for durability and frequent cleaning, so you can rest assured it will last even if it is cleaned multiple times a day.
How does barrier matting benefit the rest of my flooring?
Because barrier matting collects so much dirt and debris, it prevents it from being transferred to other flooring surfaces. Without it, grit and dirt can create scratches and scuffs on other floor surfaces like wood or linoleum.
By capturing as much dirt as possible near the entrance, you will improve the condition of your other flooring throughout your building, thereby extending its life and reducing how often it needs to be cleaned.
How does entrance matting improve my business branding?
We all know that first impressions matter and it’s no different when someone enters your business. In fact, research from the Association for Psychological Science suggests that we form a first impression of someone in one-tenth of a second and it’s likely that we don’t take much longer to judge a place!
When someone walks into your building the entrance is, by its design, the first area they will see. You can therefore elevate the impression they have of your premises by ensuring that your entrance matting looks smart and matches your business’ overall branding.