Workplace Trip Hazards and Their Prevention

Reviewed by David Carmichael, Solution Engineer (May 2024)

Trip hazards in the workplace are an ongoing serious issue facing businesses and workers. These hazards take many forms and can be difficult to spot and manage. With the right practices and controls in place, though, you can ensure that workers and visitors can move freely and safely around your workplace.

So just what is a trip hazard? It is any change in height in someone’s path that could cause them to lose their balance. This can take the form of obstructions or changes in floor elevation. There is not actually a minimum specified HSE trip hazard height, though obstructions taller than 1 inch (25.4 mm) are generally considered trip hazards.

Trip hazard examples in the workplace include:

• Boxes or objects left carelessly in walkways
• Cables or hoses suspended above ground level
• Damaged stairway steps, or ones with inconsistent or insufficient heights
• Open drawers or cabinets
• Uneven ground
• Single steps
• Poor lighting or obstructed sightlines

Some of these may seem benign, and while they can be easily marked or removed, failure to do so leaves the risk of a fall injury and all the associated costs and reputational harm to your business.

The Health and Safety Executive’s 2022/23 statistics illustrate the prevalence of trip hazards in the workplace. Slips, trips, and falls on the same level (that is, not falling from an elevated height) were the most common cause of employee-reported non-fatal workplace injuries, accounting for 179,520 out of the 561,000 total (32%).

Employees in various industries reported high levels of injuries (from all causes, not just trips) in this period. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing came in the highest, followed closely by construction, accommodation/food services, wholesale/retail trade, transportation/storage, and others. This affirms that protection from dangers like trip hazards is vitally important for all workers, regardless of their industry.

Managing trip hazards in the workplace falls within the following safety standards in the UK.

Section 12 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations of 1992 governs employer responsibilities concerning trip hazards. It mandates that workplace flooring and traffic routes be:

• Built appropriately for their purpose
• Free of obstructions, substances, slopes, and holes that could cause slips, trips, or falls
• Not uneven or slippery in a way that could cause slips, trips, or falls
• Built with effective drainage, where necessary

More broadly, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations of 1999 set out employer obligations for assessing the health and safety risks, such as trip hazards, that their operations expose workers and other individuals to.

Finally, slip-resistant footwear used as PPE against trip hazards must meet EN ISO 20345 slip resistance standards.

When a fall injury happens in the workplace due to a trip hazard, there can be staggering costs (as with all workplace injuries). These include both financial costs and human costs.

Financial costs are monetary losses the victim, the business, and even society suffer:

• Lost income
• Stopped or reduced production
• Training replacement workers
• Investigation and litigation
• Fines

Human costs are more difficult to quantify but can be even more significant, ranging from injury to a business' reputational damage.

HSE statistics indicate that from 2019/20 to 2022/23, 606,000 workers were injured yearly on average. For the 2021/22 period, injuries cost individuals, businesses, and the government £7.7 billion, with individuals seeing the majority of that. These numbers alone are reason enough to adopt strong practices for preventing trip accidents.

The best way to avoid workplace injury is to maintain a thoroughly safe environment. This begins with demonstrating that the company leadership values safety, and continues through ongoing employee training, prominent signage explaining hazard severity, and encouraging teams to look out for each other. Workers in a safe workplace culture will diligently prevent trip hazards by instinctively knowing not to place obstacles in walkways, attempt to walk over pallets, or carelessly route hoses and wires.

We can help equip you with the footwear, safety signs, and flooring you need to allow safe movement around your facility.