The Importance of Walk-Off Mats
The Importance of Walk-Off Mats
Episode 61
Most of our clients don’t understand the importance of walk-off mats. That’s not because they’re crude or lacking smarts. It’s simply because they don’t think about the beating a floor takes throughout the years and seasons. The change of weather and variation of rain, snow and ice impact how a building ages and how much it costs to maintain.
Walk-Off Mats Are Necessary
Unless you and your clients are living in the “perfect place”, their buildings need walk-off mats. Many customer-staff entering their place of employment are probably familiar with a “welcome mat”. A lot of homes and apartments will have these outside their door as well as inside. It’s a common item. But in your clients BUSINESS location, foot traffic is a double-edged sword. By that I mean:
1. Your customer needs their employees to show up for work. Many need customers and vendors to come into their locations
2. They also need to maintain the safe use of their business locations
Floor Care & Budgets
Good floor mats and walk-off mats aren’t cheap. The first push back you’re likely to get is from your client’s owner or accountant. If you want a few phrases to use, we have them for you. Contact me here. I won’t call these “magical words”. I WILL ask you to let me know how they’ve worked for you!
Walk-Off Mats Work for You and Your Customers
Walk-off mats are a tool for facilities managers building service contractors. As the cleaning professionals, a proper mat-strategy will help to reduce the time you spend vacuuming everywhere else. It will also focus on a billable service. Keep in mind that service will most likely be seasonal. And it may also positively impact your client’s insurance rates.
Being the Go-To Contact
Unless your client is a flooring AND floor care specialist, they’ll look to you. When you become their facilities and cleaning expert, your business grows. In order to reach that point, you may need information and regular coaching. At DOC’s, we serve our clients every day. My goal is helping commercial cleaning owners provide outstanding service. It’s a dirty world. Cleaning for health and safety is a skill we help our customers refine every day. And we’d be happy to help your company grow as well!
This Week’s Podcast transcript can be found below.
00:09 Ray
Folks, we’re back and we’re talking about the importance of a walk off mats. But before we jump into today’s episode, I want to thank you for stopping by, for listening, for taking the time. We are looking to grow the channel and looking to reach more cleaning professionals. If you would be so kind, please like, subscribe, and share when you get the opportunity. Joel, I rarely think about walk-off mats until I see them laid wrong. The only reason I know that they’re laid wrong is because you’ve taught me.
00:36 Joel
Or that you trip over them.
00:38 Ray
Well, there’s that, too.
00:40 Joel
Or you slip and fall on the floor because there aren’t any. Yes. The importance of walk-off mats. It is a critical piece to keeping a building clean. There’s been studies that have been done and textbooks through the ISSA. It costs anywhere from about $750 to over $1,200 to remove a pound of dirt from a building. When you want to cut the cost of your cleaning contract, you increase the number of walk-off mats you have because 90 % to 95 % of all soil comes in off of people’s feet from the outside. And it gets tracked into a building and walked through a building. And if you don’t have the proper frequencies of cleaning in place, it keeps tracking, tracking, tracking throughout the building. But that is how you get 90 to 95 % of the soil that is being removed comes through the front door or any other entrance into a facility.
01:33 Ray
Joel, let me ask, what’s the strategy in this? I’ve seen mats on the outside, a door on the inside of the doors. How far does the weather or the general conditions change how those things are laid out? We’re in the northeast. We’re looking at snow this time of year. It’s January, but there will be rain. There will be other things as spring rolls in. Some summers are wetter or drier than others. What’s the plan around those?
01:57 Joel
That’s an excellent observation Most people wouldn’t even have noticed most of what you talked about. There is a whole strategy behind what, when, where, why, and how. In essence, there’s three types of walk-off mats.
One is a heavy-duty scraper that you should walk on, and usually those should be placed outside the building. We live in the Northeast. Unfortunately, most of the buildings that are designed in the Northeast don’t have an area that can be covered to put off the proper amount of walk-off mat of that scraper-type mat to remove things in January when you’re dealing with rock salt and ice melts and things like that. Because it gets caught. You’re trying to scrape that off the bottom of your boot or footwear. No. Sometimes they may have to put it on the inside or even in the vestibular area between the air locks or whatever. But even then, you don’t normally see a scraper mat anywhere. They usually have one of two kinds. Transition mats have qualities of both a cotton to absorb the moisture on a person’s foot, as well as additional scrapers that are in it. There’s less of them that are plastic, but will continue to clean the bottom of the shoe.
03:08 Joel
And again, you should have 10 to 12 feet of that transition matting.
03:08 Ray
And then there’s?
03:08 Joel
And then there is the absorbent mats, which are all cotton to dry the foot. And again, it needs to be 10 to 15 feet to get that 8 to 10 steps to actually dry the foot.
03:25 Ray
Okay.
03:26 Joel
There’s key features, even with these mats themselves. Soil comes in, and it gets caught in the mats. So you have to have a very aggressive vacuuming program to remove that stuff out of the mats. If you’re having a service that comes in and replaces the mats, particularly in the Northeast, they have their spring and summer matting schedule, which might be one pickup a week. And then depending on the fall, it might move to 2-3 times a week. It gets increased if it’s a wetter fall. (Sure.) And then when you get into winter, it may again It should be like three to even as many as five times a week or should be. Now, sometimes it gets serviced in-house, and they have to be extracted. (See our Blog 6 Steps to Prepare your facility for Winter) Because when you’re talking about the first, the true scraper mats, those need to be power wash cleaned, because they’re used to be held and hold everything. Those transition mats, because of the scraper properties, want to hold the soils a little bit. So, it’s a little bit more aggressive, to try to clean those to get those out. You don’t want mats to creep along the floor either. So, quality matters.
04:34 Joel
If they’re too thin and people walk on them, they start walking across the floor. Well, what then some people do is they’ll put carpet tape underneath it and stick it to the floor And then you have a bigger mess. Which is another podcast down the road that we’ll talk about. That’s something that can happen. If they creep and bunch up under a door and you have a fire, you may not be able to open the door. So, this is all things you have to think about.
05:00 Ray
Actually, the question I was going to there was a trip hazard.
05:04 Joel
And the trip hazard because if they’re too thin. We’ve all seen them where they curl up on the edges. And you should have a beveled edge so that it’s easy to walk on and off of these mats. Even when they start wearing through, where you see the rubber backing. Once you see that, you really should replace the mat because one, it’s no longer effective for its use. But it also becomes a slip/fall hazard. So, there’s a lot of things you have to consider with walk-off mats that you may not realize. And as a building service contractor, you want to make sure that you’re being your customer’s advocate and pointing out when these mats need to be replaced. Even if it’s through a laundry service. Those mats should be pulled out a service because it was going to be at fault for the slip fall.
05:48 Ray
Right? Your customer, the cleaning company owner, is expected to be their customer’s advocate. It’s not the idea of, I’m trying to charge you less. We’re trying to maintain your space better. And there are times that you’re going to be upset that my crew’s vacuum cleaner didn’t pick up all the rock salt. It can’t. I mean, not realistically.
06:08 Joel
Correct. Then one of your earlier questions are, what about different areas of the United States? Because that’s where we are. That is a great question because I had a client that was in the Mojave Desert.
06:21 Ray
Are you serious?
06:23 Joel
Yes. So here we are. They’re asking me they get less than a half inch of rain a year. So they don’t need the absorbent mats. They need scraper mats, for the most part, with maybe a few transition mats in case they get that half-inch of rain. So again, because we’re trying to capture the sand and the grit and the things before it walks into the buildings. Yes, you change what your needs are based on where are you located. What are the weather conditions of your community? Just because I say these are the three because I’m in the Northeast doesn’t mean that you need those three types of mats in the middle of a desert. So, you have to be observant about what you need. And you may not need as many types of mats. Which then requires that if you want to capture more, okay, I got 15 feet of mat, but I don’t need these other mats. Well, maybe you add another 15 feet so that you’ve got now 30 feet that people are walking on to remove the stuff. Another key point. Mats need to be in where the traffic pattern is. You don’t want it to look like esthetics, where it looks nice and neat and clean.
07:35 Joel
No, these are for protection. It’s to reduce slip falls. If you have an area that people have to go to before they go up the elevators, the mats should lead to the area, not straight down the middle of a hallway to lead to the elevators if they’re supposed to go to the concierge desk first. It’s all about the safety of the people that are entering the building and not the esthetics of how it looks. That’s for an architect to worry about or a designer, and I’m neither of those.
08:05 Ray
What you’re telling me is much like present company, this is for function, not beauty.
08:12 Joel
Well, I am on the heavier side of the Northeast, and it is winter. So yes, the warmth.
08:18 Ray
I’m sharing the title. Joel, thank you for our Cleaning Company owners who are listening in. Contact Joel to get the advice on how to best approach your customers. This solidifies the fact that you are their advocate, and you are their cleaning professional. Joel, thank you.
Joel
You’re welcome.