Facility managers and cleaning professionals have a duty to protect the public from injuries from slips, trips, and falls and their clients from litigation that could cost millions of dollars. But how slippery is too slippery? How do you subjectively test and unbiasedly calculate how slippery a floor is for anyone in any type of shoes?

Russ Kendzior is the founder and chairman of the National Floor Safety Institute (NFSI) and the author of Falls Aren’t Funny: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Slip-and-Fall Crisis.  For more than 25 years his non-profit organization has advocated for floor safety, developing two standards for slipperiness based on the static and dynamic coefficients of friction.

In this episode of Straight Talk!, the fourth in a series on floor safety with Kendzior, ISSA Media Director Jeff Cross proves there’s no such thing as a dumb question when it comes to safety as he quizzes Kendzior on how to properly test a floor’s slipperiness. The NFSI founder explains how to use a tribometer, a device that calculates data on the slip resistance of floors and reveals how to work with a client on that data. Due to litigation strategies, some businesses would rather not know their floor’s slipperiness but according to Kendzior that data benefits everyone—the client, the flooring manufacturer, the cleaning contractor, and the end user—and ultimately protects people.

Watch or listen to the complete episode below to find out how to fix this slippery problem before there’s an incident and avoid the blame game of lawsuits and liabilities. You can also download an audio MP3 of the episode here.

Be sure to check out the first three parts of Straight Talk!’s ongoing interview series with Kendzior:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3