Flooring and anti-fatigue matting

Keeps people upright on a surface that is wet for most of the day, and decides how much of a shift their legs and back absorb.

Two independent mechanisms share one surface, and optimising for either one alone produces a bad floor. Slip resistance is a relationship, not a property: it depends on the floor, on what is on the floor, and on the footwear, and a bar floor is contaminated in the worst possible combinations — water, milk fat, sugar syrup and coffee oil, sometimes all at once. A surface that grips when dry can be entirely different when a film of milk sits on it, which is why the honest question is never how a floor performs but how it performs contaminated with what this bar actually spills. The second mechanism is that a hard floor returns almost all of the energy of standing back into the body. Standing still on an unyielding surface is more tiring than walking on one because the same small set of muscles works continuously with no relief, which is what anti-fatigue matting addresses: a compliant layer forces continuous micro-adjustment, so the load moves around instead of concentrating. The two mechanisms then collide. Matting introduces edges — trip hazards — and an underside that traps exactly the contamination the floor was chosen to shed; and it RAISES THE STANDING HEIGHT, which changes the working plane the counter was set for and can undo the ergonomics it was bought to fix. The resolution is sequence: get the floor right first, then decide matting against the finished standing height, and treat the mat's cleaning as a scheduled task rather than something that happens when someone notices. What is not stated here is any slip rating, any classification and any gradient. Those are set by local code and by the flooring specification against the actual contamination and use, and they are confirmed by the specifier and the authority — not chosen from a description.

• Specify against your own contamination, not against a dry-floor description. Water, milk fat, syrup and coffee oil behave differently underfoot, and the floor's behaviour when contaminated with those is the only behaviour that matters behind a bar. The required rating, classification and gradient are set by local code and by the flooring specifier, and confirmed by them.
• Get the floor right before you consider matting. Matting is a correction applied to a standing position; it is not a repair for a floor that does not grip, and using it as one hides the hazard under something that also hides the hazard.
• Check matting against the finished standing height. A mat raises the person, which changes the working plane the counter was set for — and if the counter height was already a compromise, matting can make it worse rather than better. Decide the two together, with people standing on the mat at the counter.
• Buy drainage-type matting with bevelled edges, and put lifting, washing and washing underneath it on the cleaning schedule as a named task. An unlifted mat is a sealed damp environment on top of the surface you specified to be washable.
• Specify the cleaning method with the floor and get it from the same source in writing, especially for a profiled surface. The wrong mop over the right floor produces a floor that looks clean, is slippery, and appears to be the wrong specification.
• Decide fall and drainage before the floor is laid, because it cannot be added afterwards. This is one of the small number of decisions in a fit-out with a genuine point of no return.
• Cove the junction where the floor meets the cabinetry and the wall, and coordinate that with the plinth-or-legs decision. The two together determine whether the bar can be washed down and whether anything can live under the run.
• Walk the whole bar in the shoes the team actually wears, wet, before sign-off. Footwear is half of the slip relationship and it is the half that never appears in a specification; if the site sets a footwear standard, that standard is part of the floor decision.