How to Select the Right Commercial Flooring For Your Business

Fitting out your commercial premises or industrial space can be a complex undertaking. Take flooring for instance. From simple office carpeting to high-grade commercial epoxy resin flooring for factory floors, there’s a huge range of choice for all sorts of requirements.

When choosing commercial flooring, it’s important to understand the different types of flooring available, along with their properties and characteristics, to enable you to make the right decision for your business needs. Here are 5 key factors you should be considering before you make a purchase decision and place the order.

Durability and practicality

First of all, it’s essential to think about what the floor will be used for, and the level and type of traffic it will receive. For instance, it might be the case in an industrial environment that the flooring needs to be able to bear the heavy loads of large machinery. Alternatively, a commercial retail space will have a high footfall of customers and staff members, in which case it needs to be hard wearing while still being comfortable to walk on. What’s more, from a practical perspective, it’s worth noting that commercial and industrial maintenance, cleaning and care costs can differ enormously depending on the kind of flooring in situ.

Hygiene

Do you require your commercial flooring to be hygienic? Obviously, if your business operates in an industry where high levels of hygiene are not just essential but regulated by law, such as pharmaceutical testing or food production, then it should go without saying that you ought to be investing in suitable, easy-to-clean hygienic flooring.

For this, you may find it most useful to work with a specialist commercial flooring installer. Ideally, you should opt for seamless flooring to ensure an entirely bacteria-free workspace, with drainage channels where appropriate that must be kept free-flowing at all times. Speak to a specialist such as MTS Cleansing who are part of the Water Jetting Association, and look out for water recycling units, Disab industrial vacuum units.

Health and safety

As a business owner, you have a responsibility to provide a working environment that complies with safety guidelines and ensure as low a risk as possible to your staff and visitors. Health and safety compliance is particularly important in areas such as kitchens and bathrooms, which may well require specialist safety flooring. Choose a floor that has an impervious surface and slip resistance properties, for all round peace of mind. Should an injury occur in the workplace due to flooring that’s unfit for purpose, people can get injured and your company may be held legally accountable.

Colour and branding

In any commercial environment, it can be valuable to take advantage of potential branding opportunities. Many companies choose to purchase a range of branding accessories such as signs for their door or large murals of their company logo for their interior, but then forget that colour also plays an important role to reinforce brand image. Flooring manufacturers understand this all too well, and it is now possible to have flooring installed in a vast choice of different colours. This will allow you to easily find one to match your brand and add to the overall feel and aesthetic of your facility.

Industry support

Rather than a general commercial floor, ensure that you choose flooring that has been specifically designed for your particular industrial application. For example, in a commercial environment such as a shop or a hotel, you could opt for a resin floor with decorative PVA flakes and other aesthetic additions to enhance the customer experience. In a medical or laboratory environment, by contrast, safety and practicality are always going to be more important than just good looks. In this case, choose hygiene and slip resistance as essential flooring characteristics.