Breaking the Cycle of Slips, Trips and Falls

Environmental hazards, housekeeping, and human behavior all contribute to slip, trip, and fall incidents. Organizations that address these interconnected risks together are better positioned to achieve lasting improvements in workplace safety.

• By Rhonda Piggee Johnson, CSP
• Sep 14, 2026

When people think about serious occupational injuries, they tend to picture heavy equipment, hazardous chemicals, or high-risk tasks. Rarely does anyone worry about losing their balance while walking through the workplace.

And yet, slips, trips and falls are clearly a major safety problem. According to the most recent edition of the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts, there were almost 265,000 incidents that required someone to miss a day from work. Over 140,000 additional incidents necessitated a job restriction of transfer as a result of an incident. All told, same-level falls were the third-leading cause of DART (days away from work, job restriction, or transfer) cases.

A decade ago, I was struck by how a seemingly basic problem felt like such a thorny problem in so many workplaces. I wanted to get to the bottom of what made it such a recurring challenge, and so I decided to conduct a safety webinar on slips, trips and falls, to help myself and other safety folks get a better picture of the phenomenon. As I worked on the webinar, I became increasingly fascinated by what I found.

I’ve long thought that if you were to play a safety-themed version of Family Feud and the category was slips, trips and falls, the vast majority of EHS professionals would say that incidents are caused by environmental conditions, housekeeping issues, and human error. And it turns out that I was correct, as a survey conducted by Safety Daily Advisor found that 95% of safety folks cited one of these three factors as the primary causes of slip- or trip-related incidents.

It’s no surprise what causes slips, trips and falls. And safety professionals already have a solid playbook to deal with each of these individual factors. Every viable safety management system has a policy to deal with housekeeping issues, and it’s well established that human error can be mitigated with a targeted training program. But despite that, slips, trips and falls continue to be a perennial challenge.

The issue lies in how human factors, environmental conditions, and workplace housekeeping intersect. When a crew finishes their shift and fails to properly tidy their work area and someone from another team hurries through by without paying attention, or when someone tracks in slush from a snowy parking lot and someone else is daydreaming as they cross the now-slick area. There’s no silver bullet that will fix the problem in these examples, because these examples aren’t a single problem at all. Instead, they’re a bundle of issues. One safety concern is exacerbated by another, and suddenly there’s trouble brewing.

Compounding the challenges is an overarching sense of complacency that seems to be involved, in one way or another, in almost every slip, trip or fall incident. Workers always seems to lose their footing on the set of stairs that they’re most familiar with, or to trip over a toolbox left in an area they pass through several times a day. Complacency may not be the most glaring cause of an incident, but when it comes to slips, trips and falls, it always seems to be an underlying factor.

We tend to think of routines as task-based actions that we repeat until they become so familiar we can do them on auto-pilot, but our perceptions can become subject to routinization as well.  When an environment becomes familiar—when we see it at the same time, and in the same way, day in and day out—complacency can begin to influence how we view hazards around us and behave within our work setting. We can even stop noticing small slip or trip hazards because we’ve successfully navigated an area a thousand times before.

Unfortunately, past success never eliminates future risk. And so, when people develop cognitive blind spots—also known as inattention blindness—they become increasingly unable to spot a new cord stretched across a familiar walkway, or a Wet Floor sign standing in the middle of slick floor. Never mind that the sign is bright yellow and standing in the middle of their way.

Inattention blindness isn’t the only negative outcome of complacency. Multitasking is another major danger. A 2016 research paper on same-level slips, trips and falls in an occupational setting found that roughly two-thirds of the time, someone failed to notice an underfoot hazard immediately before an incident occurred. And the single largest reason why that happened is that the worker had a concurrent visual task—which is to say, they were looking at something else. While the old adage claims that we should all be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, it can actually be quite dangerous to walk and look at our phones, or at the person we’re walking beside, or at what we’re carrying. The reason why we think we multitask like this safely is, by and large, a sense of complacency.

This was the state of slips, trips and falls ten years ago as I prepared my webinar: a handful of factors co-mingle to cause incidents, and complacency exacerbates the likelihood of injury by skewing people’s perception of risk. Since then, I’ve visited countless workplaces over the past decade and witnessed this pattern repeat itself again and again. Irrespective of industry, size of workplace, or education level of the workforce, the majority of slips, trips and falls are caused by a rotten mix of human and environmental factors.

I’ve also noticed a common pattern in organizational attempts to rein in slips, trips and falls. Typically, the safety department will place an emphasis on a sensible safety precaution, such as housekeeping. There’s a renewed effort to put things in their place, clean up slip and trip hazards and keep walkways clear. All of this results in a short-term improvement in safety outcomes. But it’s impossible to maintain this extra effort for long, and eventually the workplace lapses back to its usual state of affairs.

The companies where this happens have the best of intentions but often fail to see the forest for the trees. They zero in on housekeeping while overlooking the human factors that contribute to housekeeping-related issues, not to mention the complacency that exacerbates risk.

I’ve also seen some practical, sustainable solutions to slips, trips and falls that also follow a pattern. In almost every case, the successful company takes what I think of as a braided approach to the issue. They reinvigorate their environmental and housekeeping measures while also implementing training on human factors that reduce rushing, distraction and taking shortcuts. Weaving both approaches together usually reduces both the causes of housekeeping issues as well as cutting down on human errors that can cause workers to fail to avoid tripping in a cluttered walkway or slipping on a wet floor.  

A good braid should have at least three strands, and the best anti-slip and anti-trip measures I’ve seen also include habit-building along with other interventions. When people are rushing down a set of stairs, a habit of holding a handrail can prevent a serious injury if they make a misstep. If people are lulled into complacency after years of the same routine, a habit of walking at appropriate speeds and scanning walkways for trip hazards can prevent them from slipping or tripping. Habits can, in short, mitigate the downside of housekeeping lapses and moments of human error.

Slips, trips and falls are a pernicious problem for a reason. I’ve spent over a decade paying close attention to the problem, and I’ve seen new developments in biomechanics and tribology. I’ve seen the development of sensor-based fall detection. And I’ve seen organizations redouble their efforts to improve housekeeping again and again. All of it with less than impressive results.

By far the most success I’ve seen has been in companies that understand that slips, trips and falls requires a solution that addresses all the causes of incidents at the same time. That human factors play a contributing role to housekeeping issues. And that a braided approach makes for the strongest safety net to catch people when they’re about to fall.

This article originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.