Safety Bingo As The New Face Of Industrial Hazards Awareness
Michalis 'BIG Mike' Kotzakolios

It just had to happen.

Bingo, which has long been a favorite pastime, and one of the most popular games of chance, has evolved into something that - dare we say - boasts an industrial application.

The method is called safety bingo. The goal is to promote safety awareness in working environments that are susceptible to accidents caused by hazards that come with the nature of the job. The tools are just the same, bingo cards and numbered balls. The implementation? Longer than your usual bingo session.

The way it goes is like this: workers will be grouped into teams. Each worker will be given a bingo card. Everyday, a number will be drawn and will be announced in the workplace. The workers would have to cross out the appropriate numbers appearing on their cards. The first worker who attains a specified pattern will win a specified prize.

Now here's the clincher: if a worker suffers an accident which would make him miss work, his entire team would be declared ineligible for the following bingo sessions.

It is not difficult to adjudge what safety bingo seeks to achieve. The game wants to be an incentive for worker to take extraordinary care, considering the hazards that the nature of their jobs bring to the fray. Is it quite inequitable, considering that the hazard victim is penalized instead of being condoned? Yes, but the end perhaps justifies the means. The objective is to minimize, if not completely eliminate, the occurrence of accidents, and for this safety bingo has proven effective.

It may seem like a wise approach to industrial safety, but there are some reports of workers who are "taking the bullet for the team." Indeed, some workers who suffer work-related injuries deliberately fail to report the same so that they'd still be eligible for the next bingo games.

Whether this is because of the addictive nature of bingo or the compulsion of doing what's best for a group, we will never know for certain. But it does put a blemish on the otherwise promising nature of safety bingo as a precaution-promoting approach.

Nonetheless, there is no denying the fact that the integration of bingo in many industrial environments has favorably led to a renewed interest on safety measures and discipline in the workplace. For this reason alone, we could say that even with the risks involved, this kind of bingo game is very much worth considering for any managerial plan.

BIG Mike is a well known author, developer and Adsense expert as well as the owner of Niche Maniacs - a unique Adsense Marketing System designed to build long-term passive income streams from Adsense, YPN, Chitika and other PPC services.