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Safety Bingo
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.
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