Safety Bingo is a great addition to your occupational safety incentive program. You can be OSHA compliant, have fun, and promote a safe and positive workplace. Not only does safety bingo encourage team involvement and raise safety awareness, it also provides an inexpensive way to potentially save your company thousands of dollars.
There's no need to buy an expensive safety bingo program or purchase stacks of paper bingo cards. Bingo Baker allows you to quickly create a safety bingo game that you can print from your own office. Your employees can even participate in safety bingo using just their phones.
Safety bingo is a great way to keep track of work injuries and incentivize workplace safety.
These are just example rules. You will need to adjust them for your company.
Feel free to use any of the sample bingo cards below to conduct your safety bingo game. You can also copy them and customize them for your company.
Use the Bingo Baker bingo card generator to create your own bingo card with your own words, numbers, pictures and colors.
An OSHA memo from 2016 contained language which banned rate based incentive programs that withheld or reduced a prize because of a reported safety incident, injury or illness. But in a 2018, OSHA clarified its stance:
Incentive programs can be an important tool to promote workplace safety and health...Another type of incentive program is rate-based and focuses on reducing the number of reported injuries and illnesses. This type of program typically rewards employees with a prize or bonus at the end of an injury-free month or evaluates managers based on their work unit's lack of injuries. Rate-based incentive programs are also permissible under § 1904.35(b)(1)(iv) as long as they are not implemented in a manner that discourages reporting. Thus, if an employer takes a negative action against an employee under a rate-based incentive program, such as withholding a prize or bonus because of a reported injury, OSHA would not cite the employer under § 1904.35(b)(1)(iv) as long as the employer has implemented adequate precautions to ensure that employees feel free to report an injury or illness.
Be sure you read and understand all the OSHA rules regarding rate-based incentive programs before starting your game, including the Clarification of OSHA's Position on Workplace Safety Incentive Programs.
OSHA cites $500 as "substantial" reward. Keep your prizes well under this to avoid incentivizing non-reporting of injuries or illnesses.
For the same reason as above, the prize should never reset back to $0 because an employee reports an injury or illness. Always keep a base amount in the prize, or only remove a fixed amount or percentage of the prize when taking negative action because of a safety incident.
To ensure you are properly incentivizing reporting, consider adding money to the prize if someone reports unsafe working situations or potential hazards.
Because Bingo is a probabilistic game, ensure you have a policy in place if 2 or more people get a bingo at the same time. It's common to split the prize among all the winners evenly.
When creating or using an existing bingo card, make sure you review the probabilities displayed in the "Probabilities" section of the page. You don't want your bingo game to last too long or be too short. You can calculate your approximate daily prize increase by dividing the maximum prize size (that you decided on) by the number of days your game will last. You may want to reduce that value a bit if you will be increasing the prize for people reporting violations.
Bingo Baker doesn't endorse any particular way of playing safety bingo. It's up to you to decide how you want to play your game in compliance with OSHA rules. But there is a general help page, and specific instructions for conducting a bingo online.
