A twist on the classic board game, Quality Bingo is meant to enhance employee productivity by educating its players. The game encourages workers to improve metrics and meet goals to support continuous improvement efforts. Formed by David Gest of The Gest Group (Centreville, MI), Quality Bingo can be customized to fit any work environment and is used to help companies point out problems and monitor improvements.

The Gest Group was formed in 1992 to help support continuous improvement needs across businesses. Gest invented the game after he played a quality-related game at a company where he was an engineer. Gest altered the concept slightly and made it more quality focused by implementing terminology related to quality function deployment and total quality management.

To play, a business first chooses a goal-such as reducing absenteeism, improving safety and quality or delivery times. Employees are then given serialized game cards. Numbers are drawn daily and posted when the standard is met. The better their performance, more numbers are drawn, and there are more chances of employees winning. In the meantime, workers are familiarizing themselves with concepts that are crucial to the company reaching its goals. “This game employs the voice of workers to improve metrics and goals to support continuous improvement efforts in any business,” Gest explains.

Since its invention, Gest has sold multiple games, and has seen it applied in a variety of environments. “This game is even used in my junior college class, called TQM/Statistical Process Control, yearly,” Gest says. “We track absenteeism and use the terms to intertwine with meanings and how they apply. [It is] extremely visual, interactive, and successful.”

The concept worked well for molding company P.H. Sloan (Mendon, MI). The company says it used the game as an attendance tool, and used incentives to get workers to show up on time. Eventually workers began to work together to improve their timeliness overall, so they could receive the incentives.

The game includes 144 laminated cards with 25 spaces on each card. The rules can be customized to the company, although a general set of instructions is included. For more information, visit gestgame.com/index.html.