Raintree Safety, a sub­sidiary of Raintree Solu­- tions, recently hosted safety awareness and owner­ship programmes for Sasol Technology’s workers ahead of the 2013 Secunda plant shutdown, as well as for con­tractors working on Sasol Synfuels’ gas-heated heat-exchange reforming (GHHER) east-build and turnaround project.

Raintree Solutions group CEO Richard Lawton tells Engineering News the appoint­ment by Sasol Technology followed its success during previous Sasol shutdowns in South Africa, and at the shut-down of petroleum com­pany Shell, in Singapore.

The company was also con- ­tracted to assist Sasol, through global engineering, procure-ment, construction, mainte-nance and project man­agement services company Fluor – the principal contractor on the GHHER project – with a safety awareness and owner­ship pro- gramme during the east con-struction and preturnaround phases of the GHHER project.

Raintree Safety’s involvement on the Sasol GHHER project started in February 2012, while the east turnaround theatre and facilitated workshop process started in September 2012, both of which ran for three months.

Raintree Safety’s scope of work, which was the same for both projects, entailed the research, design, preparation and hosting of an industrial theatre and facilitated workshop process at the designated site and also included a report-back to the client on the process findings to identify opportunities, issues and remedial actions going forward.

Lawton says that the Raintree process does not take place in isolation, but forms part of the overall safety initiatives undertaken by the contractors and the client.

He says the process contrib­utes to improved safety at the various sites and projects, as it changes people’s perceptions and attitudes towards safety, which, in turn, contributes directly to an operation’s bottom line.

The company has found that, while the basics of safety training have been undertaken at most companies, safety training often fails because it only teaches the practical aspects and is not able to change people’s perceptions and attitudes towards safety.

Lawton says that the most important aspect of safety training is getting people to change their perceptions, attitudes and behaviour towards safety by raising awareness, improving understanding and ensuring ownership of safety.

Raintree Solutions achieves behavioural change in people using a people-focused approach in transforming an organisation’s safety culture through the concept of emotional ownership.

Emotional ownership aims to achieve individual and col­lective ownership of safety to change the overall safety culture in a workplace, despite the many cultures on large-scale operations and the cul­tural differences among workers, who often regard safety and communication issues differently from one another. This assists management, employees and community members in taking emotional and cognitive ownership of issues, training and change in a way that results in changed behaviour.

Raintree Safety concentrates on the dynamics between per­- ception, attitude and behaviour – across any culture and lan­guage – at companies and projects whose staff comple­ments range from a few thousand employees on a production line to tens of thousands of employees on construction sites or in branches across a country.

Raintree Solutions bolsters emotional ownership using theatre, psychologically based workshops, specialised video, supervisor training and inter­personal skills training.

The company has clients in the mining, manufacturing, oil, energy and banking industries internationally and has now worked successfully with thousands of people from 18 cultures and languages from 14 countries around the world and has worked on many multicontractor, multicultural megaprojects internationally, including mining major BHP Billiton’s Mozal aluminium smelter project, in Mozambique; Sasol’s growth projects and Turbo project, in South Africa, which entailed the uprating of an existing polyethylene plant and establishing a polypropylene plant; and petroleum company Shell’s [MASSIVE] Houdini ethylene cracker complex project, in Southeast Asia and Singapore.

Other companies which the Raintree group has worked with include vehicle manu­facturers BMW, VW and Nissan, as well as global miner Rio Tinto, platinum miner Lonmin, power and automation technology group ABB, banking group Standard Bank, the Banking Sector Education and Training Authority and construction and engineering group Murray & Roberts, covering issues including safety, environmental awareness, standards, community interface and corporate culture.

Raintree currently has projects in development on four continents and three major projects being rolled out in South Africa over the next two years, concludes Lawton.