My Big Safety Challenge

Safety starts with people. For Amber Miller, Vice President at Large of the United States Steelworkers Union, protecting workers means creating environments where people feel heard and respected. Coming from a family with deep union roots, Amber has long understood health and safety as a driving force behind workers’ wellbeing. In this episode, she shares her people-first approach to safety leadership and the importance of showing up with curiosity and empathy. She also explores why the people doing the work often hold the solutions, and how listening to their experiences can be the key to building trust and creating meaningful change.

What does it look like when an organization truly lives its values? For Human and Organization Performance (HOP) consultant, Steve Scott, it starts with trust: trust workers to know their jobs, trust workers to treat mistakes as opportunities to learn, and create enough trust for people to speak up about risks. Drawing on thirty years of experience at Alcoa, from the factory floor to leadership and continuous improvement roles, Scott shares how HOP can help organizations move beyond simply preventing incidents, to understanding how to truly protect workers and organizations. He explores the benefits and challenges that come with putting HOP into practice, and why, as he puts it, “Telling people we’re going to make a change is not enough. You gotta demonstrate it.”

Season 7 of My Big Safety Challenge is here — and this time, host Merle Heckman is joined by a new co-host, Jim Frederick, Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry.After six seasons and more than 50 guests from companies large and small, this season keeps digging into the real challenges safety leaders face — and how they work through them. In this trailer, Merle and Jim preview what's ahead: a steel industry veteran who built his career on enthusiasm and influence, a former hourly employee turned human performance trainer, an entrepreneur pursuing zero workplace deaths by 2050, a 30-year OSHA veteran, and a conversation about confronting drug addiction in the workplace.Jim also shares his own path — from growing up in Indiana to running a state OSHA program in Virginia — and the two dig into why building real relationships, with regulators, coworkers, and everyone in between, is one of the most underrated tools in safety leadership.

John Whalen, CSP, AMERS Regional EHS Assessment Manager at Microsoft, shares his journey from volunteer firefighter to safety professional—and how those early experiences shaped his people-centered approach to safety. In this episode of My Big Safety Challenge, he explains why listening, empathy, and truly understanding workers’ needs are essential to solving problems effectively and building trust. John also shares his experiences working at a hospital, and later as a safety professional for a team of archaeologists, and how these experiences taught him to lead as a partner—not as an enforcer. Ultimately, John reminds us how invaluable curiosity and collaboration are for effective safety leadership.

With more than 30 years in health and safety, Jim Frederick of Nexus HSE has worked across industry and spent four years with OSHA, giving him a unique perspective on the shared responsibility of protecting workers. In this episode of My Big Safety Challenge, he discusses some of the most difficult situations safety professionals face, including workplace fatalities and serious injuries, and explains why these topics must be intentionally built into safety programs. Jim also challenges common misconceptions about OSHA, reminds safety pros that they don’t always have to have all the answers, and highlights the dedication of public servants working to keep workplaces safer.