Imagine that on the first day at your new job, the foreman tosses you a harness and a 6-foot lanyard and says, “Be careful out there!” That may seem like an extreme example of a woefully inadequate fall protection training program, but I will bet dollars to donuts it happens more often than we think.

When employees are performing construction work six feet or more above a lower level, you need to provide them with some type of fall protection. There is an exception for working on scaffolding — the threshold height for fall protection is ten feet. OSHA regulates falls at 1926 Subpart M.