Construction
The Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH) announced that it will begin deploying safety monitoring teams to 25 high-risk construction sites starting this April, with operations expanding to a total of 105 sites beginning in June.
The decision to expand the program was based on the results of the six-month pilot program, during which 1,420 hazards were eliminated and zero workplace accidents were reported.
The safety monitoring teams are stationed on-site to prevent unsafe worker behavior, inspect for hazards, conduct safety briefings during TBMs (pre-work safety meetings), and monitor high-risk operations.
In this article, we will summarize the background behind LH’s decision to expand the Safety Monitoring Teams and highlight one structural challenge that this system points to.
The core of LH’s announcement is clear: it aims to shift the safety management paradigm from a system that inspects hazards after the fact to one where dedicated personnel remain on-site to provide constant monitoring.
LH plans to operate a system where 231 safety monitoring team members are rotated and concentrated across 105 sites. The agency also stated that it identified high-risk sites through “AI-based risk analysis using accident data,” demonstrating that safety management decision-making is increasingly shifting toward a data-driven approach.
The significance of this trend is clear: it reflects the growing recognition that post-incident inspections alone are insufficient to prevent accidents, to the extent that public contracting authorities are now directly deploying personnel.
Since the full implementation of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, clients and contractors have faced the burden of proving “what measures were actually implemented on-site” rather than simply reporting the number of inspections conducted. The structure where
safety monitoring teams identify hazards and take immediate action is ultimately an attempt to minimize the gap between when a hazard arises and when a response is initiated.
However, the effectiveness of all these activities ultimately depends on “how what happened on-site is documented.”
This reveals a structural challenge: even if the safety monitoring team identifies and addresses a hazard, it is difficult to retain the details as legal evidence required under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act unless they are systematically documented.
Even if a TBM (Toolbox Meeting) is conducted, it is difficult to prove compliance without signed records, and if communication between the site and the management office is scattered across personal messaging apps, post-incident analysis becomes difficult. In a structure where 231 monitors are rotated and concentrated across 105 sites, gaps in handover and continuity are likely to occur if site-specific data is not managed in an integrated manner.
This is where Digitalpresso comes into play.
Our comprehensive construction site platform, RenameDP, records site-specific risk assessments and TBMs alongside electronic signatures, and automatically accumulates the entire process—from hazard reporting to response—along with photo metadata (location and time).
In other words, the system ensures that “what risks the monitoring team identified and how they addressed them” is preserved as legal evidence alongside real-time location and time data, allowing headquarters and managers to view the same screen simultaneously and make immediate decisions. Automated record-keeping fills every last gap in human-based monitoring.
If you are a client or contractor preparing to operate a safety monitoring team, we encourage you to consider not only establishing a robust monitoring system but also ensuring that there is a way to document that these monitoring activities were actually carried out.
LH’s expansion of its safety monitoring teams marks a significant turning point, as it signifies that public clients have shifted safety management from outsourcing to direct operation. The figures from the pilot program—1,420 risk factors eliminated and zero workplace accidents—demonstrate that having personnel on-site produces clear results.
However, monitoring carried out by human personnel is prone to losing continuity with each staff rotation or handover. If all activities of the monitoring team are consistently recorded as data, and that data flows seamlessly into LH’s “Construction Accident Prediction AI” and “Safe-Point System,” on-site safety management will finally be completed as a system where people and data work together.
Korea Specialized Construction - "LH Deploys Safety Monitoring Teams to Construction Sites... to Eradicate Construction Accidents"
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