Measuring Human-Capital Performance upon SDGs: A Data-Driven Index for Strategic Management in Airport Operators

Human capital represents the core asset upon which the social dimension of the transition towards the circular economy is based, as the strategies for transition depend on people and their skills, safety, development and inclusion that ultimately determine the success in meeting the human-capital-related Sustainable Development Goals. Human capital, however, represents the least measured dimension of corporate sustainability, since the existing practices of measuring human capital involve either its monetary evaluation or subjective weight allocation within the firm-specific sustainability scorecard or aggregation at the national level without the ability to create an objective firm-level benchmark of human capital performance. In this study, human capital represents a management object, and the question is about the extent to which the standardized public disclosure of data about employment, occupational health and safety, training and education, and diversity and equal opportunity according to the Global Reporting Initiative standards could be transformed into a composite index that would discriminate managerial performance of organizations in managing the human capital-related SDGs. For this purpose, the Managerial Performance Index, a composite indicator based on a data-driven approach to creating a benchmark, where indicators are normalized, weighted objectively by means of Shannon entropy for their discriminating capacity and aggregated into four sub-indexes and one overall score, is created. The framework is applied to the cross-sectional sample of the leading European airport operators—an industry characterized by intensive capital, safety and labor intensity but never benchmarked in terms of human capital before.