As an international construction company, HOCHTIEF exerts direct and indirect influence on the environment and society through its business operations in several ways, both during the course of its project work and after the conclusion of its projects. To further enhance the sustainability of its operations is of long-term strategical relevance for HOCHTIEF. But in the face of the great variety of the 4.000 construction projects, it is a challenging task HOCHTIEF to evaluate approaches for construction planning and develop standards for techniques, methods and implementation, that help to increase sustainability. Therefore, the HOCHTIEF AG and the Zeppelin University are starting a joint research project to develop a standardized instrument for sustainability measurement including an indicator system that fits the processual characteristic of the HOCHTIEF business operations. Manfred Moldaschl and his team have developed a unique approach to sustainability measurement (called Polychrome Sustainability) and worked in inter-disciplinary and international projects to operationalize this approach for infrastructural development. Due to our partnership with the Zeppelin University, the joint project brings the opportunity to develop an analytical instrument customized to the process structure of HOCHTIEF business operations. The project introduced here is part of a longer journey: In this 1-year project, we will define indicators to report the impacts of construction processes on the social and ecological environment. In the medium term, we plan to expand this set of indicators to an integrated instrument for the measurement of the impacts on a project level that is adequate and transferable to the various projects of HOCHTIEF and their processual structure. In the long run, we aim to develop a company-specific standard for sustainability measurement and reporting on project level. The project is explorative – that means, we renounce the aim to validate a measurement tool that already exists in favor of the empirically based identification of the most important impact areas and the development of a small set of indicators that works in nearly all projects. In a nutshell: We search for operable impact indicators in certain relevant fields like procurement, on-site construction activities, stakeholder dialogue, fair wages and fair contracting. We look forward to discussing the relevance of these impact fields with the project professionals of HOCHTIEF and the stakeholders of reference projects and adapt this list of impact fields and broaden our research focus.
