Built for people and planet?

• Features

• 31/07/2026

Sustainability and wellness have emerged as the two most critical imperatives that are shaping the evolution of the built environment, particularly the workplace. Attitudes toward sustainability and wellness vary dramatically across Asia Pacific, shaped by a myriad of factors ranging from regulations and values to reception from the masses. To understand the real-world impact of the drive to make spaces more sustainable and wellness oriented it is prudent to start the discussion with global rating systems.

When it comes to sustainability in the built environment, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is one of the foremost rating and certification systems. Developed by the US Green Building Council, LEED is currently the most widely adopted green building rating system in the world, present in more than 180 countries. It evaluates buildings across categories including energy use, water efficiency, materials selection, indoor environmental quality, and site sustainability. Projects are awarded Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum status depending on the points accumulated across those criteria. On the side of wellness, the WELL Building Standard, administered by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), is structured around 10 concepts and focuses explicitly on human health and wellbeing.

Alongside WELL, the Great Place to Work certification has emerged as a widely recognised marker of organisational wellness. Awarded based on employee survey data and cultural benchmarking, it has become a credential that organisations pursue both for internal culture purposes and as a signal to prospective talent in a competitive hiring market. In addition to these global rating systems and certifications, different regions and countries have their own sustainability and wellness standards. In India, GRIHA — the Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment — was developed with support from The Energy and Resources Institute and the Indian government.

In Australia, Green Star — administered by the Green Building Council of Australia — functions as the primary sustainability rating system, covering design, construction, and operations of commercial buildings, and has achieved a level of market penetration that has made it effectively standard practice rather than a premium differentiator. How these global and local frameworks translate into actual project requirements — and how much genuine influence they exert on AV design — varies substantially depending on where in the region a project is being delivered.

India: Just a badge?

Rhythm Arora, CEO at Qubix, is candid about the state of sustainability certifications in the Indian corporate market. For Arora, the conversation has shifted significantly and not in the direction the standards bodies might hope.

He says: “To be frank, right now, nothing is dictating the market when it comes to sustainability and wellness. The heavy focus on LEED and WELL certifications feels like a pre-pandemic story. If I look at the last 10 to 15 large enterprise projects Qubix has delivered, clients simply do not prioritise them anymore.”

Rather than pursuing third-party validation, enterprises are increasingly defining their own internal sustainability baselines, guided by corporate governance frameworks and independent consultants rather than formal rating bodies.

Arora says: “Instead of chasing formal certifications, companies are now creating a mix of internal practices that align with their own corporate governance. Each enterprise now dictates its own baseline. A company like Salesforce operates by its own internal environmental playbook rather than adhering strictly to what a third-party framework says.”

GRIHA’s influence, Arora notes, is largely confined to the base-build layer — structural engineering, concrete, and foundational systems — and loses its grip once a project moves into interior fit-out and technology integration.

The most consequential sustainability driver in India right now, Arora argues, is coming not from certification bodies but from government policy. Discussions are examining work-from-home mandates as a tool for reducing fuel burn, traffic congestion, and carbon emissions in major cities.

The Indian government has already moved a significant portion of its own workforce to a mandatory hybrid model — a shift Arora describes as a structural inflection point. He says: “When the government, which is historically the slowest-moving employer, mandates a hybrid model, it triggers a massive shift across the entire economy.”

For the AV industry, Arora is equally pragmatic about where the technology sits within the sustainability equation. Modern AV hardware is already highly efficient by default, with PoE devices drawing minimal power. When clients request power consumption data during the bidding phase, that information is almost exclusively used by facilities teams for UPS sizing and power distribution planning — not for tracking green milestones.

He says: “AV and IT are inherently insulated from these standards. The environmental impact of architectural decisions, material choices, and HVAC systems is so substantial that a project can be completely flexible with AV design and still hit its green targets.”

A similar dynamic plays out on the wellness side. WELL is occasionally referenced in concept presentations to signal design intent but rarely survives to the execution phase.

Arora comments: “When it comes to sustainability and wellness, corporations and workplaces do want to achieve these ideals based on their values. But for ratings and certifications, a significant part of the value comes from what they signal to talent and employees. In India, sustainability and wellness initiatives are not high on the list of desired qualities in a prospective employer. Talent today is more concerned with how many AI tokens a job comes with.”

Singapore: Certification as strategy

Chris Pitsillides, CTO at ESCO, brings a perspective shaped by experience on both the integration and real estate sides of the industry in Singapore. Pitsillides describes a market where certifications for sustainability and wellness retain genuine commercial weight, though the emphasis on which framework matters is more nuanced.

Pitsillides draws a clear distinction between what LEED and WELL actually ask of the AV industry: “LEED focuses strictly on the sustainability of the build itself, the infrastructure, the architecture, and the raw materials. The wellness side is where a framework touches the professional AV industry much more directly. WELL focuses on the human element and user experience. It looks at how a workspace makes employees feel and how it supports their overall wellbeing.”

Drawing on his experience, Pitsillides narrates: “For new office builds in Singapore, positioning for these certifications was a strict corporate directive. That choice directly impacts corporate AV design because integrators are the ones tasked with implementing the technology solutions that satisfy those requirements.”

ESCO itself has achieved its Great Place to Work certification, showing that these frameworks are being actively pursued by a variety of businesses.

On the ground, the focus on wellness is changing how AV is deployed, particularly when it comes to audio. Pitsillides says: “We are moving away from traditional white or pink noise systems. Instead, we are seeing the introduction of biophilic audio and circadian rhythm soundscapes — bringing nature sounds and elements of the outside world into the office so employees don’t feel trapped inside a concrete box.”

The more significant challenge Pitsillides identifies is not design intent but data architecture. As wellness frameworks become more evidence-based and require ongoing verification, the AV industry’s ability to generate, aggregate, and present meaningful data becomes critical. The problem is that a typical corporate AV deployment involves hardware and software from multiple manufacturers and each comes with its own management portal producing isolated data streams. Room booking data, air quality metrics, occupancy sensors, and audio system analytics exist in separate silos.

Pitsillides says: “The real hurdle and opportunity today is figuring out what to do with all that fragmented information. How do you consolidate it and hand it back to the client in a meaningful, actionable format? Because if we can figure that out, we can use wellness and operational data to calculate true ROI and guide future workplace design.”

Australia: Converging silos

Kylee Naglost, co-CEO at Pro AV Solutions, a certified Great Place to Work, presents insight into a market where the baseline expectations are already high. In Australia, Green Star, a local sustainability rating, has made the journey from aspirational certification to standard practice, and the conversation has moved on to the harder questions about what comes next.

Naglost says: “Green Star is exceptionally well-regarded in Australia; in fact, it has essentially shifted from a luxury target to the baseline expectation for new projects.”

The cultural dimension of this, she adds, is distinctive. Where India and Singapore engage with these certifications through a lens of client demand or regulatory compliance, Australia carries a stronger sense of professional and civic obligation around sustainable building practice.

Naglost is equally clear about where the AV industry currently sits within the sustainability conversation. By the time the green rating process reaches the AV package, the bulk of the points for a certain rating have already been secured through structural choices, HVAC specification, and material selection.

Her response to this is to reframe what AV integrators actually offer. According to her, AV is not just a part of the contributors to a certification score but should be considered lifelong technology partners whose real sustainability contribution comes through extending the lifecycle of the systems they install. She says: “Instead of accepting the traditional three-to-five-year technology refresh cycle that has long dominated the industry, we can take the time upfront during the design phase to prioritise system longevity and maximising uptime. Designing for hardware longevity and leveraging firmware upgrades to extend an asset’s lifecycle is a tangible way we can reduce technological waste and support those broader green goals.”

On the wellness side, Naglost describes a genuine and growing appetite among Australian corporates that goes beyond box-ticking. Organisations are competing for talent in a market where prospective employees are increasingly sophisticated about the quality of the environment they are being asked to work in.

Sound masking, she notes, is a powerful differentiator precisely because it is an experiential technology rather than a visual one. It is difficult to demonstrate on a specification document, but immediately legible to anyone who enters a treated space from an untreated one.

The deeper tension Naglost identifies, however, is structural. Sustainability and wellness are typically owned by different departments within a client organisation — property management and facilities driving the green agenda, HR owning wellness. The result is that two initiatives which should reinforce each other frequently operate in parallel, without coordination. At the same time, architects design buildings as static physical assets and other parties involved with the build continue without collaboration.

Naglost says: “The fundamental mismatch is between the static environments designed by architects and the needs of the dynamic stakeholders who actually occupy those office spaces for 10 to 12 hours a day.” Pro AV Solutions has responded to this challenge operationally by integrating sustainability and wellness evaluation directly into its initial discovery process with clients, working to clearly inform workplace strategy.

Naglost says: “It all comes down to human connection and user experience. Our industry has long proven that it possesses brilliant technical expertise, but the next evolution is about how we better utilise that equipment to foster human connection and ensure technology delivers tangible value to the workplace.”