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Green Human Resource Management (HRM) is fast emerging as a topic of research among academic circles. This is because it has been adopted by organizations from across the world at an extremely fast rate. The Covid-19 pandemic brought to the fore the utility of this initiative. However, there are fears that as companies aim to recover from the recent downturn, these initiatives may no longer be supported. In this short paper, I try to dispel these fears and argue that on the contrary, the pandemic may inspire firms to use GHRM in revitalizing their organizations.

Green washing and woke washing are two deceptive marketing strategies undertaken by some organizations to exploit the public concern on environmental and social issues. Specifically, organizations may make symbolic contributions to environmental or social causes for enhancing reputation; at other times, they may behave exactly the opposite. There is a rising media focus on such “hypocritical” activities that only do lip service to the cause without sincerely implementing environment protection or social equality programs.

Companies often consider going green as a mere compliance requirement that needs to be adhered to and failing which entails legal consequences. However, there are fewer companies that have made a paradigm shift in this approach and considered the threat as an untapped opportunity and brought forward a “win-win” solution against all odds. In this paper, I have discussed how CIAL, a company that started its operations from scratch, with their strategic Green Human Resource Management policies is leading the World by Example.