Read and respond to each post below post with a comment of 50-100 words:

Post 1.) There are numerous types of diversity that can lead to a more effective working team. For instance, personality diversity would be key to having a team operate effectively. If everyone has an alpha attitude, there could be personality clashes and therefore create an inefficiency. It is also important to have skill-based diversity. Having multiple skill sets in your team can bring multiple ideas to problem-solving and innovation.

Post 2.)Diversity can be many things besides gender, ethnicity, and racial differences.

Age is another category. Age diversity is accepting employers of different ages in the workplace. An example of age diversity is our generational names, such as Millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, and Boomers. Age diversity is important because each age group had different skills, outlooks, ways of working, creativity levels, and more. Each age group can bring something to the table.

Another category of diversity is disabilities. There are physical disabilities such as being in a wheelchair or being deaf; along with mental disabilities such as autism, anxiety, eating disorders, or traumas. Just because someone has a disability does not mean they should be treated any differently. Having a diverse team boosts moral and can be a positive learning experience for everyone.

Post 3.) The job role I want to discuss is a Lineman. I am not a lineman, but my family owns and operates a utility company. We are responsible for keeping the power on for the city we live in, along with the occasional storm work in other states that we do. We were incredibly blessed to not have COVID affect the demand for our work.

Functioning critical infrastructure is absolutely imperative in response to any emergency for public health and safety. Our lineman never have the option to stay home, they have to work through events like hurricanes and tropical storms to keep the power on to make sure things like hospitals are still operational and emergency personnel can do their jobs. COVID was no different. Our maintenance crews still had to go out every day keep things in check. During COVID, so many people were relying on technology online to do their jobs from home, it would have been super bad if there was no one to keep the power running.

This is why I don't think the job role would be any different two years from now. Electricity is essential and, therefore, linemen are too.

Post 4) Pre-Covid the role of a call center representative involved you and many other employees sharing the same space and servicing members or customers in a fast paced environment. During the pandemic these roles were moved to a remote based environment where these agents could access the company systems from the comfort of their own homes. With the ending of the pandemic, my company has began having new hires report to the office while tenured agents remain within remote. WIthin two years I am expecting this to remain the same as management from my company have notified the tenured agents that they will remain remote unless disciplinary action is needed. These have been the guidelines that have been set forth by my company moving forward.

Post 5) COVID brought about so much change when it hit in 2019, to everyone, including people who work in Human Resource Managment. I think the main change it brought was moving people and practices all online. HR people played a very important role in helping companies and their employees manage all the change the virus brought, through becoming more agile. It took agility to overcome the challenge of figuring how to carry out their normal job responsibilities remotely. Compensation, staffing, training and development, performance management, etc. all had to be virtual at that point. I don't work in HR, but I'm sure they had to do a lot of new training to get themselves and others up to date on new technologies and ways of communicating. For example, I think it normalized online interviewing more. I see a lot of that these days and feel like interviews were mainly done in person before.

Post 6)The strategic role of human resources has significantly changed since the pandemic. Before the pandemic, human resources focused on efficiency and productivity. It was of extreme importance that the overall service outcome was excellent and improving constantly. After the pandemic, efficiency was still important, however, employee satisfaction and retention seemed of greater importance. During the pandemic, there was a considerable amount of change. For instance, many businesses had to shut down or become completely remote, while others that were considered essential required their employees to be at risk of disease daily. Numerous amounts of employees came to the conclusion that their jobs were not worth the risk and decided to leave their positions causing a significant amount of employee shortages. These shortages led to human resource departments having to find new ways to keep their employees happy, leading to added-on benefits and an increase in flexibility of work schedules. Now we see an increase in methods to retain employees as well as additional training opportunities to improve feedback and communication.