Select someone in the business or profession that you want to pursue. In preparation for the interview, gather as much information about the firm and its products or services as possible.
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As a budding management professional, one management expert who has excelled and whom I have come to admire and would love to emulate in my career is Hayley Johnson, Chief Operations Officer. She has earned my respect through her many achievements as part of a team that led EposNow from a small enterprise to a global firm within a short period. Hayley joined the company back in 2013. EposNow started out as a provider of affordable EPOS systems in 2011. The man behind the idea is Jacyn Heavens, who started the company using his savings after noticing a gap in the market while working as a barman. At the time of the interview, Epos Now was being described using a 2015 award as the fastest-growing technology company in the East of England. That statement is historical; Epos Now’s current website describes it as a global POS and payments company led by founder and CEO Jacyn Heavens. The firm has won several awards, including the Lotus Business Awards 2016. My interviewee, Hayley Johnson, has also been recognized as the First Woman in Business Winner 2017. I contacted Hayley through a family friend who helped me arrange the interview as an informal encounter for academic purposes. The discussion below summarizes vital learning points from the conversation.
Education
In our discussion, Hayley revealed that she grew up in the UK in Norfolk alongside her three siblings as the firstborn. She attended Cromer High School, Norfolk, before joining the London School of Business. She says that her parents played a huge role in influencing her career path through encouragement and insistence on hard work, diligence, discipline and commitment. She says that her experiences with friends and family in her early years helped her develop a liking for the service industry. From her early years, Hayley notes that she loved interacting with people and was always a problem solver. As a firstborn, dealing with and taking care of siblings also nurtured her problem-solving skills and instilled patience that would come in handy in her career in dealing with customers. The act of empowering her siblings and peers to do more also shaped her course in college (Epos Now, n.d.).
In college, she pursued Human Resources Management because she truly appreciated working with individuals and was fascinated by their psychology, development, and roles within organizations. By her fourth year in college, she was completing on-the-job training at Jollibee Corp, where she worked with its recruitment team and helped facilitate the recruitment process for clerk positions at Jollibee restaurants. She understood the role that recruitment specialists play and how they help ensure that an organization consistently acquires the best talent and retains it for a long time. After graduation, she was recruited at Aviva UK where she worked her way up as a customer business manager. She held that position for eight years before changing her role to work in the change delivery department. While still at Aviva, she would change direction and serve as a Performance and Service Delivery Manager for two years and as a leadership development consultant for eleven months. She later joined Flagship Housing Group Ltd, where she worked as a Systems Thinking Business Partner and as an operations manager at RFT Repairs.
Management Approach
Through skills gained from training and many years of experience, Hayley notes that she has developed a unique management approach in her various roles. She says that she strives to promote a culture centered on an engaged and community-oriented workforce, healthy competition, intelligent use of information, and a desire to be the best at what one does. She reiterates that individuals should be recognized and commended for exceeding expectations in their roles, supported in their efforts to improve performance, and rewarded financially for the value they bring to an organization.
At the same time, Hayley recommends that for organizations to earn the best from employees, they must perceive them as partners and also enhance their skills through training. Such training should be based on their current work requirements, while individual employees must seek extra training in pursuit of career development. In some cases, and based on changes in technology and labor markets, some individuals might need to shift careers or change their professional direction. Her case, as indicated by the various positions she has held, is an excellent illustration of this need. She cited the example of organizations such as IBM shifting from hardware development to software development to illustrate the need to reposition and restrategize.
Payment
Based on my desire to work in human resource development, I enquired about her views on recent online reviews that discredit Epos over poor pay. Hayley described the measures being undertaken at the time of the interview to assess employee performance and align it with remuneration. She noted that going global had been one challenge in managing HR and even decision-making because of the tendency for employees across the US and UK to compare wages and operational processes. She notes that the firm is on a steep learning curve and is in the process of restructuring pay to meet employee demands.
On the most critical issues facing managers, Hayley cited several of them. A major worry of HR management is to draw in potential workers. By pulling in potential workers, you should have the capacity to pick the best candidates. Moreover, after hiring workers, a manager should prepare them psychologically and develop their skills so that they can work efficiently. Once employees who should be treated as representatives are working successfully, they should be given some level of assurance about their job safety to keep motivation up (Bright & Cortes, 2019).
A portion of this motivational procedure includes pay, choosing how and when to remunerate our workers, including choices about the connection between the idea of their occupations and the level of their pay. In this way, HR managers should have the capacity to decide when employees are doing a great job and not relegate that to just their supervisors or line managers. Fundamentally, the performance and job analysis frame the focal point of the HRM work. In conducting a job assessment, an HR manager ought to understand what type of skills are required and the best way to attract them. Upon acquiring such recruits, HRM should devise effective means of managing the personas of such individuals to keep their performance and motivation up. For most HR managers, the approach to performing this role is problematic.
In the future, organizations and HR managers should learn to utilize social media as the best correspondence channel with their staff. Notwithstanding, it should establish strict rules of engagement that go beyond internal discussions. HR should demonstrate, train, and instill discipline among its workers on managing confidential information and guarding business secrets by using social media. Failure to do so will result in firms exposing their secrets and risking the loss of their competitive edge. Nonetheless, firms that will prudently utilize social media as a communications channel will excel in enhancing the free flow of information and sharing of both implicit and explicit knowledge that will enhance management decisions and organizational performance in the long run (OpenStax, 2019).
On the issue of the impact of technology on the larger POS systems industry, Hayley indicated that the move towards mobile application payments is changing the dynamics of the industry. She categorically stated that technology is changing the way EposNow is conducting business. Ideally, the firm’s POS systems seek to smoothen cash transactions, offer flexible payment methods, track inventories, and aid communication between staff. However, Hayley notes that the issue is facing difficulties regarding the compatibility of POS systems and mobile applications that support payments. She believed that most mobile wallet application designers are creating their technology without giving much thought to how their systems will integrate with major POS applications in the market. This brings additional costs to firms that may be required to introduce new hardware to create a link between the different technologies. Thus, retail outlets are more interested in buying POS systems that are compatible with the most number of mobile wallets, a problem that can be solved by app designers and not POS system service providers.
On the impact of government policies and regulations, Hayley cited several challenges. To start with, she observed that governments enact laws relevant to HRM through labor laws and workplace safety matters. The government sets standards for working environment and safety regulations for different actors. On matters of cybersecurity, the government has been regularly enacting new laws. The Consumer Rights Act enacted in 2015 gives stricter requirements on protecting consumer data accessed by POS systems and organizations. Other pertinent issues are the control of competition in light of the need for compatibility of systems, taxation, and currency exchange, given the cross-border operations of the firm. All these factors influence how the firm functions and runs its human resource assets.
All in all, the interview with Hayley was an eye-opening opportunity for me to learn about top-level management in the country. Given that the award-winning manager has worked in human resources and is currently operating in another area of management, I felt challenged to acquire multiple skills in different areas of management. Given that I would love to work in a technology-oriented company, I think that I have to seek more specialization in my education and training to increase my employability and gain a broad set of skills that give different views and perspectives of the work environment and management.
References
Epos Now. (n.d.). About Epos Now. https://www.eposnow.com/us/about-us/
Bright, D. S., & Cortes, A. H. (2019). Principles of management. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/principles-management/pages/1-introduction
OpenStax. (2019). Organizational behavior. https://openstax.org/books/organizational-behavior/pages/1-introduction
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