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.
See attached for more details.
As a budding management professional, one of the management experts who has excelled and I have come to admire and would love to emulate in my career is Hayley Johnson – Chief Operations Officer. This lady has won my respect out of many achievements as part of a team leading 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 ideas is Jaclyn Heavens who started the company using his savings after noticing a gap in the market while working as a barman. Today, EPOS Now has been voted the fastest growing tech business in the eastern region in the UK. The firm has won several awards including the Lotus Business wards 2016. My interviewee, Hayley Johnson, has also been recognized as the First Woman in Business Winner 2017. I contacted a 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 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 shaped to develop a liking for the service industry at work. From her early years, Hayley notes that she loved interacting with people and was always a problem solver. As a first born, dealing 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. It is also the act of empowering her siblings and peers to do more that shaped her course in college.
In college, she pursued Human Resources Management since she truly appreciates working with individuals and was entranced with the psychology of individuals and their development and working organizations. By her fourth year in college, she was on-the-job training at Jollibee Corp where she worked with their enlistment group and helped facilitate the recruitment process for clerk parts at Jollibee eateries. She understood the part and role that enrollment specialists play and how they help guarantee an organization dependably procures the best talents and retains them for long. 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 deliver 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 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 that is tied down around a drawn in and community-oriented workforce, sound rivalry, intelligent exploitation of information, a desire to be the best at what one always does. She reiterates that she believes that individuals ought to be perceived and commended for exceeding expectations inside the part, bolstered to dependably hope to enhance performance and ought to be rewarded monetarily for the worth 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 various positions she has held is an impeccable illustration of this need. She cited the example of organizations such as IBM shifting from hardware development to software development of the need to reposition and re-strategize.
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 reiterates the current measures being undertaken to assess employee performance and match that to 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 one 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. Pulling in potential workers, you should have the capacity to pick the best candidates. Moreover, having contracted workers, a manager should prepare them psychologically and skill-wise if at all they will 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.
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 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 frames the focal point of the HRM work. In conducting a job assessment, a HR manager ought to understand what type of skills are required and the best way to attract them. Upon acquiring such recruits, HRM should device effective means of managing the personas of such individuals to keep their performance and motivation up. For most, HRM, the approach to doing 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 in using social media. Failure to do so will see firm exposing their secrets and risk losing 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.
On the issue of the impact of technology on the larger POS systems industry, Hayley indicated that the move towards mobile applications 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 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 about 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, retails 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’s 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 regulation for different actors. On matters cybersecurity, the government has been enacting new laws on the regular on cybersecurity. The Consumer Rights Act enacted in 2015 gives stricter requirements on protecting consumer data accessed by POS systems and organizations. Other pertinent issues are on 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 resource s before and is currently operating in another area of management, I felt challenged to acquire multiple skills in 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.
