Improving Knowledge Management with Talkspirit: The Pôle emploi Story
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How can you streamline knowledge management and sharing within your team, while ensuring the capture of all the resources related to your business? To address this challenge, the Hauts de France International Mobility team at Pôle emploi (renamed France Travail in 2024) rolled out Talkspirit.
Pôle emploi is a public administrative body whose purpose is to help jobseekers find work and to support companies with their recruitment. The organisation is made up of several teams, including the International Mobility team, which is responsible for supporting jobseekers who want to go and work abroad, as well as companies looking to recruit internationally.
Key figures:
- 54,500 staff members across France
- 7 International Mobility teams with approximately 80 people
- 9 employees in the Hauts de France International Mobility team
Since 2016, Sandrine Delassus, Head of the Hauts de France International Mobility team, has been using Talkspirit to share information with her team and with the jobseekers she supports. In this article, she looks back at her initial need, how she uses the platform and the benefits her team has seen.
A need to capture and build on information
“When our team was created in 2016, we had no way to capture and share information about our activities. The previous mobility team only used paper documents or PowerPoint presentations”, which meant that everyone’s knowledge could not be passed on effectively, reports Sandrine Delassus.
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“The result: team members had no way to capture and build on their knowledge about the countries we handle, namely Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Poland.” Yet this information is essential to the advisers’ work, since they have to be able to inform jobseekers and companies about living and working conditions in those countries.
“To address this problem, we looked for a tool that would allow us to centralise all of this information, make it easier to share information between team members and support jobseekers.”
Ease of use and user experience: key criteria for Pôle emploi
“When we started our benchmarking, we first considered Scoop.it (a content curation solution), because the tool was already being used by another Pôle emploi team. However, we quickly realised that it did not match what we were looking for.
We then tested Talkspirit. Unlike Scoop.it, the platform is easier to get to grips with and very simple to use. You don’t need to be a geek to use it! And I find it very user-friendly and visually pleasant to work with.
Most importantly, it fully meets our needs, namely improving knowledge management and sharing within the team. That’s why we decided to roll out Talkspirit”, explains Sandrine Delassus.
Challenges to boost usage
“As soon as Talkspirit was launched, we held a team meeting to present the main features and explain how to use it day to day. We gave a few extra explanations afterwards, but we didn’t need to organise a training session as such.” And for a simple reason: staff got to grips with the platform in no time!
Together with her colleague Hakim, who helped roll out Talkspirit, Sandrine regularly shares content on the platform to encourage her colleagues to do the same. She “regularly sets challenges within the team. For example, during the Covid period, every member had to post information about the health situation in the country they looked after in a dedicated group.”
Some weeks, I ask everyone to find at least one piece of information to share on Talkspirit, adds the team manager. It gets all the advisers involved, it builds the habit of capturing information, and of course it puts that information to work for the jobseekers we support.”
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A tool for desk research and sharing reference information
“Talkspirit is a bit like our digital library. We use it to centralise all the ‘reference’ information on every topic relating to expatriation in the countries we handle: living conditions, practical matters, housing, taxes, job hunting, and so on.
Read also: Centralising communication within an international group: the Amicio story
Each piece of information gets its own dedicated post and comes with a description listing the topics covered in the links and/or documents shared.
For example, when we share a list of job search websites, we add the country or countries and the sector(s) concerned, along with a short description of what each site contains. And then we tag the team members so that they are notified.”
All documents and information included in posts are stored on the Talkspirit drive, in dedicated folders by country (the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.) or by cross-cutting theme (housing, taxes, etc.). Everyone can then find this information using smart search, and share it live with jobseekers through screen sharing in a video call.
“The aim is to capture all the information that each person has found during their desk research, so that the whole team can benefit from it and build up their knowledge of the various countries”, sums up Sandrine Delassus.
Faster access to information
For the team manager, “the main advantage of Talkspirit is its ability to organise all the information and documents relating to the team’s activity.
Since the tool was rolled out, advisers no longer need to spend hours looking for information. A simple keyword search is enough to find all the information about a specific country or topic.
Besides the search engine, Sandrine Delassus also appreciates “being able to add context to posts. When a colleague reads one, they can tell straight away what kind of information is being shared with them. A real time saver on a daily basis!”
Talkspirit’s take on Pôle emploi
Used alongside collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Talkspirit has carved out a place of its own within the Hauts de France International Mobility team at Pôle emploi.
Thanks to the platform, advisers can share the results of their monitoring work, store that information on the team drive and access it with a single search. These were needs that the other tools already in place did not fully meet.
As the Pôle emploi use case shows, Talkspirit is not just a tool for collaboration and internal communication. The platform also helps improve knowledge management and sharing, and in doing so builds collective intelligence.
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Author: Emmanuelle Abensur
