Venelles Town Hall

Find out how Venelles City Hall managed to :

• better share information with its agents dispersed between offices and the field
• facilitate exchanges — both formal and informal — between the various departments of the city hall
• significantly reduce the volume of emails exchanged internally
• develop a culture of feedback  
• to give more visibility to individuals' actions

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Venelles City Hall, in brief

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Venelles is a municipality of 8,600 inhabitants located north of Aix-en-Provence, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department. It has 160 municipal employees spread over several sites, about half of whom work in the office.

What is the goal of the Venelles City Council? To modernize the working methods of its agents by focusing on digital technology, and in particular on collaborative tools.

Need and context

Initial context

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Until the end of 2019, Venelles City Hall communicated almost exclusively by email and telephone, and that posed several problems:

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• Information was not accessible to all agents (especially those working remotely and those not having a professional email address),
• Exchanges were scattered over different channels (emails, SMS, phone calls, free collaborative messaging), and that made communication difficult between the different departments of the city hall.

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To meet these challenges, Venelles City Hall sought to deploy an enterprise social network that would make information sharing more fluid and better connect agents working on different sites, in the offices and in the field.

Why did you choose Talkspirit?

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Talkspirit quickly established itself as THE solution to meet the internal communication needs of the city hall. In fact, the platform stood out for its:

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• its ergonomics and simplicity of use, which allows any user to quickly catch on,
• its 100% made in France, which allows it to remain close to its initial customer base, but also to guarantee the security of their data thanks to France-based hosting,
• its ability to integrate customer requests into its roadmap, and to continuously evolve its functionalities.

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Implementation Process

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Deployed at the end of 2019 in parallel with other collaborative software, Talkspirit is strongly supported by the city manager, which helps propel the integration of the tool.

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The initial lockdown of March 2020 arriving shortly after also allows to accelerate the deployment of Talkspirit. In this period of mandatory telecommuting, "the tool thus makes it possible to federate agents. It's also a way to keep a team cohesion that is essential when working remotely," reports Carine Ponsot, who leads the local government's internal communication.

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Benefits

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1. Better shared information

Talkspirit is a real asset for internal communication within the city hall. No more constant emails throughout the day: henceforth, all information passes through the platform, saving employees time. For example, "we publish our monthly internal newsletter, as well as events and news from around town, on the news feed. For example, they can now access HR information, and even best practices," reports Carine Ponsot. 

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All this information is shared in groups organized by theme or by project, which allows everyone to be continuously informed of the news that concerns him or her, but also to find it easily thanks to the integrated search engine. Agents can then like and/or leave comments on each publication to share additional information, congratulate certain initiatives, or simply give their opinion. 

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2. More dynamic exchanges

Talkspirit also contributes to boosting exchanges between different departments. Thanks to the chat, everyone can exchange in real time with any of their colleagues, whether they're in the office or working from home or elsewhere. 

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The tool allows immediate feedback teams (like in the context of a show set-up), to collect their opinion (via the survey module), but also to answer their questions live. For Nicolas Greff, Head of Green Spaces at the city hall, there's no photo: "it's much faster than an email or a text message." Above all, it allows employees to be reachable at any time—via PC as well as on the phone.

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3. Strengthened team cohesion

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Another key benefit is that Talkspirit brings together all the city hall's employees, thanks in particular to the many informal groups that have been a real success. Michel Gueit, Director of Digital Innovation and IT, mentions for example the group "La Machine à café (the coffeepot)," where people can talk about anything and everything, or "La Mairie dans la marmite (city hall cooking pot)," where employees regularly exchange cooking recipes.

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And that's not all! Nicolas Greff has also created a group called "One day, one flower," where he asks a riddle about a flower every day, and rewards the winners with a box of bulbs. An initiative that "contributes to create a very friendly atmosphere on the network," and to strengthen the links between the different teams, reports Carine Ponsot.

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4. A better knowledge of the different services

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For Sabine Grimault, Director of the Culture and Territory Animation Department, "Talkspirit is a real revolution for the team [...]because it allows us to know what the other is doing internally, but also to understand what is being done within the department.

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Thanks to the publications, each department can highlight the initiatives it has undertaken, which contributes to bringing more visibility to the actions of each other, but also—and above all—to enhancing the work of the agents. As a result, employees have a better understanding of the work of their colleagues and are able to exchange information more freely with each other.

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More information in this blog post.