Since July 2021, Popwork has been used by the teams of MaVoie, a tech association that helps young people enter the job market.
MaVoie has grown very quickly and is extremely active in helping young people overcome the impact of the health crisis. How are they organized to deliver their mission? What are the specificities of team management in an association?
We’ve met with Philippe du Payrat, General Manager of MaVoie.
👉 How was the idea of MaVoie born?
MaVoie is a consortium of 4 social organizations, Chance, Generation France, Jobready and Bayes Impact that had different know-how in the path to employment but were all faced with the same issue: "How can we reach young people?" That's how they decided to work together and then they received support from Google.org. It's more risky than a neighborhood action but with much more potential if it works.
That's when I joined MaVoie because they needed an entrepreneur to lead the project and with an entrepreneurial background. At the time, I also realized that young people were not prepared for interviews and I had already coded an interview preparation module that I wanted to give for free.
"With MaVoie, I want to give back and give young people the same chances to succeed."
After a crisis, you have 700,000 young people who can’t find a job. We also address 20-34 years old professionals, because there are more and more reconversions and career changes. The goal of MaVoie is to save time, to become more confident and to avoid the situation where you send hundreds of applications, get no response and get demotivated.
👉 Can you tell us about your team and the organization you have put in place within MaVoie?
Even more so in a project like MaVoie, management through meaning is extremely important. In a n organisation like ours, teams are not there for the career plan or the salary: they want to have an impact, they care for the meaning of what they do. As a result, the level of motivation is very high, but so are the expectations of employees. Alignment is key: everyone must feel that they are contributing.
"In a project like MaVoie, management by meaning is extremely important."
As we are still a small organisation (4 full-time and 4 interns, freelance and part-time), it's super important for us to adopt management tools like Popwork as we have to realign ourselves permanently. Very often, we know what the problem is but we don't always have the solution, so we need to quickly, and as such I try to give the team the most effective management tools.
The challenge with a lot of tools is the cost of getting the team used to them and the budget impact for an association. This is precisely what is interesting about Popwork: it is extremely easy to adopt and cost effective.
👉 What management rituals have you put in place with your team?
We have 3 different levels of management. First of all, I have weekly 1:1 meetings with each team member to make progress on operational and day-to-day issues. The second level is monthly meetings where we take a step back from the daily routine. Finally, we have set up quarterly OKRs: the objectives and the key results are built together and we then follow them over time.
For the weekly updates, I had already tried to set up rituals with other tools such as Notion or Google Sheet, but it was not easy to keep them alive over time. This is one of the reasons why I chose Popwork.
👉 What are the benefits of Popwork for MaVoie?
What I find very interesting about Popwork is the workflow and the check-in reminders sent every week. This creates a regular and positive dynamic for the whole team that allows us to move forward together and stay well aligned.
"The strength of Popwork is the ease of use and the positive dynamic it creates between the manager and his team week after week.”
The other point I really appreciate with Popwork is the fact that I can keep track of our conversations: I can keep track of things and be aware at any time of the important topics because when you are a manager is to make your team progress over time and get regular feedback.
Finally, the simplicity and ease of use of Popwork is great: it’s a very user-friendly tool! This also explains why we adopted it so quickly and why the whole team uses it every day.
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