Cocoworker: Kiff at work!

Kiff for you, kiff for me.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky said that art would save the world. Replace art by managerial transformation and reduce the scale from the whole world to companies, and you obtain the “quest” of the start-up that is the subject of this business portrait.

Founded in 2017 by Faustine Duriez, Cocoworker intends to “save” corporate culture via a soft-skill recognition app called “kiff” (French slang for Like). Designed to encourage collaboration and communication, this recognition system combines “staff fulfilment” and “corporate success”.

Overhaul major corporations’ managerial ideology… Could that be the (corporate) world’s Homeric work?

We get some answers from Faustine Duriez, the heroine behind kiff!

The starting point

Behind this entrepreneurial adventure is first and foremost a valiant startupper — Faustine Duriez — eager to face the exciting challenges of entrepreneurship. This initial situation rapidly led to the event that would give the young woman a light-bulb moment that would launch her project’s quest for managerial transformation. As is often the case, this quest was the result of an obstacle that needed to be overcome…

With a background in communication, Faustine was recruited on a permanent contract as a change management consultant. During this experience, the young woman discovered the internal workings of large corporations… and a few managerial inconsistencies. There were internal blockages that were significantly slowing the change the company was seeking to stimulate. During this period, she was particularly struck by traditional systems where staff are acknowledged by management and human resources who cannot see and know everything. She noted that this way of operating is based exclusively on the visibility each person enjoys vis-à-vis these decision-makers. This does not foster cooperation between teams and generally has a negative impact on corporate culture.

That’s where the idea came from for a recognition system between colleagues, which she launched at a hackathon at AXA, where she came third. Called I TAG YOU, her idea appealed to the CEO of AXA France, who invited her to present her project to the management committee. Pierre Janin, the then CEO of AXA Banque, saw in the concept an ideal opportunity to provide long-term support for the digital transformation he had begun within his entity.

It was an immediate success: of the 840 members of staff amongst whom the tool was tested, 86% used it and 97% said they were very satisfied 6 months after its implementation. Furthermore, Faustine’s idea of recognition between colleagues enabled AXA banque to win the Collaborative Enterprise award (November 2016) and Managerial Innovation “Argus d’Or” award (March 2017).

Inspired by the success of her first intrapreneurial experience, Faustine decided to go it alone! The young woman left AXA to launch Kiff by Cocoworker, a modern web app spreading the power of peer recognition amongst innovative companies.

It was the start of the human adventure!

What exactly is Kiff?

Cocoworker is a start-up that specialises in developing corporate culture through the promotion of collaborative values such as trust and conviviality. The aim is to enable companies to be attractive and efficient.

To do this, the start-up created a tool: Kiff.

This app allows all employees to recommend their colleagues with kiffs… but what’s a kiff? A kiff is quite simply feedback! It’s positive feedback give by one employee to another in order to highlight a “soft skill” such as a sense of efficiency, communication spirit, creative spirit, sense of adaptability, community spirit or leadership spirit (non exhaustive list).

“Members of staff become players in their and their colleagues’ skill improvement”. Faustine Duriez

Thanks to the Kiff solution, each of the company’s employees, whatever their status and job, has a limited number of kiffs to qualify and allocate each month to colleagues they wish to recognise. Whence the value of a kiff.

The kiffs received are transformed into rewards, and any unallocated kiffs disappear at the end of each month. Depending on the preference of the company using this system, “premium” or “gifts and donations” packages are available.

The start-up currently offers an annual subscription that foresees a 3- to 6-month test period after which the client company signs a contract with Cocoworker. And this innovative value proposition is proving to be a major success to say the very least: Orange, Safran, RTE, April and Total have already put their trust in the start-up’s solution!

But beyond this economic consideration, Cocoworker’s real victory lies in “the adoption of new soft skills”, as its founder emphasises.

And whilst this may be a simple detail for you, you know that for your HR department it means a lot! Far from wanting to replace Human Resources, Cocoworker wants to be a complementary entity, “a collective intelligence” that will work for HR departments and enable them to gather fairer and more reliable information. In other words, a genuine partner promoting sustainable cooperation between the company’s players in a spirit of transversality and co-construction.

A holistic vision

Today, managerial transformation has never been more necessary: disengagement, lack of collaboration, lack of communication and lack of appeal are all issues and challenges that need to be addressed by companies right now!

More topical than ever, the implementation of this new “made in cocoworker” managerial culture has to be accompanied by companies’ willingness and genuine ambition to transform themselves. The keywords of this transformation are empowerment and trust!

Thus, to initiate this in-depth change, the start-up is developing a long-term vision. Indeed the start-up recently launched a student version of its solution in order to make tomorrow’s employees aware of the importance of soft skills. Simultaneously to this programme, Cocoworker is working on the development of its digital offer via the upcoming launch of a mapping system making it possible to visualise the swapping of kiffs within companies. Why? To show that the company is a connected network built on organic relationships.

So you will have understood that initiating the managerial transformation of large corporations won’t save the world… but its implementation will substantially help your company. And that’s worth a kiff or two.

The Cocoworker start-up has been in residence on Le Plateau since 9 May, 2018.
#LePlateau is a 1,000m² space that accommodates, under one roof and for periods of up to 6 months, Societe Generale teams and ecosystem start-ups. Each resident works on their own disruptive or innovative project in large open spaces where teams commingle. Le Plateau provides an environment enabling this work to be undertaken in a single place, but also and more importantly methodological support to accelerate projects, the organising of the residents and premises to enable them to exchange and share their expertise and experience.