Microsoft Viva – a new employee experience platform is answering the call in 2021. With organizations around the world embracing remote work like never before, the challenge of keeping employees engaged and informed, and ensuring every member of the business has access to the knowledge resources they need has become massive. It’s this very challenge that Microsoft’s new employee experience platform, Viva, is setting out to address.
Unveiled by Microsoft Corp in February 2021, Viva aims to help both large and small companies empower isolated employees and managers working from home as well as office staff, and help organizations adjust to the new digital era of work.
Microsoft Viva aims to facilitate and streamline the employee experience through four core components:
- Viva Learning: Give employees easy access to both in-house training content, as well as external courses from sources such as LinkedIn Learning, edX, Cornerstone, and Coursera.
- Viva Topics: Help employees easily locate and access the internal content, resources, and experts they need.
- Viva Connections: Simplify collaboration and internal communications, foster personal relationships, and provide personalized company news and information resource for each employee.
- Viva Insights: Use data-driven wellbeing insights and productivity recommendations to build a more resilient organization, while protecting employee privacy.
You can keep up to date with Microsoft’s Roadmap Roll Out for Microsoft Teams here.
In a post-pandemic world, the expectations of both workers and businesses have shifted for good. A growing body of evidence shows that people’s wellbeing is central to their ability to innovate, create, and remain productive at work – wherever they might be working from.
Investing in employee wellbeing is in turn good for the company they work for. In fact, organizations that prioritize employee experience are 25% more profitable and twice as innovative as their counterparts that don’t. Find out more about the need for and benefits of an integrated, modern employee experience here.
Viva Learning: Upskill and Grow
Microsoft Viva Learning aims to help businesses address skills gaps and empower individuals to advance their own personal and professional development, all without leaving the Microsoft Teams environment. Managers can assign courses to individual employees and track their progress, and team members can share content they found useful with their colleagues, all within the same space they are already working and collaborating in.
Aside from internal and Learning Management System content, Viva Learning allows businesses to integrate training content from external resources including SAP SuccessFactors Learning, Cornerstone, edX, Pluralsight, Coursera, Skillsoft, Saba, LinkedIn Learning, and Microsoft Learn. Individuals can receive personalized recommendations based on their career and personal aspirations, and bookmark interesting content for later.
Viva Learning enables businesses to foster a learning and growth culture across their organization, by bringing learning into the environment employees use for their work every day.
Viva Topics: Leverage Community Knowledge & Expertise
Microsoft Viva Topics uses AI to organize and collect your organization’s expertise and data into related topics, so employees can find the information they need instantly. Topics can be built around processes, products, projects, customers, communities, or whatever themes are most helpful for your unique business model.
When one of these topics is mentioned in Microsoft Teams, employees can bring up the relevant topic card by hovering over the topic to see an instant summary – including existing resources, content, and documents, as well as your company’s top subject matter experts in that topic.
By clicking on that topic card, they have immediate access to all of your business’ detailed information and resources on the topic which they have permission to access. Managers can review and edit topic information, and select recommended experts or content before the topic is published.
Employees can submit questions to topic experts, and Viva Topics will save their response so this information is automatically available to the next person with a similar query. This makes continually growing, improving on, and expanding your institutional knowledge effortless.
Viva Connections: Promote Workplace Culture & Communication
Microsoft Viva Connections offers a whole new approach to shaping inclusive company culture and building a modern employee experience. Viva Connections features curated and personalized news, resources, and conversations, tailored to each employee, and available on the apps and devices they already use every day.
This approach means that collaboration, sharing, and feedback are encouraged and allows each individual to feel they have a voice within the organization. In turn, this helps them to stay informed, motivated, engaged, and inspired to succeed.
Viva Connections allows the teams and communities within your company to connect with each other in new ways, and share their ideas in an inclusive environment. Connections enable you to share company news, videos, and live events and create targeted experiences for employee teams. The program builds from your existing Microsoft Yammer, Azure Active Directory groups, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams infrastructures for easy deployment.
Viva Insights: Improve Employee Wellbeing and Productivity
Microsoft Viva Insights gives leaders and managers the data they need to help their organization improve employee wellbeing, and know exactly where they need to take action to address potential issues like burnout or isolation before they become a problem. For organizations with a large number of employees working remotely, the advantages of knowing where – and exactly how – employee wellbeing can be improved are enormous.
Being able to see and analyze trends within different workgroups gives you the ability to set goals for positive change, and protect time for employees to spend on focused work, breaks, or learning. An intuitive dashboard allows leaders to monitor and measure the impacts of the changes they make to work patterns over time.
The information generated by Microsoft Viva Insights is drawn from aggregated, dis-identified data from Microsoft apps and services to protect employee privacy integrates with Microsoft Glint, and can also tap into outside sources including Zoom, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors. Insights will give your organization the understanding you need to build resilience and foster a healthy work culture.
Contact us and discover why ZAACT Consulting is a trusted Microsoft Gold Partner. Start your path toward smarter insights.
Get more insights regarding Microsoft Viva from the video transcriptions below.
Transcription: Viva Learning
Microsoft Teams is your hub for teamwork and provides a shared workspace for team conversations, files, and apps. And now with Microsoft Viva in Teams, leaders can also use it to create a learning culture that empowers people to be their best and do their best by learning new things. By bringing learning into the platform where they already spend their time, it’s easier than ever for team members to gain the information they need to grow their careers and contribute to the success of the business.
How Viva Learning Works
Viva Learning lets anyone pin a learning tab and a Microsoft teams channel sources include LinkedIn learning and Microsoft learn company-specific content, content providers like Skillsoft, Pluralsight, Coursera, and edX, and content stored in learning management systems like cornerstone on demand, Saba, and SAP success factors search for and select content from the learning library to share with team members where they’re already collaborating, communicating, and getting work done.
Viva learning adds the selected content to the learning tab so they can seamlessly transition from learning to other important work activities. With Viva, learning managers can also assign courses to individuals to help address the skills gap while driving an agile workplace that prioritizes learning and growth. Of course, they can also view the status of the learning tasks they’ve assigned – plus everyone’s completion status.
Viva Learning Benefits
Employees can then customize, simplify and supercharge what and how they learn all in one place. The “My Learning View”, from here they can select courses to help them grow in their career. And as a person, this simple view shows their assigned learning tasks. Viva learning also uses AI to deliver personalized recommendations, select a course to reveal details and options such as liking or bookmarking it for later, then start learning by jumping in when they’re ready to discover more they can search for and share learning with their teammates via chat. Everyone can benefit from great learning material without ever leaving Microsoft teams. Viva learning helps simplify the learning experience for teams and makes it easy to discover, share, and engage with the content needed to drive growth both personally and professionally.
Transcription Viva Topics
With our new employee experience platform, Microsoft Viva businesses can empower employees by giving them great experiences that put knowledge to work and connect them to experts. For example, with Viva topics in Microsoft teams hovering over a topic, gives employees an instant summary of it. That summary is on a topic card and it also lists key documents and top subject matter experts, no searching, no app. Switching the information, finds employees in the apps they already use every day.
How Viva Topics Works
Then they can select the card to open its topic page. That topic page offers a detailed view of all the information Viva topics has collected, including definitions, subject matter experts, key documents, related topics, and curated discussions and communities all there to help them learn more about the topic. Of course, managers can curate and edit this information, add alternate names, select recommended experts, and highlight recommended content.
They can also review suggested topics before publishing and filter to see which gets the most and least engagement so they can shape the flow of knowledge throughout your organization. Not only does Veeva organize information into topics, but it also connects people to experts. Employees can look at their profile cards to see their skills and learn what they’ve already accomplished. They can also submit questions to the experts that leave topics, recommends, and it saves the responses to make that information available to the next person, asking a similar question in that way, Viva topics helps to preserve valuable institutional knowledge and when they need even more information, employees can use the topics app in Microsoft teams in the topic center, they can find and follow information from the organization like suggested learning courses based on the topics they already follow. Viva topics uses the Microsoft Graph to organize content into topics.
Viva Topics Benefits
It already organizes information in Microsoft three 65, however, content connectors give companies the power to integrate information from other sources like service. Now over 130 connectors are available now, and you can use our API to integrate even more sources, Viva topics, inherits the API security and compliance capabilities. So employees see only what they have permissions to see we’re working to extend Veeva topics beyond Microsoft teams. So you’ll see the same topic highlights and other Microsoft three 65 apps, including Outlook and SharePoint, Viva topics, frees employees from time-consuming searches for information and people making it easy to find the content resources in experts can help them succeed every day. Viva topics is available now as an add-on to all Microsoft 365 plans.
Transcription Viva Connections
Microsoft Viva Connections is your digital gateway to creating a rich, modern employee experience. It helps your entire organization stay engaged and gives everyone access to the tools they need to succeed. And it’s personalized appearing in the apps and devices your employees love and already use every day. Viva connections provides them with a curated experience that includes relevant news conversations and other resources, all in one place and get ready to transform your company culture. By creating an inclusive environment, the seamless integration of Viva Connections and your company’s communities means everyone can connect with each other and feel empowered to contribute their valuable thoughts and ideas.
How Viva Connections Works
With Viva connections, you can engage with your entire team from the top floor to the shop floor, wherever they are, and on any device, use video and live events to showcase your important company moments and campaigns share stories and messages and your authentic voice, and provide unique experiences for your employee groups and teams.
Viva connections also helps you target and schedule company news to the right people at the right time, based on your Microsoft Azure active directory groups, you can use your existing Microsoft stream, SharePoint, Yammer, and Microsoft teams, infrastructures to deploy Viva connections with minimal effort, you can even reinforce your organization’s identity with custom branding.
Viva Connections Benefits
All your employees will have a streamlined experience for tackling those important tasks, help them make the most of their precious time throughout the day before they need to return to helping customers or building products, empower everyone to succeed. Viva connections gives you the modern employee experience to keep your entire organization informed, connected, and inspired so they can bring their best to work every day.
Transcription Viva Insights
Microsoft Viva insights helps business leaders address critical questions about organizational resiliency and work culture. For example, you can see that only 37% of teams across the business have strong cohesion, meaning that a lot of employees are at risk of isolation. Best practices can help break down those silos and create alignment. A sense of shared purpose and community across the entire company.
How Viva Insights Works
These insights generated using aggregated de-identified data from Microsoft apps and services are even more powerful when combined with other data sources. That’s why we’re excited to introduce a new dashboard for joint Veeva and Glint customers that maps behavioral insights about how people work to sentiment data about how people feel this dashboard can help leaders more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work patterns, and then measure the impact of those changes over time. We’re also partnering to bring Viva insights into Glint.
New capabilities can help analyze engagement data, including comment data based on metrics like weekly collaboration hours work week span and manager employee one-on-one time. Glint smart alerts also uses this information to identify employee populations at higher risk of attrition. Viva insights can also tap into data from third-party tools and services like zoom, Workday, and SAP success factors.
Viva insights helps leaders know where to take steps to help their organization improve wellbeing and build better work habits, productivity and wellbeing. Insights are also invaluable for managers providing visibility into work patterns that can lead to burnout and stress such as after hours work, meeting overload or too little focus time here.
You can see over half of the team consistently works after hours. That number is high, especially within the context of similar teams across the organization. Viva insights makes it easy to understand current team norms, so managers can set goals for positive change supporting research and data-driven best practices, help them address challenges head on, and they can easily launch flexible programs designed to help teams collaborate more effectively preserve time for uninterrupted work and disconnect at the day’s end.
Viva Insights Benefits
Team members receive recommendations and best practices to help them prioritize well-being and boost productivity and managers can track and measure progress against team goals. Overtime for employees, a virtual commute experience is coming soon to Viva insights in Microsoft teams. It’ll offer a preset reminder to wrap up their workdays in a mindful way, close out their tasks to free valuable mental space preview what’s on their calendars for tomorrow and reflect on how they felt about their day. They can even unwind with guided meditation from Headspace.
Viva insights also helps employees make the most of their working hours with the stay connected experience. They can maintain strong relationships with important people and their work networks. This makes it easy to prioritize one-on-one meetings and keep up with requests and emails, chats, and share documents all in one place.
Yes, collaboration is important, but sometimes employees just need quiet time to concentrate. The protect time experience makes it easy to schedule focus, time to work uninterrupted during the day before it fills up with meetings. And of course, actionable insights are also available, right?
And employees workflow in Microsoft outlook, the briefing email from Cortana prompts them to set aside time in the week ahead for learning and other important activities to help make the most of that learning time. The briefing email will also include recommendations like unlocked courses from LinkedIn learning. Viva insights gives leaders, managers, and employees data-driven insights that help everyone work smarter and thrive.