Even before COVID-19 turned our lives upside down, a new generation of digital tools was opening up new possibilities for the future of work. What we didn’t expect was that this future would arrive almost overnight, as millions of businesses around the world responded to the pandemic by moving to remote and hybrid work.
A few days ago Microsoft introduced their new kind of employee experience – Microsoft Viva. Powered by the full depth of the Microsoft 365, Microsoft Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into one integrated experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere.
Microsoft Viva includes four modules: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva topics.
Viva Connections
The reason behind this module is the fact that according to the statistics nearly 60% of workers feel less connected to their team since the move to remote work. This is challenging for everyone, but especially impactful on new hires. Accessed in Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections provides a single-entry point for employee engagement and internal communications. Viva Connections is built on Microsoft 365 capabilities like SharePoint to provide a curated and branded employee destination. Leaders can connect with employees via company town halls. The personalized feed helps employees find the helpful resources they need from many apps across the digital workplace. The content can be customized for specific roles within the company so that everyone can have a comprehensive view of just the resources they need.
Viva Insights
30 percent of workers say the pandemic has increased their sense of burnout. It has never been more important to help people unplug and make the most of their scarcest resource: their time. Viva Insights gives everyone personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights. It brings new personal wellbeing experiences, insights, and recommended actions from Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics into the flow of people’s work in Microsoft Teams. Accessed in Microsoft Teams, this module helps employees stay connected with ensuring time for regular breaks, focused work, and learning. These organizational insights are even more powerful when combined with other data sources, so Microsoft introduces a new dashboard for Microsoft Viva and LinkedIn’s Glint customers. Its aim is to map insights about how people work to employee survey data about how people feel.
Viva Learning
A recent report from LinkedIn found that 94 percent of employees would stay at a company much longer if it invested in their learning and development. Hence, organizations need to develop a culture of learning to keep up with the pace of change and to retain great talent. Viva Learning helps make learning a natural part of both every employee’s daily work and company culture. Viva Learning creates a central hub for learning in Teams, with AI that recommends the right content at the right time. It aggregates content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, your organization’s own custom content, and trainings from leading content providers.
Viva Topics
We all know that finding an expert, understanding company acronyms, or surfacing the content you need can be tedious, especially when you’re a new employee or working remotely. Microsoft research shows that people spend the equivalent of seven weeks per year searching for or re-creating information. Viva Topics enables us to harness the knowledge of our organization, and connect people to that knowledge, in the apps we use every day. Think of Viva Topics as a Wikipedia with AI superpowers for our organization. It uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise into relevant categories like “projects,” “products,” “processes,” and “customers.” Along with content from the Microsoft Cloud, Viva Topics also surfaces information from third-party services.
Microsoft Viva is easy to integrate with the systems and tools a company already has in place. Integrations with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and third-party products and services will deliver a complete employee experience in the flow of work. With Microsoft Viva, it becomes easier and more natural for everyone to stay connected, access knowledge, learn on the job, and use privacy-protected insights to enable individuals to prioritize wellbeing, empower managers to lead more effectively, and help leaders drive better decision-making across the organization.
