Microsoft‘s employee experience platform (EXP), Microsoft Viva, is designed to help empower employees by providing easy and repeatable solutions across the platform. In this blog, we will explain what Viva is, detail its six pillars, and share some ways your business can benefit from it.
The Six Pillars of Microsoft Viva
- Viva Connections is a single-entry point in your Microsoft 365 environment to pull together employee engagement and internal communications..
- Viva Insights uses Personal and Workplace Analytics to bring in Wellness and insights on collaboration per employee.
- Viva Topics improves knowledge management by connecting employees with data and surfacing organizational knowledge in the M365 apps and other services used within your organization.
- Viva Learning connects and monitors your learning platforms in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
- Viva Goals is a goal alignment solution that connects employees to your organization’s strategic priorities.
- Viva Engage brings people together to share ideas and experiences.
Microsoft Viva Connections
Viva Connections is accessed from Microsoft Teams. It provides a single-entry point for employee engagement and internal communications. Think of this as a gateway to your digital workplace.
With Connections, you can add your SharePoint Intranet, Yammer Communities, and Company News – allowing employees to easily discover relevant communications and communities in one place. Users will be able to navigate and access the company intranet without having to leave the Teams app.
By customizing Connections, you can easily align the entire organization around your mission, vision, and strategic priorities – all while following your company branding. Within Connections, you’ll have the ability to target communications and dashboard items to individuals or groups using audience targeting. This is helpful to ensure critical content is being seen by the right employees.
Requirements: Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Yammer, Microsoft SharePoint with the SharePoint App Bar enabled, and your Intranet must be a communication site.
Microsoft Viva Insights
Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable insights that everyone in the organization can use to help improve productivity. Insights uses Microsoft AI technology to learn about your habits and the things you click on and access within the Microsoft ecosystem.
It brings a new and personal employee wellbeing experience – along with recommended actions from Workplace Analytics and My Analytics – into the flow of people’s work within Microsoft Teams.
Every activity you’re doing in Microsoft 365 has potential actionable items that Viva captures to show your wellbeing experience, insights, and recommended actions.
Here are three ways you can use Viva Insights to improve daily work:
Personal Insights
Personal Insights is a great way to build better work habits by helping you improve your collaboration, setting designated focus time, checking in on your wellbeing, and surfacing reminders about outstanding work.
For example, if you email someone and ask if they received a report – or if you received an email asking you a question – Viva Insights will bring that recommended action to the forefront. It will surface the original email with the request and ask you if it has been completed. It’s an excellent way to keep track of things so you don’t interrupt your valuable flow of work by digging through your inbox.
Manager Insights
For managers, Viva Insights provides data-driven recommendations to foster healthy and successful teams. For example, Viva Insights can help managers see if their team is at risk of burnout and provide work-life balance recommendations like encouraging your team to turn off notifications, setting boundaries in their calendars, and setting daily priorities to focus on what matters most.
Company Insights
For company leaders, Viva Insights helps address complex challenges and respond to change by identifying organizational work patterns and trends. These could include wellbeing opportunities and workspace planning as companies reimage their offices for hybrid work. It also provides leaders with organizational network analysis to understand the connectedness and cohesion between and across team members – whether they’re returning to the office or continuing remote work. The network analysis also provides insights on what’s happening in each of your offices.
Requirements: My Analytics for personal insights, Workplace Analytics for manager and leader insights.
Microsoft Viva Topics
Viva Topics helps you find experts on specific topics in your organization. We have all experienced trying to find internal experts to help us understand company acronyms or content. This can be tedious – especially when you’re onboarding a new employee or working remotely.
Microsoft Research shows that people spend the equivalent of seven weeks per year searching for or recreating information. Viva Topics enables you to harness the knowledge of your organization and connect people to that knowledge in the apps they use every day.
Viva Topic pages are like a Wikipedia with AI superpowers for your organization. Through AI, Topics will take a suggested topic or keyword, automatically search through your Microsoft 365 environment (documents, Teams communications, Yammer, SharePoint, etc.), and organize these company resources, content, and expertise into relevant categories.
Requirements: Additional M365 Viva Topics license per user
Microsoft Viva Learning
Viva Learning helps make knowledge discovery a natural part of every employee’s day to day work and helps foster a culture of learning within the organization. It lets you connect to other learning management systems (LMS) and bring that information into Microsoft 365. Employees can easily discover learning resources to upskill and grow their professional development.
In this space, employees can also share with their colleagues everything from training courses to microlearning content. With Viva Learning, managers also get the tools they need to assign learning to their team and track course completion.
Microsoft Viva Goals
Viva Goals is a goal alignment solution that connects employees to your organization’s strategic priorities, unites them around your mission, and drives business results. Within Goals, you can create, customize, and manage your team’s objectives and key results (OKRs) workloads with templates and automated check-ins. You have the ability to track organizational goals, as well as assign goal managers and specific goal tasks.
Microsoft Viva Engage
Previously called Yammer, Viva Engage brings people across the organization together to connect with a variety of leaders, colleagues, and communities. You can share your ideas, crowdsource answers, share experiences, and find a true sense of belonging at your place of work. Engage helps employees build their personal and professional connections by encouraging interaction with new communities and leaders through the sharing of knowledge, stories, thoughts, and experiences.
Conclusion
As organizations further advance their digital transformation, Microsoft Viva has the functionality to rejuvenate the current employee experience in Microsoft 365. Viva can provide an enhanced work experience by empowering employees to collaborate and share knowledge across the organization.
If you’d like to schedule a demo or learn more about how Microsoft Viva can be an asset for your organization, contact our team today.
