Yesterday Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Microsoft Viva the first employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work within Microsoft Teams.
Satya spoke how we had all been taking part in the world largest at scale remote working experiment during the last 12 months. While we will see some people choose to return to our offices in the future, it was clear that we were now in a new era of flexible digital working.
However, this flexible digital world brings about new challenges around unifying employees around your common mission and purpose as well as creating, maintaining and growing your company culture.
There is a need to reimagine the complete employee journey through from onboarding and their first few days within the company, how will they get to meet and engage with people socially in the flexible, digital world, to creating content and collaborating with others, looking after well-being and ensuring they have the right tools to learn and grow.
Microsoft Viva promises a suite of tools primarily accessed from Microsoft Teams, so you can quickly and easily access what you will need, connect with your business, colleagues, maintain your own well-being but also look out for others, find the information that matters to you when you need it and access the right training to help you grow and succeed.
Initially, Microsoft Viva will have four modules, but this is likely to expand as time goes by. These modules will offer new tools to your business and employees and allow Microsoft’s partners and your business to integrate the employee experience tools and resources that matter to you directly into Viva.
- Viva Connections Viva Connections will give employees a gateway to access your companies outer loop of communication, allowing them to quickly and easily access company resources, news, policies and benefits as well as participating in communities within your business. Connections is powered by SharePoint and Yammer and had previously been spoken about at Microsoft Insight 2020 as Teams home site
- Viva Insights Viva Insights is built upon the information that is available today from Microsoft My Analytics and has been spoken about as the Insights app during Microsoft Ignite. Insights allow you as an employee to keep track of key well-being information and give you actionable insights to ensure you manage your precious resource time to the best effect whilst ensuring you balance work and social to avoid burnout. Announced last year insights will also introduce further well-being features like integrations with Headspace. For Managers and leaders it gives privacy protected insights regarding how your team is doing shedding light on work patterns and trends to ensure you are fostering healthy and successful teams within your organisation. Insights will be available in the coming months.
- Viva Learning Viva Learning brings all-important training courses and microlearning content directly into Microsoft Teams. Managers get a set of tools to assign learning and to track progress in assigned material. Within Viva content is aggregated from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, your own organisations content and training from external providers such as Skillsoft and Pluralsight. Microsoft is also working with LMS providers to provide integrations into Viva Learning.
- Viva Topics Viva Topics enables you to quickly and easily access the knowledge in your organisation, including both information and people. Viva Topics uses AI and knowledge experts within your organisation to curate knowledge into categories called topics. This enables your own Wikipedia-like view of knowledge across your business right within the applications you are using when you are using it. Viva Topics has previously been spoken about as part of Project Cortex alongside Syntex.
As of today, Viva Topics is generally available. There is a public preview of Viva Insights and a private preview of Viva Learning. To learn more and get started, check out the Microsoft Viva website.
Conclusion
Microsoft says they are just getting started with Microsoft Viva and what they have announced today is the coming together of a number of key areas for employee experience that are required in the new digital flexible world.
I am really excited to see these tools come together and I personally believe that employee experience, curating social and cultural connections across an organisation and looking after employee well-being is one of our biggest challenges in this flexible and digital world. These tools start the journey for organisations to drive and improve employee experience, however, their success will depend on your organisation’s implementation, the culture around utilising these tools and how you can ensure there is a human connection behind the technology.
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