How Microsoft Viva Powers Better Employee Experience

Overview

92% of employers have identified that enhancing the employee experience (EX) is an important priority and plan to improve EX within the next three years. While this shows a positive outlook for the near future, it also indicates an enormous need to improve!

Now, more than ever, companies feel challenged to retain star talent when employees have new expectations.

EX determines how satisfied they will be in the position. An increase in satisfaction benefits from performance, longevity, retention, and more – consider the measurable costs associated with turnover!

Microsoft is heavily invested in developing technologies to improve employee experience and has created Microsoft Viva to address this specific need.

In this blog, we identify how eight Microsoft Viva experiences provide valuable insights and solutions to EX challenges across the entire digital workplace.

These solutions include:

• Viva Goals
• Viva Insights
• Viva Topics
• Viva Connections
• Viva Amplify
• Viva Engage
• People in Viva
• Viva Pulse

For a complete understanding of this concept and how Microsoft helps enable a robust employee experience that drives profits and performance, we recommend downloading our latest whitepaper.

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Microsoft Viva

Microsoft’s premier employee experience platform is Microsoft Viva. It has multiple applications and features that provide actionable insights into improving the experience of your employees.

Curious? Let’s jump into the eight experiences

Viva Goals

Viva Goals connects teams and individuals to your organization’s strategic priorities, uniting them around your mission and purpose.

Some of the most significant capabilities it provides are:

• Improving clarity and staying aligned at scale: This enables organizations to create clarity by having one centralized source of truth for goal setting, monitoring progress, and assessing success across the organization.  
• Prioritization and focus support: By having the ability to easily share progress across your organization and team with customizable dashboards, it can help everyone focus on the impact that matters most instead of just the effort or activities involved in the work.  
• Keeping goals top of mind: By bringing goals and their related data and actions into the spaces teams are already using, like Microsoft Teams, ADO, and the most popular data and project management tools, we can make goal engagement and visibility much higher.

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Viva Insights

Viva Insights gives everyone a look into how they might be able to improve their performance, their team’s performance, or the entire organization’s performance as it relates to digital behaviors.  

Some of the most prominent capabilities it provides are:

• Personal insights: By allowing employees to monitor their insights into how they digitally work. This can empower employees with insights that improve their collaboration, focus, and well-being. This might be actioned by taking recommended breaks between meetings, having AI support in suggesting when and where to protect time for focused work, and providing ways to disconnect after hours mindfully.
• Manager and leader insights: By allowing leaders to leverage insights and AI-assisted guidance to improve wellbeing, engagement, and effectiveness across their teams or the organization.
• Advanced insights: By extending and leveraging this platform, an organization can address complex business questions and spot correlations across data sources through advanced analysis.

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Viva Topics

Viva Topics allows companies to create an internal knowledge network interwoven with tools and places employees who already work. This feature organizes and filters content based on topics while recommending relevant people, resources, digital spaces, and more to employees.

Some of the biggest capabilities it provides are:

• Turn content into knowledge: Use AI to identify, process, and organize people, content, spaces, and more across your organization’s data automatically and continually. You are empowering an employee experience with access to more intelligent content and people than ever before.
• Curate and organize knowledge: Help your organization’s experts identify, refine and cultivate topics and related resources with topic pages and topic cards. Providing AI-supported insight for those who have curated content for years on what content, people, spaces, and more they may have never had the time to address effectively in the past.
• Make knowledge easy to discover: Automatically display topic cards across Microsoft 365 apps to help employees discover knowledge in the context of their work. This rich experience brings knowledge, people, and content to the employee when and where they need it without them having to find it.

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Viva Connections

Viva Connections helps teams collaborate and communicate in one location. It promotes inclusion by placing value on each member’s ideas. It also aligns vision and mission within the hub for work of the organization, Teams.

Some of the most significant capabilities it provides are:

• Connect people: By amplifying culture Viva Connections can promote workplace communication by bringing together news, conversations, and resources that inform, inspire and engage.
• Empower employees: By rallying and motivating employees with a more connected experience, we can foster a culture of inclusion, manage organizational change with transparency, and encourage meaningful workplace connections.

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Viva Amplify

Employee communication is a critical part of the digital employee experience. One of the biggest challenges with digital communication today is how to craft it well, distribute it effectively, amplify it, and understand and learn from its impact. These are areas of experience that are improved by using Microsoft Viva Amplify.

Viva Amplify provides writing guidance to help craft a message that resonates with targeted audiences. It provides a way to organize, collaborate and share campaign resources to set and measure communication outcomes. Analytics based on the campaign and its distribution channels can help gauge message impact and continuously improve communications.

Some of the most significant capabilities it provides are:

• Use one space to create, collaborate, publish and measure all your communication campaigns.
• Share communication across multiple channels at once and optimize content for chosen distribution channels such as Outlook, SharePoint, Viva, Windows 11, or elsewhere.
• Find writing guidance and preview content before publishing.

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Viva Learning

Viva Learning is a learning and development platform. It can be customized based on personal career paths. It also incorporates learning into everyday tasks, processes, and the tools people already use with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.

Some of the biggest capabilities it provides are:

• Make learning collaborative: Encourage social learning with Teams chat, tabs, and peer recommendations.
• Empower employees to control their learning journey: Support employees’ learning goals with bookmarks, assignments, personalized suggestions, and calendar prompts.
• Aggregate learning from your organization: Help employees find relevant content from connected learning providers, learning management systems, and your company resources.

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Viva Engage

Many organizations can elevate employee experience by adding the ability to have a space shaped for social interaction, including stories, that can facilitate employee connectivity between in-person, remote, and hybrid workers to create moments that matter. This can help to foster and build meaningful relationships at work while giving employees a place to connect, express themselves, and find belonging.

Some of the greatest capabilities it provides are:

• Create, build and join employee communities: Connect with coworkers in communities built around interests, job types, departments, and everything else to find belonging at work.
• Share and discover knowledge: Encourage open sharing and exchanging of ideas, questions, answers, and best practices.
• Encourage self-expression and share your unique voice: Use Viva Engage to share what you’re passionate about and connect with people who share your interests.
• Leadership corner experiences such as the “Ask Me Anything” format let leaders connect with employees where they are already engaging and building communities while providing leaders with deeper insights and actionable recommendations into what’s top of mind for employees.
• Match questions to answers from experts across the organization and put collective knowledge to work, leveraging AI to highlight approved responses, recommended topics, and experts for greater context.

Note: It’s important to note that while Viva Engage has an answers experience and Viva Topics has an answers experience Microsoft over time may elevate this as it’s own set of experiences. This super experience around answers would be called Answers in Viva.

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People In Viva

People are at the center of employee experience. People in Viva is a digital experience that helps colleagues discover connections and experts across their organization. Available through Microsoft 365 profile cards and as a new app, People in Viva is powered by AI to unlock information across interests, knowledge, and goals to improve collaboration and team building.

Some of the strongest capabilities it provides are:

• The ability to not just navigate organization charts but to further refine and filter these to discover people (and where they fit) based on topics, goals, work modes and more.
• Integrated where people already work throughout the Microsoft digital experience via people cards. Available also through a more focused app experience in Microsoft Teams.

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Viva Pulse

Enabling managers and team leaders to seek regular and confidential feedback on their teams experience is a critical capability to remain informed and to action employee experience improvements. Viva Pulse uses smart templates and research backed questions to help managers pinpoint what’s working well and where to focus, and also provides suggested learning and actions to address team needs.

Some of its greatest capabilities it provides are:

• Through the use of smart templates, research-backed questions, and more managers and team leaders can request regular, confidential feedback on their teams experience.
• Along with results that include sentiment analysis and trends, Viva Pulse provides next steps, suggested actions, and recommended learning based on the feedback received.

Managers can choose to share de-identified and aggregated results with their teams to spark conversations on essential topics to help drive team success and outcomes.

Is Viva for You?

Numerous businesses have already used Viva to revolutionize how employees feel about their work and significantly increase the value each can bring to the table. We can promise that since we have first-hand experience bringing Viva into the fold and transforming digital employee experiences.

Find 80+ pages of Employee Experience insights, best practices, and even more details within our latest whitepaper.

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