What is Microsoft Viva?

Microsoft Viva is a new Employee Experience Platform from the technology titan. It is being described as a people-centric enhancement to your current intranet and ways of working.

At Microsoft Ignite event this year, there was an evident focus on the use of Microsoft Teams and the move to the hybrid workplace. Over the past year, many of us have been relying on digital forms of communication with meetings, networking, onboarding, and even just conversations with our colleagues have needed a vastly different approach. We do not all have the luxury now of walking over to a colleague’s desk to catch up, ask a quick question or show them something new.

Microsoft has announced four modules under the Viva umbrella, designed to combat these challenges and help employees collaborate, work more efficiently, and feel a part of the company and community whilst working remotely. Below is my overview of all of these…

Viva Topics

Topics leverages AI to organise knowledge and expertise within the business. Topic pages provide a collated summary of relevant knowledge relating to a certain topic, including documents, conversations and subject matter experts derived from existing usage and data within Microsoft 365.
This will vastly improve knowledge sharing within a company and help find the right person to answer a question about an area you are unfamiliar with.

Viva Connections

Connections is aimed at curating business communications, news, and resources into one place to ensure employees feel included and informed no matter where they are working. This will be a personalised experience based on the users existing usage of Office 365 and Azure AD groups. A key area of connections is the ability to join in with relevant conversations within their company.

Viva Insights

Insights is a module designed to help employees focus both on their work, building better work habits and improve their wellbeing. With the shift to remote working over the past year, it has become increasingly important for employees to manage their time and ensure they are able to work and take necessary breaks to prevent burnout. Insights will assist with blocking out time to focus on work and suggest when you may need to take a break.

On top of this, managers will be able to gain feedback from employees to understand when they are feeling good or feeling stressed. From an organisation level, insights can be given an understanding of how teams work together and identify trends within the business and show gaps to pinpoint areas of improvement and efficiency.

Viva Learning

Viva Learning allows organisations to provide relevant training to their employees via a central learning hub and can also aggregate content from external sources such as LinkedIn Learning, Cornerstone and Coursera.

Learning has been designed to empower employees to enhance and fine-tune their skills in what they already know and discover new skills to broaden their knowledge. Managers can recommend courses and track employee progress to ensure they have an understanding of knowledge within their teams.

With these key four components combined, Microsoft Viva will be an employee experience platform built for a digital era that we have not seen before. As with any product, adoption will be key and the more engaged employees are with Microsoft 365, the better their experience will be. Viva will work with existing usage; however, it will also learn as the company grows and over time, the insights and suggestions will improve.

The platform is now going through a soft launch phase with Viva Topics available to download as a free 30 day trial with further module launches throughout 2021.

“We have participated in the largest, at scale, remote work experiment the world has seen. As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where, and how we work will be key.”
–  Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

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