Microsoft Viva Transforming Employee Experience

With remote and hybrid working being the norm, employees face a growing imbalance between work and life which could lead to a greater risk of burnout and decreased wellbeing. This is a worrying trend that can lead to lower productivity, employee disengagement, or staff retention. To truly empower your people to feel connected and supported to bring their best selves to work, you need to rethink your employee experience strategies. Adopting new flexible workplace approaches, working models, and employee experience platforms are critical to improving engagement, employee wellbeing, and helping your people succeed.

This is where Microsoft Viva can help.

Microsoft Viva can help your organization empower employees, create a collaborative culture, and most importantly, lets you reimagine your employee experience. Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated experience that empowers people and teams to be their best — whenever and wherever they are working. It’s embedded in the Microsoft 365 suite and is integrated with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. Microsoft Viva is easily customizable, accessible from anywhere you work, and integrates with tools you already use to meet your unique needs.

A New Kind of Employee Experience

Microsoft Viva consists of four modules: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning. All modules are generally available, and when you purchase just one plan, the new Viva suite, you have access to all of them.

Viva Connections

Employee engagement helps create a better work culture, reduce staff turnover, increase productivity, build better work and customer relationships, and improve your bottom line. The Connections module aims to boost employee engagement by helping employees stay informed and connected no matter where they are working. It facilitates access to internal communications and company resources, allowing employees to access everything from company news, policies, and benefits to employee resource groups or communities they want to join.

Key features include:

  • Curated access to company news, resources, and announcements.
  • Personalized feeds, including workplace groups and Yammer communities.
  • A custom dashboard connects employees to tools and resources.
  • The company-branded SharePoint portal is accessible via the Teams toolbar.
  • The ability to pin files and videos from Microsoft OneDrive and Microsoft Stream.

Viva Insights

Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights and recommended actions that help everyone in an organization thrive. Insights encourages the empowerment of individuals, teams, and organizations in their quest to achieve better work habits and routines while improving business outcomes with personalized insights and recommended actions.

It offers employees personal insights and recommendations to prioritize wellbeing and boost productivity, while managers can see trends at an organizational and team level and recommendations to help improve and better balance team wellbeing and workload.

Viva Insights helps company leaders address complex challenges and respond to change by highlighting organizational trends and work patterns. These could include wellbeing opportunities and things like space planning as companies reimagine their offices for hybrid work. Viva Insights also provides leaders with organizational network analysis to understand the connectedness and cohesion between and across teams.

Viva Insights incorporates:

  • Manager insights into employee productivity and burnout markers.
  • Visibility of team patterns and potential areas of concern.
  • Employee resources and actionable advice on finding work-life balance, such as recommendations to stay connected with colleagues or take a break from screen-time.
  • Quiet time to create better boundaries between personal life and work life. Users can configure quiet time to silence mobile notifications from Outlook and Teams outside of working hours and provide personalized insights on how consistently users are disconnecting.
  • Guided meditations from apps such as Headspace to help people start the day grounded, relax their minds before a big presentation, or disconnect from work in the evening.
  • Effective meetings experience to warn you of potential meeting overload as back-to-back meetings make it harder to stay engaged and focused. Meeting organizers can view personalized insights and suggestions to help improve their meeting habits and feedback to help improve their meetings.

Viva Topics

The Topics module provides AI-powered knowledge discovery assistance that identifies information and experts throughout the organization. It organizes content into shared topics, allowing employees to find the information they’re looking for easily. And what’s great is that these topic pages are surfaced as Topic Cards right in the flow of work in Office and Teams.

Using Topics, employees have a personalized platform to find appropriate tools, conversations, and news they need to perform their daily jobs efficiently. Employees will be able to find the following information about any topic:

  • Definition
  • Relevant people to contact
  • Important documents about the topic
  • Related topics
  • Relevant team and web resources

You can edit this information just like a Wikipedia page, updating the information whenever required.

Viva Learning

Workplace learning can improve employee performance by giving them the means to grow with the company and contribute to a culture built around performance. It can help the company’s mission and vision and is a highly effective tool to engage employees and invest in the company’s growth. With Viva’s Learning module, you can empower your employees to develop the skills needed to grow in the company.

Microsoft Viva Learning makes training and professional development opportunities more discoverable and accessible within an employee’s workflow by connecting content from your organization, Learning Management Systems, LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and third-party providers. Viva Learning allows people to share resources and lessons just like they’d share other content types. So, employees can discuss and share lessons in chats or tabs.

Viva Learning helps:

  • Make learning a natural part of both every employee’s daily work and company culture
  • Combine all your learning content in one place
  • Empower managers to curate, assign, and track learning and report on training within and across teams.
  • Align education with business outcomes and individual goals

What Makes Microsoft Viva Unique?

Designed to be an open and extensible platform, with a strong and growing ecosystem of partners, Microsoft Viva is easy to integrate with the systems and tools your company already has in place, such as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Here are a few things that make Microsoft Viva stand out:

  • Viva puts people at the center, uniting them to share knowledge, skills, resources, and connections in the natural flow of the workday. It’s designed to be intuitive and easy to use to drive adoption and immediate value.
  • It delivers personalized and actionable insights throughout the workday. It aligns the everyday work of leaders, teams, and individuals to core business goals.
  • It offers privacy and security you can trust. For example, your personal insights are visible only to you, while insights for managers and leaders use aggregated and de-identified data, ensuring privacy protection every step of the way.
  • It provides an open and extensible platform and a strong and growing ecosystem of partners so that it can work seamlessly with existing technology for HR and CRM, as well as your Learning Management Systems.

Ready to Harness the Business Benefits of Microsoft Technologies?

Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft Viva, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Azure can transform your work experience, increase operational efficiency, save costs, improve security, and drive business growth. As a top Microsoft partner, OnPar Technologies can help you get the most out of your Microsoft implementation, guiding your digital transformation and opening up more possibilities for your business.

Regardless of whether you’re in the US or abroad, the team at OnPar Technologies can help your business at each stage of your cloud journey, from planning, migration, implementation, and adoption, to configuration, customization, integration, training, and ongoing management. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and let us help you leverage Microsoft technologies for success.