Fostering employee wellbeing and improving productivity at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Insights

Oct 12, 2023   |  

Microsoft Digital technical storiesEmployee expectations and priorities have shifted in the new hybrid workplace. In Microsoft’s September 2022 Work Trend Index Pulse Report—a study of 20,000 people in 11 countries—48 percent of those surveyed reported that they feel burned out at work. Prior data from Microsoft’s March 2022 Work Trend Index—a study of 31,000 people in 31 countries—revealed that 53 percent of the participants prioritize health and wellbeing over work more than they did 3 years ago.

A positive culture along with personal wellbeing and mental health are among the top aspects of work that employees view as “very important” for an employer to provide. Many elements of hybrid workplace culture contribute to the success of an organization, including:

  • Promoting employee wellbeing
  • Fostering connection and fulfillment
  • Improving meeting effectiveness
  • Developing inclusive and adaptable hybrid work plans

At Microsoft, we’re evolving the employee experience to meet the needs of today’s digitally connected, distributed workforce. We’re using Microsoft Viva Insights and Glint as one way to assess and address the critical needs of the hybrid workplace and increase engagement, collaboration, and productivity for all our employees and for our managers and leaders.

[Visit our Microsoft Viva content suite to learn how we’re deploying Viva internally at Microsoft.]

Insights for individuals

We use the Personal insights feature in Microsoft Viva Insights to help our employees individually prioritize wellbeing and improve personal productivity in the flow of work. The statistics and insights that are generated from your data are for your eyes only. They give you recommendations and opportunities throughout your day that you can choose to act on. For example:

  • The Microsoft Viva Insights Outlook add-in recommends that an employee book dedicated preparation time for upcoming meetings on their calendar. It provides a similar reminder after responding to a meeting invitation.
  • An employee can wrap up tasks during a virtual commute and log off for the day, silencing mobile notifications from Outlook and Teams during their off-work hours.

Our employees’ personal data is always kept private. We want every employee to know that personal reflections, dashboards, and insights about their own work habits are always available only to them.

Insights for managers and leaders

Leaders and managers use Microsoft Viva Insights to leverage data in making informed decisions that promote employee wellbeing and business success. With Viva Insights managers and leaders gain a more profound understanding of how work impacts their teams and individuals, enabling them to evaluate their leadership practices and pinpoint opportunities for development. They can then take corrective measures, like developing shared focus plans to create positive changes in their teams.

Whether it’s for our managers and leaders, or for our employees, we’re very serious about privacy.

Privacy by design

Microsoft Viva Insights protects our users’ privacy by design. It analyzes data from everyday work in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Graph to surface objective metrics that describe how work gets done. Viva Insights uses de-identification, aggregation, and differential privacy to offer a balance between providing useful information and protecting individual privacy.

Differential privacy is an open platform for data differential privacy, developed in collaboration between Microsoft and Harvard’s Institute for Social Science. Differential privacy uses sophisticated methods for data variation and randomization to ensure that no individual activity or metric is visible to a manager or organization leader.

Microsoft Viva Insights also adheres to local regulations for data privacy, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Engaging employees and encouraging wellbeing

We want our employees to thrive. We’re focusing on wellbeing and productivity for all employees. We’re using the capabilities of Microsoft Viva Insights to provide our employees with actionable recommendations that help employees work smarter, build better habits, and achieve balance in the workplace.

Two employees chat while sitting on a coach in a gathering space in a Microsoft building.
We’re using Microsoft Viva Insights to give our employees recommendations that they can use to work smarter, build better habits, and achieve balance in the workplace.

Creating deeper engagement with Customer Zero

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small-and-midsized customers.

We collaborate closely with the Microsoft Viva Insights product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of the Customer Zero partnership, our implementation teams get early access to new features and a chance to provide input into the product roadmap. This enables our own internal experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Viva Insights development process.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft Viva Insights, we have a unique opportunity to inform product development by aligning closely with the Viva Insights product team and internal business groups such as Engineering, HR, and Finance. These internal business groups identify the challenges they are facing that Viva Insights could help to solve. This partnership grants us the ability to address these challenges through early and extensive feedback to the product team. For example, our implementation teams recognized early in our adoption process that we needed more granular admin controls to balance speed of deployment with the need to review new experiences in many EU countries. We continued to partner with the Viva Insights engineering team to develop these, and other controls, that we believe will enable even greater adoption and engagement by our customers globally.

Partnering for successful change

The journey to increased employee wellbeing and productivity with Microsoft Viva Insights involves our entire organization and the vision for a better understanding of our organization requires intentional strategies for change management, communication, and adoption.

Activating change in a large organization requires the correct stakeholders and partnerships across the organization. Executive sponsors, program managers, communications, IT specialists, early adopters and others were all critical to the successful deployment and adoption of Viva Insights within Microsoft.

So much of the core focus of Viva Insights is influenced by HR, by organization culture. Our focus is on wellbeing and productivity, but that can look different from organization to organization. Our HR teams were instrumental in helping define the specifics of what makes our organization work, from how we define the term manager to how employees might work across multiple teams and internal organizations.

—Steve Reay, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Together, we established clear agreement on critical aspects of the employee experience, aligning expectations, language, and focus for the implementation of Viva Insights. Some of these aspects included:

  • How does the employee experience align with our purpose, brand, and culture?
  • How do we support coaching, development, and optimization of the employee experience?
  • Do employees feel empowered to set boundaries on work and home life?

The answers to these questions helped our teams align with existing cultural initiatives and the broader work culture fostered by Microsoft Human Resources, a key partner. Microsoft HR played an important part in communications and strategy for Viva Insights, and how Viva Insights integrated with our culture. Steve Reay is a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital Employee Experience.

“So much of the core focus of Viva Insights is influenced by HR, by organization culture,” Reay says. He emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all with Viva Insights. “Our focus is on wellbeing and productivity, but that can look different from organization to organization,” he says. “Our HR teams were instrumental in helping define the specifics of what makes our organization work, from how we define the term manager to how employees might work across multiple teams and internal organizations.”

We used a hybrid change management approach by using centralized communications alongside activities driven by local adoption teams. This hybrid approach helped simplify and unify overarching communications while allowing the local adoption teams to reinforce the messaging while aligning with local initiatives and work culture. Local change management was instrumental to creating the most effective, productive, and enjoyable employee experience with Microsoft Viva Insights while also ensuring local regulations data and privacy regulations were met.

Ensuring privacy and compliance with partnership

Our end-to-end collaboration with our workers’ councils is boosting Microsoft product and service rollouts in our European Union regions. For example, including employee representatives in the rollout process was critical in helping Microsoft Viva Insights accurately measure the pulse of our organization. Workers’ councils in our European regions played a significant part in our Customer Zero process and in our larger change management strategy for Viva Insights.

Deploying any new tool at Microsoft requires a thorough vetting of the technology to ensure that employees’ privacy is protected. Data privacy compliance regulations vary from region to region. In some EU countries and regions, our employees have formed workers’ councils—representative bodies elected by our employees and with whom we actively partner to ensure the appropriate review and implementation of workplace technologies, like Viva Insights.

Microsoft Viva Insights supports productivity and wellbeing by supplying behavioral data and intelligent recommendations directly to employees themselves. Private information doesn’t go beyond their own inboxes. Still, we needed our workers’ councils to sign off, both when we initially deployed Microsoft Viva Insights, and going forward, when we update it.

In this case, two related points help us partner well with our workers’ councils. First, the agile, modular design of Microsoft Viva Insights allows our product team to deploy new features without waiting for major product updates.

Second, because we work closely with them, we’re able to get our workers’ council representatives to quickly review new features and updates, and as long as they are aligned to core privacy and labor principles we’ve established in partnership with the works councils, we’re able to deploy them more rapidly than we could in the past. This is saving Microsoft employees hundreds of hours per year in EU regions and is speeding up overall deployment of new features.

Two employees collaborate at a workstation in an open space in a Microsoft office.
We wove Microsoft Viva Insights into programs and tools that our employees were already using to make it easier for them to start taking advantage of it.

If our workers’ council representatives raise concerns we cannot quickly address, we can use the assignment of the manager role to remove those experiences in the given country or remove the Microsoft Viva Insights Service Plan for those employees.

Putting Viva Insights to work

Microsoft Viva Insights has impacted internal business group team culture across the organization by enabling our teams to establish work patterns and expectations for the entire team. For example, one of our internal business groups teams set their work calendar from 9am to 3pm, Pacific Standard Time. They made a conscious choice to allow the team members to have breakfast and dinner with their families without worrying about work communications creating an interruption. They didn’t have to guess at time zones, and they didn’t have to make assumptions about when it was OK to send an email.

Having the preparation details for an upcoming meeting delivered directly to me not only improves my productivity, but it makes me more confident. It directly increased my wellbeing.

—Microsoft Viva Insights power user, Microsoft Human Resources

With Microsoft Viva Insights, the team has established a twice weekly focus time block of two hours for each team member. This choice and pattern make it easier for the team members to schedule focus time and know that they have the leadership backing to protect that focus time and establish the wellbeing rhythms that make them productive, the team also dedicates each Friday as a meeting-free day so the team members can focus on items that they might have outstanding before the week is over.

An internal power user within HR has been using Viva Insights in this context for the past 15 months.  “Having the preparation details for an upcoming meeting delivered directly to me not only improves my productivity, but it makes me more confident. It directly increased my wellbeing.”

The team has also been using Viva Insights to set objectives for habits that they want to build as individuals. One of the most common goals has been recognizing colleagues by sending Praise through Viva Insights. Each time a team member is in the Viva Insights interface, they are reminded to encourage and send praise to their team members. This builds sense of value, contribution, recognition, and value across the team.

Our adoption of Microsoft Viva Insights at Microsoft has been both based on integration with existing HR programs and building the product into the flow of work rather than driving it as a new tool or experience. Viva Insights supports and affirms behavior that improves wellbeing and productivity. In putting Viva Insights to work, we learned valuable lessons, including:

  • Implementation and adoption are long term processes. Communication, education, and feedback mechanisms should be in place throughout the lifetime of Viva Insights to foster understanding and engagement.
  • Integrating Microsoft Viva Insights with existing people, priorities, and practices that your organization is working toward is very helpful. Viva Insights meets employees where they work, enabling them to use commonly used tools like Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams.
  • Use a hybrid approach to change management with centralized and localized communication and encouragement. Support early adopters and share success stories and best practices.

Moving forward

We’re continuing to use Microsoft Viva Insights to guide individuals and teams toward better work habits and norms to improve productivity and wellbeing. Personalized insights provided to our employees help them to improve their wellbeing and productivity within the flow of work. Our organization is using broader insights to champion beneficial organization practices, bring our hybrid workforce together and address complex challenges our business is facing. However, we’re not done. Viva Insights is a catalyst for positive change at Microsoft, and we’ll continue working with the product group as Customer Zero to ensure that opportunities to assess and improve wellbeing and productivity increase for every Viva Insights customer.

Key Takeaways
When introducing Viva Insights to an organization some of the key takeaways would be:

  1. Understand the needs and requirements of an organization to help land new experiences in the context of your company culture.
  2. Identify executive sponsorship and gain commitment to help provide leadership, direction, and drive team accountability.
  3. Change Management and communications are critical. Be proactive at addressing any privacy concerns employees may have.
  4. Engage early with works councils and any regulatory bodies in all applicable countries you have employees based in. The early engagement is helpful as the process can take weeks or months to complete but the feedback from the reviews can also help you adjust your deployments plans to ensure all employees can enjoy the experience.

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