Technology is about people, and no Microsoft organization understands that better than Human Resources. When our HR team started rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to the global HR organization, a human-centered approach was a natural fit.
And what better way to focus on the human side of adoption than Microsoft Viva?
This story shares how our HR team used the Viva suite to communicate, provide opportunities for skilling and development, and measure success. As a result, they’ve been able to craft and disseminate effective adoption content through several different channels, provide both centralized and peer-led learning opportunities, and effectively track their progress.
Applying HR expertise to Microsoft 365 Copilot
AI represents the greatest workplace shift in a generation, so Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption has been a priority across the company. The HR team has an especially important role in that process: They’re both practitioners supporting AI transformation across the rest of Microsoft and professionals who use this technology in their own roles.
“As champions for Responsible AI at Microsoft, we have a special duty to learn, experiment, and apply Copilot to the space where we work,” says Liz Friedman, senior director of HR AI Transformation. “To support the rest of the company on this journey, we have to understand it ourselves.”
Copilot brings an unprecedented solution to the table, so we’re applying new technology in innovative ways as we experiment with fresh approaches to adoption. And new technical capabilities aren’t the only aspect of Copilot that affects its rollout.
“In some ways, the adoption challenge with Copilot is flipped on its head,” says Caribay Garcia, a principal people scientist on the Microsoft Viva product team. “It’s not as much about building momentum as it is about guiding excitement to create effective usage and long-lasting change.”
Driving AI adoption is about harnessing the optimism and energy of employees. With its human-centered suite of apps designed for employee engagement, Microsoft Viva has been a natural fit for agile Copilot adoption efforts that respect how people assimilate new tools and processes.
Accelerating Microsoft 365 Copilot with Viva
Viva Connections
Sharing key news related to deployment and enablement, generating “buzz,” and tying Copilot to Microsoft culture.
Viva Amplify
Producing and efficiently distributing employee communications to build awareness and excitement.
Viva Learning
Courses and training for our employees on how to maximize value from Copilot, inclusive of building effective prompts.
Viva Goals
Establishing and tracking Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) focused on employee Copilot usage and productivity gains.
Viva Engage
Actively engaging employees, providing leader updates, listening to feedback, and enabling Champs community.
Viva Insights
Using the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard beta to identity actionable insights and usage trends.
Viva Pulse
Instant feedback from employees on their Copilot experience to fine-tune our landing and adoption approach.
Viva Glint
Understanding employee sentiment and gauging the overall effectiveness of our Copilot deployment effort.
With support from our team at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, HR is leaning into Viva as a vehicle for change. Their team recognizes its value across every component of the adoption journey, from communication and learning to engagement and feedback.
“Using Viva for our promotion, awareness, skilling, and reinforcement process is tremendously useful,” says Anand Shah, senior business program manager with Microsoft Digital. “It’s critical at scale because it captures so many more people than we could ever manage with just instructor-led trainings or other centralized efforts.”
HR and people science: A powerful pairing
As their Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption unfolds, HR is taking a highly specialized approach that keeps Microsoft’s culture and priorities at its center. The team also benefits from the expertise of people science professionals in the Viva product group who have a background in organizational psychology, behavioral science, data science, and employee experience. These experts take a research-based and people-focused approach, infusing the Viva suite with insights from their discipline and ensuring every app effectively supports employee needs.
“People science helps us understand what’s important to employees to help them feel happy and successful,” says Carolyn Kalafut, a principal people scientist in the Microsoft Viva product group. “When employees experience rapid changes like AI transformation at work, our research shows that we can ease the process by encouraging them to share their voice, addressing their concerns, keeping them informed with key updates, and providing relevant skilling opportunities.”
To support their efforts, Microsoft Digital provides technical and change management expertise based on our experience with repeated deployment and adoption cycles.
The HR AI Transformation team built a strategy to address key challenges associated with AI adoption in HR that include:
- HR practitioners’ professional caution in using AI tech in the context of constantly evolving guidance and laws around protecting employee confidentiality and privacy
- Uncertainty about where and when HR and employees can responsibly use Copilot in their work
- Questions about data security and the appropriate flow of information in the context of Copilot
- The ongoing introduction of new features and capabilities in a rapidly evolving solution category
- How to embrace elective technology that requires buy-in from employees rather than embedding itself into business functions by default
“We think of our efforts in terms of a cohesive strategy for driving change, from generating awareness and motivation to building knowledge and skills, then applying and tracking the behaviors we’ve enabled,” Friedman says. “Viva apps are really well designed for each of these steps.”
The resulting combination of HR’s organizational expertise, the product group’s people science insights, and Microsoft Digital’s time-tested change management processes helped the team develop an effective and multifaceted adoption strategy enhanced by Viva.
Change and adoption communication is a well-established discipline that relies on both centralized campaigns and more localized, intra-departmental efforts. Above and beyond Microsoft Digital’s company-wide Copilot communications, HR’s internal adoption leaders actively construct campaigns specific to their organization’s needs.
In addition to running these campaigns using Viva Amplify, the Viva suite’s organizational communications app, change leaders can deploy adoption material through HR’s own Copilot sponsors and champions, giving them the opportunity to influence their communities on whatever channels feel most natural: Teams, Outlook, or Viva Engage. This approach captures the benefits of an organizationally aligned, carefully crafted narrative while capitalizing on the reach and trust that employees’ leaders and peers inspire.
The ongoing HR AI Roundup is one example of a Viva Amplify campaign. It provides a monthly update on HR’s goals and progress with Copilot adoption, shares new features and capabilities, and offers clear actions employees can take to further their usage.
As this work continues, the HR adoption team is learning from their initial experiments with Viva Amplify. The goal is to collaborate with sponsors and champions to disseminate customized campaigns that provide precise analytics, contributing to continuous improvement.
“Everyone can be an effective communicator with Viva Amplify,” says Laura Luethe, a director of communications on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “It combines the capabilities of corporate communicators with the ability to tailor messaging to uniquely relevant audiences.”
There isn’t one right way to learn, so HR accommodates a diverse array of learning styles. Viva Learning provides opportunities for both self-directed and group learning as components of their Copilot skilling offerings.
Aside from providing multiple paths to learning and development, one of the principal upskilling challenges is the location and discoverability of content. In that context, Viva Learning’s flexibility and ability to pull learning material from multiple sources is a major asset.
“People are hungry for skilling opportunities for their specific disciplines. Viva Learning supports that desire by providing one central location for all their learning needs.”
The HR team assembled a set of discipline-specific learning materials to create the AI for HR Academy. It contains the mainstay AI for HR learning path, as well as other modules that include discipline-specific content, material on systems thinking, and more. For people who learn best alongside their peers, there are also opportunities for collaborative skilling activities like group trainings, community teams, or forums.
With this academy, HR change leaders have a shareable core of learning material they can deploy alongside enablement communications, community blasts, or other activations.
A human-centric approach to adoption respects that change is often community-based and meets people where they are—and that it works best when it’s fun. In an organization as large as Microsoft HR, with many people working in different locations or functioning on a hybrid model, a digital solution for community-based engagement is essential.
“There’s no watercooler big enough for our global community to gather around,” says Chris Owen, a senior program manager on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “In that environment, Viva Engage becomes the one and only space where all of HR can meet regularly and exchange ideas.”
As a grassroots employee community app, Viva Engage enables peer-to-peer guidance and communication about Copilot. It also unlocks synergies between different Viva apps. Change leaders can introduce campaigns into Viva Engage by rallying employees to share pre-populated posts distributed through Viva Amplify.
HR’s Copilot Champs Community, a subset of our wider HR AI Community of Practice, is an essential part of those peer-to-peer change management initiatives. They share best practices for local outreach and support each other’s efforts to drive adoption within their specific disciplines, often through Viva Engage.
Although Viva Engage relies on community members to drive conversations forward, it also allows guidance from change leaders and community managers tasked with supporting the adoption. The tool provides just the right elevation for leaders to introduce change initiatives into the community, which members can adapt and socialize throughout their peer groups.
In one instance, the HR adoption team created a digital Copilot escape room designed to gamify learning about prompts for their HR AI Community of Practice members. Community members found the initiative so helpful that they recommended making it available to the wider organization, encouraging others to replicate the experience within their local teams.
One of most valuable aspects of Viva Engage is the way it decentralizes the responsibility for leading change. By letting conversations unwind organically, it becomes a repository for knowledge-sharing, content, and ongoing conversations about the best ways to use Copilot.
When employees learn together, share best practices, and ask questions, collective conversations unfold and people build valuable connections, which are especially helpful in a hybrid environment. That isn’t just a powerful adoption practice. It also boosts a sense of community and improves morale.
The numbers illustrate how effective and connective this channel can be. Just nine months after the launch of the HR AI Community of practice, almost 900 new members have joined the community, creating more than 230 posts that have collectively earned nearly 50,000 views.
As one of the most effective vehicles for change management in HR, Viva Engage illustrates how social connections can be a powerful force for good.
Orderly data and the ability to process insights are essential to applying people science principles practically. We aren’t just interested in understanding what people are doing, but how they feel about it—uncovering the “why” behind adoption behavior. Employee signals are central to that goal.
As part of HR’s enterprise employee strategy, the team deploys biannual, organization-wide Signals surveys through Viva Glint to gauge sentiment across different topics. With the introduction of Copilot, they included questions about engagement with the new technology. HR’s AI adoption leaders work alongside the HR Business Intelligence team to use select data from that survey to understand sentiment about AI and fine-tune their adoption approach.
Recently, they’ve been working to correlate results from questions about AI usage and employees’ thriving metrics, the main outcome we use at Microsoft to understand the employee experience. To thrive is to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work, and based on recent survey results, the HR team is beginning to understand trends and sentiments around Copilot adoption and its impact on employees’ experiences.
By collating thriving metrics acquired through Viva Glint surveys with Copilot usage, the HR team has found that employees who use Copilot at least once every week are more likely to say they’re thriving and take initiative to be productive.
That insight accomplishes two things: It validates further investment in Copilot adoption efforts and simultaneously demonstrates its value to users.
“It’s all about energy, empowerment, and whether work is meaningful to employees,” says David Spahr, a director on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “We aren’t just trying to understand the productivity and efficiency gains of AI—we want to see the ways it’s helping humans become more human.”
Clear and structured progress toward goals is a key motivator for employees. Viva Goals provides the benefit of tracking and clarity around OKRs to help deliver that motivation. The HR Services team uses this tool to track progress on Copilot-supported productivity and job satisfaction.
This year, one of the team’s major projects is determining whether using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to handle HR inquiries correlates with an increase in productivity and job satisfaction for HR agents. In addition to tracking these elements and establishing a correlation, Viva Goals helped HR align these objectives and their benefits with their organization’s strategy.
Now that the team has correlated Copilot usage, productivity, and job satisfaction, their next step will be to set targets for each of these three areas and track them effectively. Viva goals will be essential to their work by providing visible, verifiable insights into the team’s progress and how the benefits they realize contribute to their goals.
“We’re very intentional about defining our objectives, anticipating their benefits, and establishing OKRs to track those pieces,” Friedman says. “From there, we can verifiably demonstrate progress.”
One of the most important learnings from HR’s Copilot adoption experience has been that no OKR is ever static. Instead, these metrics help change leaders to answer questions about their current progress, ask new questions about how to adjust work, then revise their measurements into more perfectly calibrated OKRs as needed.
This kind of progressive goal setting moves organizations away from simplistic pass-or-fail thinking and toward dynamic, progress-centered ways of tracking success.
Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption is going strong in HR
Thanks to robust change management practices, cross-organizational collaboration, and Microsoft Viva initiatives grounded in people science and tailored to employee needs, HR’s adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot has generated impressive results so far.
“HR has been a powerful adopter,” says Eric Wand, Head of IT at Microsoft Canada. “This organization has been so committed to their Copilot journey; they’ve achieved many of their end-of-year adoption metrics in just the first few months.”
Microsoft Viva is a crucial part of HR’s process, and it continues to be a critical tool for advancing usage at scale. As they incorporate further Viva apps, HR will continue to fine-tune their adoption activities and find new ways to unlock even greater value for employees. The team is currently exploring ways to programmatize agile and decentralized Viva Pulse surveys according to people science principles and gain further visibility into employee sentiment and usage at the team level.
HR is also partnering with Microsoft Digital to track usage through the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data will support even more effective change management as HR continues to deepen its Copilot adoption.
“Our job is to empower the people who empower the planet, and that means changing the way we change,” Friedman says. “The more we can do to meet people where they are and help enhance how they work, the more success we’ll have. So the investments we’ve already made in employee experience areas—communications, skilling, and measurement—have given us a valuable head start at accelerating our own functional AI transformation efforts here in HR.”
Here are some tips on how to use Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot to empower your employees:
- Build your change strategy first. Know what problems you’re trying to solve, what you’re trying to accomplish, and use Microsoft Viva as your partner in change management.
- Don’t interrupt. Enhance. Build change management activations into the flow of work.
- Build a good virtual team that brings people together from different organizations, with different skill sets within your business.
- Ensure sponsorship is active and visible by using Viva to communicate your strategy with your employees on a regular basis
- Start with the basics. Don’t feel like you need to be an expert in AI, and just land your foundational pieces around communications, skilling, and measurement.
- Don’t be intimidated by the scope and possibility of the new product. Adopt a growth mindset and take bite-sized steps forward.
- Community offers agility. Traditional learning and development may not be able to keep up with the pace of change, so let peer-to-peer enablement in different types of community settings take on some of the burden.
