Empower and energize employees with Microsoft Viva

When employees thrive, companies flourish. Microsoft Viva, the first integrated employee experience platform for the hybrid work era, was built around this ethos. It brings connection, purpose, insight, and growth into the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best. Since its launch last year, it has helped customers reduce onboarding time by 50 percent, improve worker productivity through a 75 percent reduction in search time, reduce employee attrition by 20 percent, and more, resulting in 3x ROI.¹ Today, we’re announcing the expansion of Microsoft Viva with new apps and services that help companies address the three business imperatives from our latest Work Trend Index Pulse Report, to empower and energize employees to do meaningful work in an uncertain economic environment.

Empower managers and teams to create clarity

Productivity paranoia is prevalent: our data shows 87 percent of employees report they are productive, yet only 12 percent of leaders say they’re confident their employees are productive in hybrid work. We call this disconnect productivity paranoia and it’s making flexible work unsustainable. Instead of worrying if their employees are working enough, leaders need to create clarity around what work is most important—and listen to what their employees need to make the biggest impact.

Our research shows more than half of companies rarely, if ever, collect feedback about their employees’ experience at work. Feedback is a critical signal that can help catch issues before they reach a breaking point that can cost businesses talent, time, and money.

Microsoft Viva helps managers and teams create clarity through better goal-setting and continuous feedback.

Recently, we launched Viva Goals, a goal-setting and objectives and key results (OKR) management solution that helps organizations align everyday work to business outcomes. Today we’re excited to share new integrations in Viva Goals that bring goals into the flow of work. These include an enhanced Microsoft Teams app to check-in and collaborate on OKRs within the Teams activity feed, an extension in Azure DevOps to complete work items, a connection to Power BI datasets to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and key results, and integrations with Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project for automatic project management updates.

We’re announcing Viva Pulse, a new app that empowers managers and team leads to seek regular and confidential feedback about their team’s experience, right in the flow of work in Teams. Using smart templates, research-backed questions, and analytics, Viva Pulse enables teams to use their voice to help managers pinpoint what’s working well and where to focus. Viva Pulse also provides suggested learning and actions on relevant topics, making it easy for managers to address team needs. This is complementary and additive to robust company-wide engagement tools like Glint, which will be coming to Viva next year. Apply to be on our Viva Pulse Customer Advisory Board to help test Viva Pulse features.

Modernize employee communication and connection

Since the shift to hybrid work, our data shows 68 percent of leaders say team cohesion is a challenge, while 51 percent of employees say relationships outside their immediate work group are weaker. It’s crucial for companies to rebuild this lost social capital—leaders need to enable consistent communication and connection no matter where employees work.

Microsoft Viva keeps everyone informed, included, and inspired with employee communications and communities that engage people wherever they choose to work.

Last month, we announced the general availability of Viva Engage, which brings people together through digital communities, virtual events, rich conversation tools, and more. Today, we’re releasing new capabilities that will empower leaders to connect with employees, drive company initiatives, and address employee questions. Leadership Corner is a space for leaders to encourage open dialog and feedback across communities and teams through news, Ask Me Anything (AMA) events, surveys, and more. Leaders can build, promote, and launch these activities all from one place, and use intuitive dashboards to track metrics and employee sentiment in real time.

To support effective communications at scale, we’re excited to introduce Viva Amplify, a new app that empowers employee communication teams and leaders to elevate their message and energize their people. The app centralizes communication processes in a single space and offers writing guidance to help messages from every part of the organization—leaders, corporate communications, and HR—resonate with employees. Communicators can then publish to multiple channels simultaneously, manage their campaigns from a central hub, and study resulting metrics to better plan future communications.

Build a learning culture

If employees can’t learn with you, they’ll leave. According to our data, 55 percent of employees say the best way to develop skills is to change companies. But leaders can take this as an opportunity to re-recruit employees by investing in new skills and career growth. More than two in three people say they would stay longer at their company if it was easier to change jobs internally, and they would rather make a lateral move to learn new skills than earn a promotion with fewer growth opportunities.

Microsoft Viva helps employees learn, grow, and succeed by giving them the knowledge and learning tools they need at every stage of their career.

Today, we’re announcing enhancements to Viva Learning’s integration with LinkedIn, now with the LinkedIn Learning Hub. This integration will enable a seamless experience for employees to navigate across both systems. And, for learning admins, a consolidated admin experience will make it simple to surface all LinkedIn Learning Hub content within Viva Learning, including content specific to your organization, like custom content, curated learning paths, and collections.

Technology can also help to surface knowledge and expertise from inside the company for employee learning and growth. We’re launching a new experience called Answers in Microsoft Viva that matches employee questions to the right answers and experts across their organization to help address open questions and put collective knowledge to work for all employees. Answers in Viva leverages AI to surface similar questions that have been answered, recommends topics and experts, and highlights the top solutions. It works with Viva Topics and Viva Engage to identify and prompt experts to contribute their own knowledge and rewards people who contribute back to the knowledge base through gamification.

Looking ahead

As we look to the future of employee experience, we are also focused on new capabilities that improve the experience for specific roles, like sales, marketing, and customer service. Earlier this year, we introduced Viva Sales, our first role-based employee experience app that automates tasks like customer relationship management (CRM) data entry and note taking, while bringing intelligence back to the seller in the tools they’re using to connect and close deals—Microsoft 365 and Teams. We’re happy to announce that Viva Sales will be generally available on October 3, 2022. We look forward to continuing to bring more role-based experiences to Viva in the future.

We’re also excited to introduce several enhancements that will deliver a more unified experience across Viva and add new shared capabilities and services to existing apps:

• To streamline the Viva experience and help employees start their day on track, the new Viva Connections home experience will bring all the Microsoft Viva apps and services into one place, and the Briefing email from Viva will provide a personalized daily summary of important productivity insights, recommendations, and employee experience information directly in everyone’s Outlook inbox.
• People in Microsoft Viva is a new capability that puts people at the center of the employee experience, helping 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.

The innovations announced today will begin rolling out to customers in early 2023. To learn more and get started, check out the Microsoft Viva website and explore the Viva Innovation Brochure. If you’re interested in purchasing the Viva suite, which will include these latest capabilities and apps, except for Viva Sales, contact your Microsoft representative.

• Learn more about the Employee Communications and Communities offering.
• Get the e-book on how customers are using Viva to improve their employee experience.
• Learn about the cost savings and business benefits of Viva in this Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study.¹

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¹The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Viva, September 2022, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Results are for a composite organization based on interviewed customers and over a three-year period.