The world was running relatively smoothly until the pandemic hit and forced everyone to work remotely.
By necessity, many of us have been working in a remote or hybrid mode for the last couple of years, and it’s shown us that hybrid work is the future. Across all industrial areas, various organizations have adopted the hybrid way of working.
In this chapter, you will be introduced to Microsoft’s new employee experience platform (EXP), called Microsoft Viva , including its modules, its significance, and how an organization can benefit from implementing it.
Microsoft Viva leverages existing capabilities from Microsoft 365 including SharePoint, Teams, and Yammer. It is part of the Microsoft 365 suite.
Hybrid Working Model
The term hybrid work will be used throughout this book. So, let’s start by discussing what the term means.
A Venn Diagram represents the hybrid working model, which has the combination of two different elements, namely, work from on site, work from off site.
Hybrid working model
The hybrid working model brings location flexibility, which offers a choice for employees to work on-site (an office location) or off-site (a home or remote location) based on what an employee and their organization think is appropriate, productive, and convenient for them.
Benefits of Hybrid Working
Flexible working hours: In the hybrid working model, employees have the flexibility to get their work done based on flexible hours instead of predefined office work hours and can stretch out their days to adjust to other time zones.
Better work-life balance: With a hybrid working model, employees can define their own work schedule and fulfill both their personal and professional work obligations.
Ability to attract global talent: Organizations can build a remote team of talented people with specialized skills to create better balanced teams. This allows organizations to attract global talent and retain the capabilities that support their business needs.
There is another side of this coin too: the challenges that come with a hybrid working model.
Challenges of Hybrid Working
Disconnected feeling: Interactions over virtual meetings are limited. As a result, individuals can feel disconnected from their fellow team members and managers. The human angle of sharing ideas and brainstorming solutions is very much limited in virtual meetings compared to face-to-face meetings .
The Viva Connections module surfaces this problem by bringing relevant content in the form of news and conversations closer to users, who can carry out discussions and stay engaged with colleagues.
Keep up-to-date with learning: In a hybrid working model, sharing thoughts and knowledge with team members is a bit difficult. Employees feel challenged to keep up-to-date with technology and the latest happenings. Learning with peers is considered the most effective option, which does not work best in virtual mode.
The Viva Learning module addresses this by making learning part of everyone’s daily life. The learning resources from various sources (e.g., Microsoft Learn modules, LinkedIn learning, third-party learning providers, and custom organization learning resources) help everyone learn at their own pace and grow. Everyone can learn together by sharing the content and recommendations.
Lack of team engagement for leaders: Managers and leaders lack engagement with their teams in a virtual environment. Keeping the entire team synchronized is always challenging in a hybrid environment. Keeping track of everyone’s work is difficult. When the employees have a disconnected feeling, it is challenging for the leaders to set up a nice employee experience. Leaders need to fill this gap by furnishing employees with the right skills and tools.
The Viva Insights module helps individuals, leaders, and managers be productive and improve their well-being. These insights will help you understand how well you are connected with your colleagues and leaders. The manager insights help them to understand employee burnout and to take corrective actions.
Organization challenges for smoother functionality: At the same time, organizations strive for smoother functioning by removing these obstacles by leveraging existing toolsets without a need for additional tools.
Microsoft Viva is part of the Microsoft 365 suite. This makes it easy for organizations to adopt Microsoft Viva without any additional infrastructure and skillset investment.
Employee Experience Platform
EXP in simple words is a digital platform that organizations can implement to help their employees get involved, focus on their productivity and well-being, achieve their goals, and create a better work-life balance.
How has hybrid working changed the organization’s culture?
How are you planning to bring the content closer to your employees?
Do you have an existing communication channel set up to publish news and announcements for employees?
How is the employee engagement on those communication channels?
Do you have a feedback channel set up for your employees?
How do you encourage ideas and feedback from your employees?
How are you planning to achieve your organization’s goals, mission, and vision by enabling an EXP?
Microsoft Viva: Microsoft’s New EXP
As organizations adapt to the new hybrid working model and begin reopening their physical office locations, it’s essential they rethink old paradigms and view their employees as being at the center of this new experience. Hybrid working brings a shift of focus for everyone including organizations, employees, culture, and technology.
When organizations invest in better employee experiences, they get beneficial returns in terms of retention, employee engagement, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Hybrid work requires modern tools for the employees and organizations to succeed. Microsoft’s solution to these challenges is Microsoft Viva.
Organizations can reimagine the employee experience with Microsoft Viva. Microsoft Viva brings together everyone by enabling effective communications and helping to share knowledge, learn and grow together as a team, find resources, and carry out insights.
Today millions of users use Microsoft Teams daily for better engagement with colleagues and partners. It is a hub to bring together all resources and applications. Microsoft Viva extends this foundation by adding an employee engagement feature on top of it.
Microsoft Viva consists of various modules to offer these capabilities to users.
Microsoft Viva Modules
For organizations to thrive, Microsoft Viva offers various modules as of today: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, Viva Topics, Viva Goals, and Viva Sales.
Now, we’ll provide an overview of the existing Viva modules.
Microsoft Viva Connections
Microsoft Viva Connections is referred to as a gateway to a modern employee engagement experience.
A Microsoft Viva Connections home page of Nachan 365. The dashboard depicts the number of M 365 groups the user has. On the right, is a weather forecast and some F A Qs.
Microsoft Viva Connections
Viva Connections is based on the same theme as Microsoft Teams where, and employees will have all organizational updates in one place. These updates include news and announcements from SharePoint, conversations from Yammer communities, and videos from Stream.
In simple terms, Viva Connections surfaces the SharePoint home site in Microsoft Teams to provide a seamless experience to the users so that they can get the updates without leaving the Microsoft Teams interface.
Microsoft Viva Connections has mobile and desktop versions to meet the needs of information workers and frontline workers.
Microsoft Viva Insights
The Microsoft Viva Insights module is built on top of Workplace Analytics. It provides insights on user activities and suggestions to improve employees’ well-being.
A screenshot of Microsoft Viva Insights page of Microsoft Teams with greetings, Good evening, hope it's a good one, exclamatory symbol.
Microsoft Viva Insights
Personal insights: By analyzing your working habits and patterns, it helps you to understand how you can perform better.
Manager insights: It helps managers and team leaders understand and organize teamwork to help team members manage work-life balance.
Leader insights: It analyzes employee engagement and adds value to an organization from the work culture point of view.
Advanced insights: It helps to understand important aspects of the business by identifying workload balance and business requirements.
Data privacy: It helps you to keep your personal data secure.
Microsoft Viva Topics
Microsoft Viva Topics helps organizations to transform their information into knowledge.
Viva Topics helps an organization transform its content into knowledge. It makes use of intelligent services including Microsoft AI, Search, and Microsoft Graph to better present the knowledge to the users.
Every organization has a lot of content stored in the form of documents or pages related to different topics. When someone tries to search through this ocean of content, it can be hard to find the exact information needed. This obstacle is overcome by Viva Topics by grouping related content into topics.
A screenshot of Microsoft Viva Topics page in Microsoft Teams with ten topics related to projects, products, or any field of study.
Microsoft Viva Topics
The topic results are displayed when users perform a search in SharePoint, Office.com, and Office applications (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Excel). This knowledge indexing makes it easy to get relevant information on a topic defined by the organization.
A short description
Related people to further the discussion
Files and sites related to the topic
Microsoft Viva Learning
Microsoft Viva Learning makes learning part of everyone’s day.
Microsoft wants to promote a culture of learning, where learning will be an integral part of everyone’s work life. Viva Learning enables everyone to learn, recommend, and share the content made available by the organization and partners without leaving the Microsoft Teams experience.
A screenshot of Microsoft Viva Learning page in Microsoft Teams with available courses LinkedIn learning, M S 365 Training, and Microsoft Learn.
Microsoft Viva Learning
The learning sources include Microsoft Learn, Microsoft 365 Training, LinkedIn Learning, Go1, Skillsoft, Udemy, Edcast, and many other learning partners. Also, organizations can define their own learning sources by publishing learning videos on SharePoint and Stream.
Viva Goals
The new module of Microsoft Viva based on Ally.io is focused on objectives and key results. This will help employees define their goals and set objectives.
Viva Sales
The new module targeted to the sales experience allows sellers to use Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to automatically capture the data in CRM systems.
Licensing Model for Microsoft Viva
With Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 licenses, you can access Microsoft Viva Connections at no additional cost. For the latest offerings, licensing, and cost details, visit www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/pricing .
Microsoft offers Microsoft Viva Suite at a lower price that includes Viva Learning, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Goals.
Conclusion
Hybrid work is the future. Across all industrial areas, various organizations have adopted the hybrid way of working. Hybrid working brings with it challenges. Microsoft Viva, a new employee experience platform, is the answer to the challenges faced by employees, managers, leaders, and organizations. Microsoft Viva offers various modules, namely, Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, Viva Topics, Viva Goals, and Viva Sales.
In the next chapter, we will walk through the Microsoft Viva Connections experience for desktop and mobile users. Also, we will cover the setup prerequisites for Microsoft Viva Connections.