On September 2022, Jared Spataro and Satya Nadella held an online event that talked about the impact to employees in these troubled times. Using the insights Microsoft gathers as anonymised productivity signals and through their 2022 work trends report, it was clear that the gap in perception of productivity between leaders and employees is large, the expectations around why to come to the office is all about the social connections and now is the time to re-energise your teams through re-recruitment. The event balanced the insights from the report, discussions about the impacts to organisation and announcements of the new pillars of Viva Pulse, Viva Amplify and Answers for Viva.
With the growth of the Viva services, the understanding of what each is used for becomes more complex. To address this, Microsoft has aligned the services to four key needs for organisations and employees:
- Connection
- Insight
- Purpose
- Growth
Each of these aligns to different purposes within an organisation and become an easier to understand view of the different elements.
A new home for Viva
The biggest new announcement came around the unification of Viva into a single app within Teams, providing a hub for the key information from across the information related to each employee and providing links to the other apps. This will address one of the big concerns of Viva where employees would be confused by the different apps all over the place.
The single app will bring together the latest communications, goals, learning and other updates to a single place. For many, this will not replace their existing Viva Connections investments on their Intranet home page but will provide an alternative focus area for Viva.
Connection
As the ongoing discussions around hybrid working take place, one thing that most agree on is that effective communication is among the critical skills needed for the year ahead. In fact, 96% of business decision makers and 95% of employees see this as key, especially ensuring that the communication is authentic. True authenticity is shown to be what keeps employees feeling connected to the organisation.
The existing services of Viva Connections and Viva Engage help bring together employees and build connections to leaders and the organisation as a whole. The recently announced Storylines and Story would bring more ways for employees and leaders to connect and these are now followed up with a leadership corner. As well as providing a single place for leaders to connect, it will provide the analytics to understand the success of these connections.
New experiences coming to Microsoft Viva Engage - Microsoft Tech Community
For employees, the powerful daily briefing email will receive additional enhancements with more AI powered updates on learning recommendations and topics, automated scheduling for checking messages and taking a break (alongside the existing Focus Time) and recaps for key meetings.
Communicating is not just about Viva Connections and Microsoft knows that there are many different routes to getting information out to people. So many organisations still make use of desktop images, emails and even specific alerting applications built into each PC build. This leads to lots of different routes for communications, often rightly to allow people to prioritise, however this also leads to huge complications for Comms teams with getting different approvals and managing the messages. Now, there is Viva Amplify.
Viva Amplify introduces the ability to create and schedule content with previews and approvals before publishing across Microsoft 365 (and shortly, going beyond with Windows 11 notifications and third party as well). The importance of the messaging can also be measured against outcomes and analytics to understand the impact as well.
For connection to people, Viva will now power new experiences around the People cards across Microsoft 365. The Viva services will provide more information to employees’ networks so that they can see where common goals and knowledge can bring people together and encourage connections from across an organisation’s hierarchy.
People in Microsoft Viva – Putting people at the center of the employee experience
Insight
When organisations primarily had their employees in the office, the ability to gain insight into the feel across the organisation was easier to do. Walking around the offices and chatting with people would bring out the buzz that was taking place but with the reduction in the amount of in office work, it is harder for leaders to understand the productivity and wellbeing. From the Work Trends Report, 85% of leaders have said that they are unsure whether people are productive while 87% of employees say that they are productive wherever they are. New ways of working will require new ways of understanding outputs and going beyond just time spent at desks. Viva Insights and Glint already provide those Insights into both what employees are doing and what they are thinking. Looking across the personal, manager and leader perspectives, they work together to help organisations understand what is happening. However, people have been feeding back that they need that in-between level to further support managers with the understanding and ongoing trends within their areas.
Viva Pulse brings research driven questions for managers and team leads to ask their teams confidentially how they are feeling. Whether it is a regular question or a more time-based, work-related survey such as after an intense period, Viva Pulse will allow the managers to take that pulse of the team and focus on initiatives around the key feedback.
As more details are release, hopefully a clearer relationship between Pulse and Glint will be established but for now, the intention appears to be Glint for the whole organisation and Pulse for teams.
Purpose
How productive are you feeling today? One of the outputs of the work trends report was that while 87% of employees believe they are productive at work, just 12% of leaders have full confidence that their employees are being productive. Naturally, this is a perception rather than a measure, but this perception helps to feed the Productivity Paranoia for employees, that feeling that they there is a disconnect between what is expected of them and what they are delivering. As an employee experience goes, this is a very impactful perception and is only like to reduce the productivity.
To address this gap, leaders are encouraged to set help set expectations and focus on the clarity of message for employees. Being transparent with the current focus that employees should be aligned to will reduce the burden felt by staff and also help employees through periods of change and uncertainty by bringing along everyone together.
To support this, Microsoft is adding deeper integrations for Viva Goals to the rest of the Microsoft stack, especially around Power BI, Planner and Project. Each of these will help align business strategy to business implementation and provide the clarity for employees, managers and leaders for what is being aimed for and the success of those aims as clear measures.
Growth
The opportunity to grow as well as perform well is a key driver to employees to remain at an organisation. 56% of employees and 68% of business decision makers say that there are not enough growth opportunities to make them want to stay long term and 55% believe that the best way to expand on their skills is to change companies. Much has already been written about The Great Resignation and that includes plenty of estimates of the cost of replacing staff and impacts to productivity so putting in place measures to reduce this likelihood is a cost-effective mechanism.
Viva Learning has been delivering some of that growth through learning in the flow of work since it’s release around a year ago and continues to be enhanced. There will be deeper integrations into LinkedIn Learning including a LinkedIn Learning Hub and curated learning paths right within Teams. Empowering employees with the knowledge they need to grow is also important and also announced was Answers in Viva which will act as a hub to ask and answer questions, providing the link to tacit knowledge held in employees’ heads. This will also link into Viva Topics to provide knowledge hubs that start to combine implicit and tacit knowledge to a single place and support a culture of knowledge sharing.
Announcing Answers in Microsoft Viva - Microsoft Tech Community
Viva Topics product updates: Answers in Viva, new topic types, and more - Microsoft Tech Community
Summary
There have been a few discussions already about the sheer number of new services and names coming into Viva and the pace of change is certainly high. However, focusing on these key areas of Connection, Insight, Purpose and Growth with each service neatly aligned will bring the aims of what employees need to be important, not the names of different services. A single hub to view what is relevant to you as an employee brings the frustration of knowing where to go for what to a single place. These new services will not appear immediately (although the opportunity is there for organisations to be involved in early previews were it is relevant) and so the time to build out the understanding of each and how it is relevant for each individual will be vital.
The importance of Viva is to empower employees and these services bring more power to people. The links to more role specific services such as Viva Sales allow this as well and it will be up to People/HR and Technology/Digital teams to work closely together to deliver relevant services that align to the processes and people that matter in your own organisation.
Other useful links:
Microsoft Viva Ebook The Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Viva
Photo by Israel Andrade on Unsplash