Microsoft launches VIVA for better employee experience

Microsoft has launched a new tool, Microsoft Viva, which claims to enrich employee experience. It promises to bring in all aspects of employee experience — communications knowledge, learning, resources, and insights— into the flow of work through an integrated experience.

Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow and thrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity and collaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, says in an official communique, “We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience.”

“Every organisation will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams,” he adds.

Viva allows integration and will enable customers to integrate their existing employee experience systems and tools with Viva to make them more accessible and discoverable to employees.

The new tool from Microsoft has four modules – Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics.

Viva Connections provides a single-entry point for employee engagement and internal communications. It allows leaders to connect with employees via company town halls. At the same time, employees are able to access everything from company news, policies, and benefits to employee resource groups or communities they want to join.

Viva Insights provides individuals, managers and leaders personalised and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organisation thrive. For instance, it can help managers see if their team is at risk of burnout and provide recommendations, such as encouraging them to turn off notifications, set boundaries in their calendars, and set daily priorities to focus on what matters most.

Similarly, it promises to help CXOs address complex challenges and respond to change. It provides leaders with organisational network analysis to understand the connectedness and cohesion between and across teams.

Viva Learning will allow organisations to create a central hub for learning in Teams, with AI that can recommend the right content at the right time. It aims to make learning a natural part of every employee’s daily work as well as the company culture. It allows managers to assign learning to their team members, and track the completion of courses.

The fourth tool, Viva Topics delivers a knowledge discovery experience that helps people connect to information and experts across the company. It integrates knowledge from a variety of third-party services.

The tool is also enabled with consulting and advisory services from a global network of services partners, including Accenture, Avanade, PwC and EY.

The idea behind Microsoft Viva is to provide a unified platform and a one-stop solution to organisations to integrate their fragmented workplace tools, which is otherwise a $300 billion industry of a fragmented market of services, infrastructure and hundreds of tools.