Microsoft Viva: What is it?
Microsoft Viva: What is it?
It is Microsoft's digital employee experience platform that is seamlessly integrated into Microsoft 365 productivity and collaboration tools, including Teams.
This platform aims to enhance employee experience by focusing on four key areas: communication, workplace well-being, knowledge sharing, and learning.
In this article, we will explore Viva's modules that facilitate interaction with colleagues and provide tailored content to meet their needs.
What you will find in this article
What is Microsoft Viva, and how does it work?
Microsoft Viva is the new digital employee experience platform from Microsoft.
Seamlessly integrated with the productivity and collaboration tools of Microsoft 365 and specifically of Microsoft Teams, it aims to help everyone in the company team learn and grow through new digital experiences.
The platform can also be customized so that people can integrate their own employee experience solutions. As a result, employees will be able to use them in a more convenient and accessible manner.
We've already mentioned that it's made up of four parts: Viva Connections, Viva Topics, Viva Insights, and Viva Learning.
These enable the company to interact with its employees and provide new functions and content by focusing on four areas: communication and conversation, workplace wellness, knowledge sharing, and training.
Employee Experience
Employee experience is a growing trend that is widely discussed - especially during the pandemic - and emphasizes the importance of employee care within businesses.
The true assets of businesses are their employees because they drive productivity, progress, and all other business processes.
Also see: Achieve the best employee experience with the intranet
All the tools at the company's disposal, as well as the opportunities for action, training, and services that the company provides to its employees, are considered in the employee experience to ensure that their work experience is the best it can be.
It's now common knowledge that people who feel part of a community - and are engaged - are in a state of well-being that motivates them to perform better. As a result, the company's workforce profitability rises.
6 Key Employee Experience Elements
For the creation and development of this new platform, Microsoft relied on six key elements:
- Wellbeing.
In an organization, a person must find favorable circumstances and have at their disposal a variety of tools that can be useful to them and can help them optimize their work routine.
- Growth.
People must have the opportunity to grow and learn in every business setting.
- Connection.
The ability to connect with and share information with coworkers and all other people in the company must be granted to all employees.
- Focus.
Favoring a focus on activities, i.e., obtaining tools that encourage simple collaboration among coworkers and maximize individual tasks.
- Purpose.
To provide users with a set of tools that will allow them to see a global and detailed view of the state of their business activities.
- Self-awareness.
Supplying elements to increase awareness of the dependents' points of strength and weakness.
As a result, Microsoft has attempted to improve these aspects with its digital employee experience by proposing, via an integrated intranet in Teams:
- Services and functionalities that keep employees informed about the company's activities.
- SharePoint tools that make company resources more accessible.
- Viva Learning plans for growth, development, and training.
Microsoft Viva's components
Microsoft has paid special attention to the health and well-being of its employees. Since we now spend most of our time on computers, having features in Teams, the tool on which we work every day, that can alert us if we are working too much is extremely useful.
It's also for better managing our own time and having one-on-one conversations with our coworkers or bosses. For this reason, Microsoft Viva Connections was created to facilitate communication, collaboration, and the growth of the corporate culture.
With Viva Connections, employees can access internal communications and business resources from a single, customizable app on Teams.
Then there's Viva Learning, which was created for personal development and training; it collects all available learning resources in a single work environment.
Viva Topics allows the distribution of knowledge within the company using artificial intelligence tools. File and information exchange becomes easier and more immediate.
Finally, we'll talk about Viva Insights, a company that was founded to visualize and develop the well-being and productivity of employees.
What is intranet.ai?
intranet.ai is the ready-to-use corporate intranet, designed to reduce costs and implementation times, thus creating a collaborative and modern digital work environment:
- Initial price of 3,650 €/year for a complete intranet
- 50+ applications, including advanced search, document management system, push notifications via Teams, personal profile, and FAQ pages
- 100% integrated with SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365
Microsoft Viva Connections
Businesses have had to adapt to social and economic changes by mobilizing their workforce and providing them with the tools they need to do their jobs.
As work becomes more remote, it becomes more difficult for people to feel connected and participate in business reality.
We'll see what Viva Connections is and what it does.
What is Microsoft Viva Connections?
Viva Connections is your doorway to a modern employee experience. It's integrated into apps and devices that employees use daily, such as Microsoft Teams.
This platform provides users with a unified experience that includes news, conversations, and other business resources.
Viva Connections provides new opportunities for leaders to implement an organizational culture and engage their employees in a motivating work environment. As a result, its goal is to help you establish and maintain strong relationships with your dependents, regardless of where you are.
Customized feed
Internal communication is a critical factor to which every company should pay close attention. With such a large number of tools for interaction and information exchange, there is a risk that some content will be lost or will not be found.
To this end, Viva Connections enables people to easily discover and retrieve all the information they require. People have a unique and personalized experience within the feed that the platform provides, and they can contribute to conversations wherever they are.
The feed is also useful because it allows users to publish services from Microsoft 365's most popular apps, such as SharePoint, Yammer, and Stream, on its internal network. But you can also publish any external content you want to make known to your dependents.
The platform also allows employees to easily share feedback with the Yammer community and participate in non-interrupted conversations about announcements and company news.
Rapid access
It's available on Teams as an icon in the upper right corner that allows you to access your company's intranet. In this case, the intranet should be set up as a SharePoint home site.
The home site is the main site for our SharePoint Online instance, and it can collect news, content, and information from all the sites that are part of the Microsoft 365 subscription.
We can access the intranet directly and quickly thanks to this icon throughout the day's work.
Dashboard
One of the most interesting new features is the dashboard, which is available on Viva Connections within SharePoint Online.
The dashboard is an app/widget that displays content or functionality tailored to the user by the company.
It's a feature tailored to the user and built around them to allow them to stay focused on their work, or, for example, to mention someone to create an engagement or to see how many hours of vacation time they have left.
You can think of the dashboard as a business home designed for employees and built with the goal of serving as a meeting point where everyone can find the business resources they require.
In addition, on the dashboard, you can personalize the resources for different groups of employees (such as first-line employees), whose time-consuming content is solely limited to pauses.
As a result, you can configure Viva Connections to provide them with a comprehensive view of everything they require, reducing the amount of time they spend away from their primary activity to the absolute minimum.
Global navigation
We have a global navigation within the SharePoint Online home site that allows us to move between the contents and sites in our entire Microsoft 365 environment.
In this way, you can retrieve the files and information you require without losing anything.
Company feed
The company feed represents the integration of Yammer and SharePoint Online in terms of conversations, which can be accessed easily via both the intranet and Teams.
This feature can be customized to display content from either the main community or specific communities.
Microsoft Viva Insights
Microsoft Viva Insights focuses on the well-being and productivity of the company's employees.
It provides personalized information to individuals, managers, and leaders that can be used to assist everyone in the organization in growing.
To this end, Viva Insights will integrate Microsoft Workplace Analytics and Microsoft MyAnalytics in the future.
Clients can rely on security measures for predefined settings, such as deidentification, aggregation, or privacy.
How does Viva Insights work?
Microsoft Viva Insights combines the features of two Microsoft products: MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics.
These are tools that measure a user's interaction with Microsoft 365 tools in their day-to-day activities.
Data that can be used to learn, for example, how many emails are received, how much time a person spends writing emails, and how much time they spend in meetings, is archived.
All these elements are presented in two ways:
- Personal insights, in which a person can visualize how they are using the platform, manage their schedule, and set aside time to focus on their activities.
- Workplace Analytics data that is aggregated to allow managers and leaders to have a high-level view of daily labor productivity.
Personal insights
There are three types of people who can interact with data: single users, managers, and leaders.
Users can integrate Microsoft Viva Insights with their Teams app to add two key functionalities:
- The "Stay connected" tab, which allows you to stay in touch with coworkers or subordinates and manage your e-mail and calendar and proposes you to schedule one-on-one meetings with your collaborators in order to keep them informed and avoid feeling isolated, especially given the current situation.
- Notifications that you will receive in case you haven't replied to your emails yet.
The detailed information provided by this app is completely private and is derived from the archiving of Microsoft 365 data such as e-mails, meetings, phone calls, and chats to which the users already have access.
Time-protection feature
Using Microsoft Teams, you can gain access to a dedicated area where Viva Insights offers a few slots within your schedule to take some time to breathe and relax.
The time-protection feature allows users to easily plan their concentration-time so that they can work without interruptions or distractions before the day is overburdened with meetings and tasks.
Homepage
The homepage is the first thing you see when you enter an intranet's interface, and it allows you to perform quick actions that are useful for both interacting with people and managing our daily work activities.
For example, you can quickly access tasks, organize focus moments for yourself, or anonymously share information with the company about your well-being in the workplace.
Manager insights
We already mentioned that there are three types of people who can interact with the data provided by MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics. Managers are among them.
If a manager is granted access to Viva Insights, they will be able to access reports to visualize data relevant to their team and direct employees.
Managers can nourish the well-being of their team members by increasing the visibility of work models that depict burnout and stress symptoms in people, such as the inability to attend meetings, having too little time to concentrate, or working outside of the hours set by their employers.
These insights, which are supported and contextualized by research and best practice suggestions, assist managers in identifying the most pressing challenges they face while also supporting employees' diverse work needs and flexibility.
Over time, this experience will be enhanced by opportunities for managers to develop team action plans.
Members of the team are given tips and best practices to help them prioritize their health and productivity. Managers can also track how well their teams are progressing toward their objectives over time.
Leader insights
Leaders are those who have visibility across the entire organization.
They're interested in seeing how people are engaged, and they're always using the Analytics data that comes from using Microsoft 365.
Meetings can be used, people can be engaged, there can be collaboration in the office, and as a result, intervention actions can be taken.
In Viva Insights, Microsoft also suggests actions that the company can choose to follow or not.
