Microsoft Viva: a revolution in employee experience

The past year has seen unprecedented changes to the way we all work. With “you’re on mute” now part of daily life, we have adopted very different ways of communicating and collaborating. With technology firmly at the centre of team working, it’s pretty clear that we need to find new ways of supporting each other, build connections, and foster knowledge sharing and training. Yesterday, we saw the exciting introduction of Microsoft Viva, a brand new tool designed to empower employees, support remote working and enhance wellbeing.

“No area has undergone more rapid transformation than the way we work.”

– Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

The little things in Viva

Microsoft Viva comprises four separate modules that blend together to make a complete employee experience suite. Each of these exciting new modules provides new capabilities that promise to significantly improve the way information is shared throughout the workplace. Let’s take a closer look at each of the modules:

Viva Connections

Connections will provide personalised access to your internal digital workplace where employees can easily find internal company information, news, files, updates, or resources. This module allows you to bring the power of your SharePoint intranet home page directly into Microsoft Teams – allowing quick access to applications and content. This module will be available on desktop in public preview during the first half of 2021 with a mobile app coming later in the year.

Source: Microsoft

Viva Insights

Viva Insights is built to help employees work smarter, but not harder! Personal insights are provided for each employee, to help them optimise their workday whilst at the same time encouraging regular breaks, and to end the day with a virtual commute. Team leaders and managers are provided with useful statistics to help prevent burnouts, showcase their team engagement, and understand how team morale and wellbeing can be improved.

Source: Microsoft

Viva Learning

Training is very often an informal or even overlooked part of the employee experience. Viva Learning seeks to integrate skills development into the working day. The module provides a central hub for training resources from across the organisation, aggregating content from multiple sources, including Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning and various third-party providers. Managers can use Viva Learning to easily identify and flag training collateral, which can be presented to team members as future training activities. As with the rest of the Viva suite, being surfaced through Microsoft Teams will make Learning a central part of employee life within the organisation.

Source: Microsoft

Viva Topics

At Intelogy we’ve been following Topics for several years now. Formerly a key part of the ‘Project Cortex’ initiative, Viva Topics will bring Knowledge to life within your organisation. This module uses AI to automatically identify knowledge of value that is contained within your existing content and promote it to a central Knowledge Hub. I’m personally really excited by the potential of Viva Topics – using a tool to automatically derive additional value from your existing content and build an internal ‘Wikipedia’ will vastly improve the flow of knowledge throughout the organisation.

Source: Microsoft

Viva Topics is one of the major deliverables to result from Project Cortex, a programme that Intelogy has had early sight of for over a year. We’re excited to see it come to the market and can’t wait to help our clients realise the value of their organisation’s content and data. As one of only a handful of ‘preferred’ Content Services partners in the world, Intelogy are perfectly placed to help you benefit from improved knowledge sharing within your organisation.

For more information around Viva Topics, why not take a quick look at one of our previous blogs exploring Project Cortex: Project Cortex – what is it and how will it transform your productivity?

Microsoft Viva is certainly one of the most exciting new products to emerge within the Microsoft 365 family since Teams itself. It’s hard to underestimate quite how it will improve processes, knowledge and wellbeing in the workplace. We can’t wait to help you to enable, configure and adopt the Microsoft Viva suite and to watch the way these tools support remote working and improve employee growth and performance. Why not get in touch, so that we can help you reimagine employee experiences throughout your organisation.