Microsoft has launched Viva, an employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, well-being and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work. 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.
“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,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Every organization 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.”
According to Microsoft, the nascent employee experience platforms (EXP) category is estimated at $300 billion in annual spend, and spans what is today a fragmented market of services, infrastructure, and hundreds of tools, many that go undiscovered and under-utilized by employees at the companies that have invested in them.
“As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and wellbeing so organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. “Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders.”
Microsoft Viva builds ona foundation of Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas—engagement, well-being, learning, and knowledge—in an integrated experience.
The launch includes an initial set of modules in Viva that will provide built-in capabilities, integrations from an ecosystem of Viva partners, and platform extensibility that will enable customers to integrate their existing employee experience systems and tools with Viva to make them more accessible and discoverable to employees:
Viva Connectionsprovides a personalized gateway to a digital workplace where employees can access internal communications and company resources such as policies and benefits and participate in communities such as mployee resource groups, all from a single customizable app in Microsoft Teams. The Connections app for Teams will be available on desktop in public preview the first half of 2021 with a mobile app coming later this year.
Viva Insights gives individuals, managers and leaders personalized and actionable insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. Personal experiences and insights, visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks, focused work and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with their colleagues. Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organization level, as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. The insights are aggregated and de-identified by default to maintain personal privacy. In addition, a new dashboard allows organizations to combine employee feedback from LinkedIn’s Glint with collaboration data from Viva Insights, enabling leaders to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms, and then quantify the impact of those changes over time.
Customers will also be able to incorporate data from third-party services such as Zoom, Slack, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors. The Viva Insights app in Teams and the new Glint and Viva Insights dashboard are now available in public preview.
Viva Learning makes training and professional development opportunities more discoverable and accessible in the flow of work. It aggregates all the learning resources available to an organization in one place, including content from LinkedIn Learning; Microsoft Learn; third-party providers including Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX; as well as an organization’s own content library. From traditional learning courses to microlearning content, users can discover, share, assign and track a wide variety of learning as a natural part of the workday. The Viva Learning app is now available in private preview, and starting later this year Viva Learning will offer integrations with leading learning management systems, including Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba and SAP SuccessFactors.
Viva Topics delivers a knowledge discovery experience that helps people connect to information and experts across the company. Using AI to reason over a customer’s Microsoft 365 data, and with the ability to integrate knowledge from a variety of third-party services such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, Viva Topics automatically surfaces topic cards within conversations and documents across Microsoft 365 and Teams. Clicking on a card opens a topic page with related documents, conversations, videos and people. Viva Topics is now generally available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 commercial plans.
For more information about Microsoft Viva, go to www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/overview.