Hopefully you managed to watch the “Empowering Your Workforce in Economic Uncertainty”. There is certainly a lot to unpack from it.
I found some of the stats very interesting and what Microsoft are coining as “Productivity Paranoia” was a key take away it shows that “87 percent of employees report they are productive, yet only 12 percent of leaders say they’re confident their employees are productive in hybrid work.”
But what does this mean and how can Microsoft Viva help? Leaders need to create clarity around what work is most important and listen to what their employees need to make the biggest impact.
With that Microsoft has unveiled a few new Viva modules and features that are coming out and I’ve given a very quick overview of some of them and a short thought on what I like about each one.
Viva Pulse
A new app that will enable managers and team leads to seek regular and confidential feedback on their team’s experience. Viva Pulse uses smart templates and research-backed questions to help managers pinpoint what’s working well and where to focus, and also provides suggested learning and actions to address team needs.
This will allow you to pulse your team with surveys and spot issues early. It’s a quick, snappy way of gaining insights into how your teams are feeling. It helps managers grow and know where they should be focussing. Providing real time feedback between managers and employees and gives the managers the ability to share de-identified reports to help teams grow together.
I’m personally really excited about this new module and I can’t wait to see how it begins to integrate into the other areas of Viva which I think will really provide a super power here.
Viva Amplify
Viva Amplify is a new app that will empower leaders and communicators to elevate their message and reach employees where they are with consistency and impact. The app centralizes communications campaigns, offers writing guidance to improve message resonance, enables publishing across multiple channels and distribution groups in Microsoft 365, and provides metrics for improvement.
I’m excited to see how you can publish informaiton across multiple places, like Viva Engage, SharePoint or even in the future windows alerts.
Campaign objectives can be set and analyse how people are engaging with them. This type of feedback will help communicators and leaders to become more engaging.
Bringing all of these comms abilities into a single pane of glass will be invaluable. Quickly being able to disseminate informaiton to various different channels within Microsoft 365 and offering writing guidance to help boost engagement is going to be a game changer.
Viva Sales
Yeah I know I already blogged about this a while back but we at least now have a date for GA.
Viva Sales will be the first role-based experience app in Microsoft Viva its going to be generally available on 3rd October. It brings together a seller’s CRM with Microsoft 365 and Teams to provide a more streamlined and AI-powered selling experience. Right in the tools they’re using every day to connect with customers and close deals. Microsoft is announcing a partnership with Seismic to personalize and scale customer engagements through AI-generated content recommendations.
Viva Connections Home Page
There is a new home experience in Viva Connections coming which will bring all the Viva apps together in one place, and updates to the Viva briefing email will provide more personalized productivity recommendations to help employees catch up on work, meetings and learning.
Having a single place to easily access all of the Viva modules will be really useful. Read more here.
Leadership Corner in Viva Engage
This looks like a really interesting new feature for Viva Engage it will allow leaders to create a space for open dialog accross their organisation. It will give the leader the ability to track sentiment and feedback from their audience and help guide their communications.
I think the Ask me Anything feature is great and it would actually be great to be able to run these not just from a leadership point of view but allow subject matter experts or poeple who run certain communities to run AMA’s.
Answers In Viva Engage
A new Answers tab in Viva Engage will serve as a hub for employees to ask questions, find solutions, discover knowledge, and help co-workers. Answers helps organize questions and solutions by connecting to existing knowledge and experts.
Users can ask questions, see recommendations, and contribute their own answers to open questions. I think this is a really interesting feature and it will help to nurture a really open environment where poeple want to help and add their experteese to enable a better informed workforce. This will also be coming to Viva Topics in 2023. Read more here.
Poeple in Viva
People in Microsoft Viva is a new platform capability in Viva that puts people at the centre of the employee experience, so you can discover connections and experts across your organization. Available as an app and integrated into Microsoft 365 profiles, People in Viva is powered by AI, unlocking information across interests, knowledge, and goals to improve collaboration and team building.
There are a quite a few awesome use cases for this but I really can’t wait to see how this integrated with Viva Topics and the search functionality accross SharePoint etc. With a more dispersed workforce these days this type of stuff is really powerful. Read more here.
If you missed the announcement watch it here and read this news article. It gives 3 urgent pivot points for leaders to act on ASAP
There is so much coming to Microsoft Viva and the employee experience as a whole is probably THE most important thing right now, exciting times ahead!