Microsoft Viva connections are starting to roll out as part of your existing Microsoft 365 licence, starting this summer with the launch of a Teams app that incorporates a mobile app. So, what is Microsoft Viva?
Microsoft Viva is a new unified experience combining learning, expertise, communications, and insight that is encouraging people and their teams to be their best, wherever they are. Fuelled by the strength and scope of Microsoft 365, you can experience it through Microsoft Teams and many other Microsoft 365 apps that are used in everyday life.
Microsoft Viva includes four sections: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and finally, Viva Topics.
Viva Connections
A study from Microsoft’s ‘Work Trend Index’ has shown that almost 60% of workers have felt less connected to their team since remote working began. This is not only tough on your team but especially hard for someone like a new starter, who was never able to meet colleagues in person or be part of the office culture.
Viva Connections offers a singular entry point for those crucial internal communications and to help heighten employee engagement. In a sense, it is the entrance into this new modern digital workplace.
Built on Microsoft 365 resources such as SharePoint, which provides an exclusive employee destination. Businesses can connect with their employees through company town halls and their employees can access everything from company news and policies to communities they might want to join via Microsoft Viva’s integration with Yammer.
This provides a customized feed and dashboard to help your staff find all the useful resources they might need. The content can also be tailored for specific roles within the company, meaning they can have a complete view of only the resources they require.
Viva Insights
During this pandemic, a large percent of workers are reporting heightened stress levels which can lead to a higher risk of burn out. It is vital for businesses to help their employees switch off and make the most of the rare time they have available.
Viva Insights provides individuals, managers, and business owners tailored and privacy-protected insights that will help everybody in the organization succeed. It helps to bring new personal wellbeing experiences and recommended actions from places such as Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics into people’s work in Microsoft Teams.
Available via Microsoft Teams, Viva Insights is vital in helping employees to stay linked and connected with their colleagues and in helping protect that essential time used for things like regular breaks and or focused work. Microsoft Viva also plays an important part in improving personal and overall security and privacy. Viva uses aggregation, de-identification, and differential privacy, meaning personal insights are only visible to the individual, while insights for managers are collected and de-identified by default to protect that employee’s privacy.
Viva Learning
Recent findings from a report by LinkedIn found a massive 94% of employees would be more likely to stay at their current company if it invested in expanding their knowledge and development. Studies like this show how important it is for organizations to develop an environment based around learning to make sure that they are keeping up with incoming changes and to hold on to the great talent in their businesses.
Viva Learning enables learning to become a natural part of employee’s daily work and their company culture.
Through Viva Learning, employees will easily discover and be able to share events such as training courses, management will be able to obtain the tools they need to assign learning and to track the completion of courses, all of which help in creating this culture of learning. Viva Learning creates a centralised hub for learning in Teams, with AI that recommends the right content needed at the right time. Viva Learning also works with the leading learning-management systems.
Viva Topics
We have all been that ‘new employee’ at some point in our lives and due to the current environment, we are all familiar with working remotely, even if you had not experienced it before. Therefore, everyone has experienced issues such as trying to find an expert or getting to grips with company acronyms or surfacing the content you need and consequently know how tiresome those matters can be.
Viva Topics allows you to utilize the knowledge of your organization, and connect people to that knowledge, via those apps they use daily. According to Microsoft, the best way to think of Viva Topics is as a Wikipedia with AI superpowers for your business.
Topics uses AI to instinctively manage company-wide content into the relevant categories. There is no need to search for the knowledge — the knowledge will find you. Viva Topics instinctively surfaces topic cards as people work in apps such as SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. When employees click on a card, a topic page appears with documents, videos, and related people.
Along with content from the Cloud, Viva Topics also surfaces information from third-party services like ServiceNow and Salesforce, and Graph connectors are there to make it easy to connect to more useful content, helping employees to get the most out of their valuable time.
If you want to learn more about Microsoft Viva and start planning for the public previews and the summertime launch then get in touch and come talk to us.
