Blog & Resources

Technology industry insights and IT tips from NMX IT

Microsoft Just Launched a New Engaging Employee Experience Platform

Microsoft Just Launched a New Engaging Employee Experience Platform

In February 2021, Microsoft announced a brand-new platform that promises to be the next new trend in employee engagement. Microsoft Viva is noted as the first employee experience platform of its kind, designed to bring several key components of a healthy, happy, and engaged work life together.

Richard Branson once famously said, “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don’t want to.” This is one of the sentiments at the heart of Viva.

The platform is designed to harness the power of cloud solutions to nurture employees in four important ways to improve their overall experience, thus making organisations better.

Microsoft Viva is an add-in for Microsoft Teams and it connects to and utilises data from the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The goal is to:

  • Amplify culture and communications
  • Balance productivity with wellbeing
  • Harness knowledge and expertise
  • Accelerate learning and growth

71% of surveyed executives say that their company success depends upon having engaged employees. Keeping employees engaged has become a bit harder recently due to the move to remote working during the pandemic.

Remote teams aren’t going anywhere after the COVID crisis has passed either, it’s expected that in 2021, the number of permanent remote workers around the world will double.

Microsoft Viva was created to bridge the divide by bringing several employee experience mechanisms into one of the main virtual work tools that remote teams use every day.

How Does Microsoft Viva Work?

Microsoft Viva is powered by four different components:

  • Viva Insights
  • Viva Learning
  • Viva Connections
  • Viva Topics

Each component addresses a different area of the employee experience to improve productivity, wellbeing, work-life balance, and ongoing learning and knowledge capturing.

Viva Insights

How do you know if an employee has started working through lunch and breaks when they’ve moved to a remote environment? Some people might put in extra hours because they think they have something to prove when working from home.

But employee burnout doesn’t help productivity, it hurts it.

Viva Insights provides helpful reminders for employees about their health and wellbeing, such as reminding them to take regular breaks.

All app images are from Microsoft

The tool also gives managers and leaders valuable non-personal data that can let them know if their team is overworking when working from home and perhaps need to be reminded to balance home and work life, so they don’t burn out.

Viva Learning

94% of employees say they would stay with a company longer if it invested in their skills development and ongoing learning. But incorporating a learning program, even though a learning management system (LMS), isn’t always easy or fluid.

Viva Learning is designed to change that by bringing all types of employee training and skills development programs into once place, inside Microsoft Teams. This makes it easy to link to learning modules and makes the experience more visible and integrated with everyday activities.

The tool can integrate multiple LMS systems and learning tools like LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, Coursera, and many more.

Viva Connections

Pretty much everyone is familiar with those personalised news portals that you might have as your default home page of a browser or in social media platforms like Facebook. They bring information pertinent to your interests, geographical location, and other preferences into a single page.

Viva Connections does the same thing, but for your company. Organisations can use Viva to keep employees informed in relevant company news, curated content, industry news related to an employee position, and other resources.

The app is designed to strengthen the company culture and sense of team and keep employees engaged.

Businesses with highly engaged employees have 21% greater profitability.

Viva Connections provides a modern and automated way to inform employees that’s in a format they’ve become familiar with from other internet platforms. 

Viva Topics 

Every company has a vast knowledgebase of documents, important articles, and expert guides that have been developed over the years. But finding the relevant topic at the right time can be time-consuming. New employees may not even realise there is an internal guide they can reference to help them do their work better.

Viva Topics is designed to make those resources visible and bring them into conversations naturally thorough links and auto-generated topic pages that employees can reference.

For example, if someone references the SOAR Guide when discussing something in Teams, the document will be automatically linked to the mention so anyone on that conversation can click and find all the company’s information on that guide instantly, no searching through tons of online archives.

Topics is a big productivity booster and helps leverage your team’s collective knowledge for all.

Get Help Optimising Your Remote Team With the Right Solutions

NMX IT Solutions can help your Thames Valley area business incorporate innovative and helpful cloud tools that make your life easier and improve engagement for your employees.

Contact us today to schedule your consultation! Call 01628 232300 or reach out online.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Archives