Microsoft’s latest digital platform for the employee experience is called Microsoft Viva. With seamless integration into Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 productivity and collaboration tools, its goal is to enable everyone on the team to learn and develop through new digital experiences. Also, users can adapt the platform to incorporate their own employee experience solutions. Employees will find it easier and more convenient to use them as a result. These, which concentrate on four areas—knowledge sharing, workplace wellness, training, and communication and conversation—allow the business to engage with its staff and offer new features and content. Here is a simple guide to explore more about Microsoft Viva and the ways it can help your team.
What’s the purpose of MS Viva, and how it can help your team?
The purpose of Microsoft Viva is to enhance the employee experience in the digital workplace. As a new Employee Experience Platform (EXP) from Microsoft, it represents a significant step forward, akin to the evolution seen with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and modern SharePoint. Microsoft Viva aims to revolutionize how companies design employee experiences, integrating seamlessly into the existing digital workplace ecosystem that often includes Teams for real-time communication, SharePoint-based intranets, and a broader digital workplace powered by Microsoft 365.
Microsoft Viva brings together a suite of both new and existing Microsoft 365 features to support various aspects of employee experience. It focuses on key organizational priorities that are centered around people, as defined by Microsoft:
Engagement: Enhancing employee engagement through improved communication, collaboration, and connection within the workplace.
Education: Facilitating learning and professional development opportunities to empower employees in their roles.
Health: Promoting a healthy work-life balance and mental well-being among employees.
Information: Ensuring easy access to relevant information and resources, thereby streamlining workflows and decision-making processes.
For teams looking to harness the full potential of Microsoft Viva, consulting services, such as those offered through MS Viva consultancy, can be invaluable. These services provide tailored advice and strategies to leverage Microsoft Viva effectively, aligning its capabilities with the specific needs and priorities of a team or organization. This expert guidance ensures that businesses can maximize the benefits of Microsoft Viva, fostering a more engaging, educational, healthy, and well-informed workplace environment.
Even though some aspects of Viva may be experienced through Outlook, it’s primarily experienced through Microsoft Teams.
1. Balancing employee time
The ease with which Microsoft Viva protects staff time is one of its primary advantages. Instead of requiring staff members to reserve time on their calendars, Microsoft Viva interfaces with Outlook automatically, reads the calendar, and schedules “Focus time.” Focus time slots are reserved for two or more times a day, with different durations to accommodate breaks in between meetings. After that, your Teams status automatically changes to “Focusing,” so you don’t have to set the Do Not Disturb option. This encourages your staff to dedicate all of their attention to a single work during that period, and it also makes other staff members more aware of their surroundings when conducting meetings in between.
2. Encouraging leaving on time
The Virtual Commute service is one of Viva’s offerings. The virtual commute, which is aimed mostly at remote workers or those who work from home once a week, is a sequence of steps and a reminder to staff members to ensure that they turn in on time and get ready for the next day in order to prevent blurring work boundaries. The three phases are Wind Down, Tasks, and Meetings. Meetings ask you to reply and let you know whether you have any meetings the next day, along with any lingering invites or conflicts. Tasks encourage you to go over your to-do list and schedule any reminders for the next day. Lastly, Wind Down provides a range of concluding exercises, such as relaxing and thinking back on your day using a straightforward emoji.
3. Expressing gratitude to associates
The Viva Praise integration is also available in the Team’s chat. This ensures you congratulate one coworker for many reasons, such as optimism, leading, being inclusive, and working in teams. Acknowledging achievements does not necessarily mean praising straight performance or KPIs; it entails recognizing some intangible feats in the office space with a pinch of celebration for the small wins that build up to great successes.
4. Putting mental health first
Both the Teams app and its web version use data from Microsoft’s product Viva Insights to highlight the significance of mental health at mid-working day. Viva insights prioritized the employers’ mental health. The number of out-of-office messages measures quiet hour disruption and indicates whether one can complete a specific activity without interruption.
5. Creating better working habits.
Certain work habits can be detrimental to productivity and focus, such as checking other Teams’ messages during meetings, arriving late for video sessions, and scheduling last-minute catch-ups. Viva Insights examines the way you work and provides a report on how well you followed best practices. It then suggests ways to improve your working habits and offers recommendations if you’re having trouble in a certain area on a regular basis. For instance, you might not need to have or be present at recurrent meetings when you are responding to chats the entire time.
6. Making catch-up tasks simple
Viva starts analyzing your emails with text recognition and machine learning. It will remind you to add a task to your ToDo list to ensure you finish it if you reply to a coworker saying, “I will do this task tomorrow morning.” This eliminates a significant portion of the tedious manual task creation process and eliminates the need for lengthy paper trails, post-it notes, and even misplaced emails. It’s a lot more flexible and easier to work with, which was especially helpful during the pandemic because it eliminated the need to rely on notebook memory.
7. Evaluating the length of your workday
It might be difficult to gauge how much you’ve truly accomplished in a workday, particularly on days when it seems like you haven’t spent much time at your desk. Viva’s communication habits analyze your collaborative accomplishments and create a bar chart that updates every four weeks. In this manner, you are able to observe your daily routine and habits at any given time. Numerous additional data sets are available as well, and they all work together to provide you with further insight into the jobs you’ve performed, your work habits, and your areas for improvement.
