Microsoft launches employee experience platform, Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Corp has announced the launch of a new employee experience platform, Microsoft Viva.

Viva is designed to help employees and organisations navigate remote work.

“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 organisation 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,” added Nadella.

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Microsoft Viva builds on the capabilities of Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning and Knowledge

The tech giant has announced an initial set of modules in Viva which also includes integrations from Viva partners, and platform extensibilities to enable customers to integrate their existing employee experience systems and tools with the platform.

Employees can access internal communications and company resources through Viva Connections. It can be done through a customisable app in Microsoft Teams. The Connections app for Teams will be available on desktop in public preview in the first half of 2021 with a mobile app coming later this year, Microsoft said.

Viva Insights gives individuals, managers and leaders personalised and actionable insights. Personal experiences and insights will be visible only to the employee. Managers and leaders can also see trends at team and organisation level along with recommendations to better balance productivity and well-being.

In addition, a new dashboard will allows organisations to combine employee feedback from LinkedIn’s Glint with collaboration data from Viva Insights.

Customers will also be able to incorporate data from third-party services like Zoom, 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 will aggregate learning resources for employees. It will consist of all the learning resources available to an organisation in one place, including content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, third-party providers including Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX, as well as an organisation’s own content library.

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“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,” Microsoft said.

Viva Topics is meant to provide 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,” the company explained.

When a user clocks on a card, it opens a topic page with relevant documents, conversations, videos and people. Viva Topics is now generally available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 commercial plans.

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