Webinar Recap | The State of Microsoft Viva & the Digital Workspace.
Thanks for your interest in “The State of Microsoft Viva & the Digital Workspace.” If you were able to join us for the webinar, we sincerely thank you for being there. We hope you had as much fun getting to learn about Microsoft Viva as our speakers did sharing their knowledge with you.
Didn’t get a chance to catch our session live? We’ve got you covered.
This Session:
The way we work has fundamentally changed, and organizations are clamoring to connect disparate digital tools into an intuitive and holistic digital workspace. Microsoft Viva—Microsoft’s employee experience platform—is becoming the central hub of a successful digital workplace. Powered by Microsoft 365 and experienced primarily through Microsoft Teams, Viva supports a culture where people and teams are empowered to be their best no matter where they are.
So, what exactly does Microsoft Viva offer? And how can you leverage it to help your company? In this webinar recording, Microsoft MVP and Regional Director Eric Overfield breaks down the many modules of Microsoft Viva and shows you how they can bring transparency, efficiency, and productivity to your workforce.
Episode Takeaways:
- Understand what exactly an Employee Experience Platform (EXP/EEP) is
- Learn about each of the 9 generally available Viva modules
- See how these modules integrate and interact with each other
- A manager’s life in Viva: see an example of a manager persona navigating through all Viva modules
- Learn successful patterns & practices when rolling out Viva components in your organization
Show Links:
Key Takeaways
9:20 – What is an Employee Experience Platform?
Providing hybrid flexibility has become part of the “experience” that employees now expect. Making that experience positive requires the creation of a digital workplace experience. This is what an employee experience platform is built to deliver.
“It’s a platform looking to provide that middleware connectivity, bringing together digital workflows, case management, process management, and knowledge management all in one interface, even though those systems might be separate. Instead of making people go to all these different systems or trying to piecemeal all these disparate third-party tools together, an EXP/EEP does the heavy lifting for you. If any of you have worked with the APIs for some of the large systems, such as Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, etc., they can be a little complex and difficult to pull together. An EXP or EEP is looking to provide that middleware so that from the employees’ perspective, It’s all one platform.”
24:20 – Microsoft Viva Modules
Microsoft Viva is everything you need to grow your people, surfaced in Microsoft Teams. This employee experience platform brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights that can be accessed wherever and whenever. There are nine Viva modules that each deliver different benefits.
Viva Connections
24:53 “Viva Connections is all about helping people stay engaged and informed primarily through your home site via the intranet homepage. It gives you some extra tools and this idea of a dashboard that you can include in your home site. But it’s designed primarily for productivity at your fingertips on mobile devices. It also includes a feed trying to pull together the most important information relevant to you to help keep you informed and engaged. As well as the primary resources you need, which is your Global navigation, to help you get to the different aspects of your Digital Workspace—far beyond what the Viva modules currently provide on their own.”
Viva Insights
26:09 “There’s two major pieces of Viva Insights. Your personal insights are for you and your highly protected data. Viva Insights personal is about balancing your own personal productivity and well-being, helping you stay engaged and connected with people, helping you find focus time, helping you with just general well-being and virtual commutes, and keeping you personally as productive as possible. The Viva Insights for managers and teams is about team members, managers, and business leaders, understanding how their team is doing without it being what I like to call creepy. It’s not specific, so you know that Mary did this, Joe did that, and Ali did this other thing. It’s much more about how you might want to know that 20% of your employees work over three hours a day after normal work hours. What your managers are looking for really is to understand and hopefully prevent burnout.”
Viva Topics
28:03 “The idea of Viva Topics is to help connect the knowledge within your organization with the experts who have that knowledge. Every org I’ve ever worked with has got institutional knowledge. It’s got the information that’s relevant to what the organization does in order to be an organization. It has the data on the projects I worked on, the code names, the internal things, all these acronyms that no one ever knows, and whatnot. Topics is a knowledge management system that looks to curate that together, using AI, as well as a topic center that can be curated by people. And it helps find these topics within your organization; it helps create topic pages, pulling together the documents, the conversations, the people into one spot and then surfacing those topics within the flow of work.”
Viva Learning
29:30 “Viva Learning is about upskilling. It’s about being within the flow of work, helping people learn more things, trying to stop that idea of, “I can’t go anywhere in my organization with new technologies, new pieces unless I switch work,” and that’s just a horrible idea for everybody. And so, Viva Learning looks to address that. There’s a free version of Viva Learning, which connects you to Microsoft Learn and some general LinkedIn Learning. It’s about 100-150 different components or modules. There’s a paid version where you can connect to an external upskilling module system. As well as giving managers the ability to track progress, help recommend things, and help create a curriculum for their team to help them with upskilling.”
Viva Goals
30:43 “Viva Goals is about turning the objectives and goals within an organization into something tangible that can be tracked, aligned, and viewed. I love Viva Goals because it’s built on the idea of OKRs— a goal-setting technique called objectives and key results.”
32:15 “One of the big things about OKRs is all about alignment and visibility within the org, and Viva Goals brings that to life. If you are at OKRs, this is a no-brainer. If your org is not OKRs and you can’t convince your org to do this, my opinion is that this tool is not going to work for you.”
Viva Engage
33:30 “Viva Engage is effectively Yammer in your org. It’s providing connections around communities and conversations.”
Viva Pulse
34:14 “Viva Pulse is all about getting that on-demand employee feedback. And about you asking all kinds of surveys and what’s going on to be able to track that and provide some really good dashboards on top of it.”
Viva Amplify
35:30 “Amplify is all about simplifying communications. It’s a great corporate communications tool.”
35:49 “It’s not fully out yet, so I’m interested to see as it happens. But I want you to know, though, there is this tool that is coming that’s all about helping effectively corporate communications or an organization spread out communication, get communication out, not an intranet or anything but more like news or announcements or big communication efforts that need to be done.”
Viva Sales
36:25 “This is, well I call it dynamics within Viva. It’s supposed to be connected to any CRM. It’s providing a role-based experience primarily starting with year-round sales CRM data directly in Viva.”
47:30 – Viva Rollout Best Practices
There are some key steps to follow when you decide you’re ready to roll out Microsoft Viva in your workplace:
Define what you are trying to achieve
48:03 “What are you trying to achieve here? Like, what’s the point? What’s the problem? What are the big roadblocks? What are the things that you’re seeing?”
Review features and functionalities for each Viva module
49:24 “With that, getting more familiar with each Viva module really can help you understand and achieve these outcomes that you’re looking for. I went through them one by one very fast, but you can, of course, go to www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva to understand what they are. What is it that that module is achieving, what it’s trying to do, as well as how would it fit into a bigger picture of an employee’s Day-life Workweek within the org.”
Prepare how your organization will use Viva to reach certain audiences and goals
50:06 “Now, you can then start organizing, auditing, and scoping how exactly your organization would use these modules, in particular, to reach those different audiences that you are looking to reach. You may not be rolling this out to your org all at once. And align the modules with its’ feature sets to the desired outcomes that address the needs that you are attempting to achieve.”
And there you have it! We hope this recap has provided some valuable insights that you can put into practice. Check out the recording for more details on this content.
Make sure to join us at our next webinar on December 8th, where we will walk you through the practical application of the Power Platform to level up your internal communications and processes.
