Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva is a platform that aims to improve the employee experience, primarily in the Teams environment. It enables connection, provides better information, insights into the habits and workload of employees, gives better management of working time, facilitates learning… You’ve been able to implement these solutions before, using SharePoint, but Viva is far simpler and better integrated into  the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

My first conclusion about Vive is that it’s “SharePoint on steroids”. This is not entirely incorrect, especially since SharePoint Online is used to store the data. However, it is better integrated with Microsoft 365 apps and services.  You can add Viva modules  as apps within Microsoft Teams, or you can run them on their own from microsoft365.com portal. Let’s see what Viva consists of!

Viva Connections

Large companies used to have bulletin boards that in the age of digitalization moved to Intranet pages – internally designed websites that aim to inform employees about news. Viva Connections aims to display news, tasks, and other interesting things through a personalized bulletin board.

Viva Engage

A few years ago, Microsoft created Yammer, a social network that aims to connect employees and share knowledge. This was most reminiscent of the old Usenet portals that some of us used in the 90s of the last century to discuss a given topic. Yammer has evolved into Engage, it enables a discussion between employees where you can ask a question, create a survey, praise a colleague…

Viva Insigths

This module aims to improve the productivity and well-being of employees, and based on the collected data, it allows individuals to better manage working time, and provides managers with an insight into the dynamics of work, popularly speaking: it shows which employees are overloaded and can “burn out”.

By using the Viva Insights module, each employee can have an insight into the time of engagement, take time for important activities, breaks, exercises to reduce stress, naps, etc. It shows statistics on how much time is spent in correspondence, chat, meetings… With Viva Insights , managers can see how much someone is working, whether they’re overwhelmed, and executives get aggregated insights into the company’s productivity and well-being.

Viva Learning

Viva Learning enables the HR department to plan and track the implementation of employee trainings, and provides them with access to training content on LinkedIn Learning or the Microsoft Learn portal. Group learning can also provide additional motivation, and sharing achievements and/or certificates won has a synergistic effect on employee learning.

Microsoft Viva also offers some other interesting functionalities. Viva Topics uses artificial intelligence to automatically organize content and expertise in your organization into topic tabs and pages, making it easy to find and share knowledge. Viva Goals allows teams to align with company goals by tracking goals and key results. It is useful for tracking progress and maintaining focus on strategic priorities. Viva Pulse allows managers to regularly check in on their teams through quick surveys, helping to identify issues and improve team performance. Viva Glint is a more advanced tool for employee feedback and engagement, often used for deeper organizational surveys and analytics.