Microsoft Viva Sales

The Microsoft Viva suite not only provides employees with personalized, inclusive, encompassing, and engaging experiences, but it brings individuals, teams, leaders, managers, and customers together through streamlined processes, data-driven insights, alignment between outcomes and goals, and clear, focused communications. Microsoft Teams Viva Sales provides sellers with a new experience for customer relationship management (CRM) by reducing time spent on administrative duties thereby freeing up time that can be spent connecting and engaging with their customers.

Microsoft Viva Sales is the first Viva application that is designed for a specific role in a company — the sellers. To be successful as a seller, CRM tools are essential; however, these tools currently are standalone software packages that are independent of team-driven software, such as Microsoft Teams, that corporations utilize to bring their teams together for collaboration and updating of current news and events. Having to manually input information into both the CRM and collaborative software is not only time-consuming, but it also takes valuable time away from seller-customer relationship building, number of sales, and most importantly, delays closing of deals. Driven by AI, Viva Sales works seamlessly with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics 365. Microsoft Viva Sales is the bridge between business and collaboration systems.

As with all businesses during the pandemic, sales forces have had to adapt to a digital workspace, marketing, pitching, and closing sales online. There has been a leap in adaptation for sales organizations and in this leap, the gaps and limitations in the tools that are provided to support sellers became very apparent. Microsoft has stepped up, once again, to address these limitations with Microsoft Viva Sales.

The greatest impact on sellers has been the increase in virtual meetings, chats, emails, and video conferences to not only close deals but to present and pitch their solutions. With the increase in time spent in virtual spaces, sellers globally identified that there is a great disconnect between manual data entry, processes, tools, and the ability to capture customer engagement data in productivity applications plus, alternating between different applications several times daily is ineffective and redundant.

Viva Sales: How the Sales Landscape is Changing

Currently, sellers must manually enter customer data into their CRM tool, a tedious and timely process, from one application to another. In line with the Microsoft Viva Suite of applications, Viva Sales brings all customer insights and data into one, centralized location. By pulling these details and insights (many of which would not be entered into the CRM) from Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Office applications including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and centralizing it, the amount of time spent manually entering data can now be spent on creating, building, and fostering relationships with customers to achieve successful sales.

Viva Sales brings contextually correct, timely, and accurate information to the seller at the right time into everyday tools that they are already familiar with. Viva Sales optimizes and streamlines the selling process for your sales force, providing an improved sales experience for your teams. Viva Sales can be integrated with Salesforce CRM and Dynamics 365, and in the future, it will be integrable with any CRM system.

Viva Sales was designed for seller productivity and it:

  1. Delivers real-time business context from the CRM system of a seller in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, thereby reducing the amount of time utilized in the search for relevant information;
  2. Connects your sales teams easily as it facilitates efficient collaboration with knowledge sharing which carries forward the momentum of the deals as it approaches sign-off and closing;
  3. Improves customer engagement with AI-powered insights that enhances the actions and decisions of the seller; and
  4. Boosts sales productivity by eliminating the need for manual CRM updates.

Viva Sale: How and What

  1. Eliminate redundancy: the duplicity of manually entering customer information in the CRM is now a process of the past. Viva Sales allows sellers to update their CRM data from Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, and it allows capturing of new contacts from meetings and emails straight into their CRM. Additionally, sellers can save emails directly from Microsoft Outlook into their CRM and they can see key customer insights, including previous activities, emails, and meetings. Viva Sales will sync customer data to Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM.
  2. Collaborate and close: sellers can search, share, track, and edit inline CRM entities across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, making it efficient and easy to collaborate with colleagues on their teams. This is accomplished by leveraging Context IQ and rich contextual cards. With opportunities, contacts, and accounts at their fingertips, sellers can keep their sales team in the current flow as deals move forward while collaborating, exploring, and making better decisions.
  3. ­Leverage AI­-Powered Insights: communicate with customers in Microsoft Teams and the Sales Conversation Intelligence (SCI) will generate the information for follow-through with customers post-meeting. SCI will not only generate meeting summaries but will also track customer sentiment and produce a list of suggested actions for customer follow-up post-meeting. SCI will record, transcribe, and provide valuable insights, including sentiment analysis which will aid sellers to track customer sentiment about a specific topic, guide the conversation, and plan the best approach for the next conversation. With SCI, notetaking during meetings is eliminated, allowing sellers to focus on their conversation with their customers and building the important sales-customer relationship.

Viva Sales: Benefits and Features

With Viva Sales, sellers in your sales force will be able to:

  1. Login to their CRM system via Outlook;
  2. Create a new contact in their CRM system. If an email signature is present, the contact information will be prefilled;
  3. View account from within Outlook;
  4. View opportunity information from within Outlook; and
  5. Save emails from their CRM from within Outlook.

Within Teams and Outlook, sellers in your sales force will be able to collaborate with their colleagues on customer data. By utilizing the collaboration features, sellers will be able to:

  1. Copy account, contact, and opportunity information from Outlook;
  2. Share this information in Teams as a link. This link will unfurl into a rich preview card;
  3. Share in Teams chat CRM information by using the messaging extension; and
  4. Update CRM record information from Teams chat by using the rich preview cards.

Using intelligent Teams meeting insights, your sellers in your salesforce will be able to connect better with customers. Sellers will be able to focus on the sales cycle as meeting notetaking will become obsolete with the implementation of automated action items for customer follow-ups. Sellers can, with these insights, be able to:

  1. Access CRM information when scheduling a meeting from Outlook;
  2. Save meeting details from Outlook to their CRM; and
  3. Take advantage of the sales conversation intelligence which is the meeting insights including a detailed executive summary, action items to follow up on, and sentiment analysis.

When Viva Sales is integrated with Microsoft Teams, your sellers will be able to search a word or phrase to find parts of a conversation that they had with a customer during a Teams sales meeting. This is a powerful tool as this type of information can be critical with the closing of a deal. If a Microsoft Teams meeting is recorded and transcribed, then sellers can scan the recorded transcript to find key parts of a conversation.

Microsoft Viva Goals

The Microsoft Viva suite has been expanding and delivering its employee experience platform apps since its announcement in 2021. Integrated with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva offers Viva Learning, Viva Topics, Viva Insights, Viva Engage, and Viva Goals, all accessible through the “home” of the Viva Suite, Viva Connections.

Microsoft Viva Goals supports the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) goal-setting framework for the natural alignment of an organization’s top strategic business priorities with the work that is being performed by its teams to drive results and feed a thriving business, keeping forward momentum. Not only will it align, but it will create, manage, and customize OKR workflows through automated check-ins and OKR templates. With a shared dashboard and advanced insights, OKR rhythms can be boosted through the connection of work and outcomes through deep integrations to projects and tasks such as data sources, critical tools, and advanced OKR configurations such as customizable weights and scoring guidance.

Viva Goals provides business leaders, HR leaders, and employees with the benefits of:

  1. Clarity through a centralized source that provides goal setting, progress monitoring, and success assessment across the organization. Teams will be able to connect daily work to outcomes, aligning with the organization’s top priorities on all levels;
  2. Focus teams on impact versus output. With the shift of focus from activity and effort to impact and outcomes, teams will share their progress on the customizable dashboards that translate data into insights for the organization; and
  3. Goals will be kept at the forefront of employees daily through the flow of daily work by bringing action and data into spaces that are already in use by your teams, such as Microsoft Teams, ADO, and the most popular project management and data tools.

Viva Goals: Capabilities

More exciting capabilities will be added in the future, but for now, the features available with Viva Goals to bring your organization’s OKRs into the flow of work for your employees include:

  1. Customize OKRs by using built-in templates or by creating them from scratch;
  2. Understand and align at all levels in your organization your team’s goals in the context of goals, down, up, and across the company with OKR approval workflows, Chart View, and Organizational, Team, and Individual Goal Pages;
  3. Engage and excite employees through clarity and communication of how their everyday work contributes to the progression of the organization moving towards its goals by connecting work to outcomes by aligning Projects and Tasks to OKRs;
  4. Focus discussion at town halls and team meetings with insights on real-time progress towards goals through context and simplified reporting with the use of a customizable dashboard combined with automation and dynamically updating OKRs; and
  5. Collaborate and share the progress and insights with shareable links to dashboards across the organization. By keeping every employee engaged with team goal setting and progress, individual team members of each team will be engaged with a sense of belonging in a community that is striving towards common goals.

Viva Goals: Logging In  

Once your organization has purchased the license for Viva Goals, you can log in by using your Azure Active Directory credentials. Remain logged in to your Azure Active Directory to log in to Viva Goals. Follow the following steps based on your scenario:

  1. On the Viva Goals Sign-In page, select Azure Active Directory;
  2. Log in to your Azure Active Directory;
  3. If there is no organization available, then you will be redirected to the No Organizations page. You will then be prompted to Create a New Organization;
  4. If you are a first-time user and received an invitation link to join your organization, then you will be redirected to your organization’s Viva Goals account;
  5. If you are a first-time user and are not part of an organization, you will then be redirected to the Join Organizations page. Here, select your organization from the list. You will then be taken to your organization after logging in.

Viva Goals: Creating Your First Organization

To create your first organization:

  1. Log into your Viva Goals account with your Azure Active Directory credentials;
  2. You will now be prompted to create an organization;
  3. Select Create Organization;
  4. Enter your organization’s name. You have the option to provide a brief description;
  5. Select the organization type as either Public or Restricted. A Public type allows anyone in your company to join your organization without the need for approval. A Restricted type provides the ability to choose which users get to join your organization. The purpose of Restricted is to keep and maintain a tight-knit user group’s information boundaries;
  6. Select Create Organization;
  7. Your first organization is now created; and
  8. As the Administrator, add users by inviting members.

Viva Goals: Creating Additional Organizations

You may find that you need to create another organization if you are part of more than one organization. To create another organization in Viva Goals:

  1. Log into your first organization in Viva Goals;
  2. At the top of the left menu, select the organization name;
  3. An organization-switcher dropdown list will appear. Select the Create or Join New Organization button;
  4. Select Create New Organization on the Join Organizations page; and
  5. Repeat steps 1 through 8 for Creating Your First Organization.

You can switch between organizations with the organization-switcher dropdown.

Viva Goals: How to Join an Organization  

You can join an organization in Viva Goals by:

  1. Using your Azure Active Directory credentials, log in to Viva Goals;
  2. If you are logging in for the first time and are not a part of an organization, you will be redirected to the Join Organizations page. Select your organization;
  3. If your organization is Public, then you can select the Join button to join your organization’s account;
  4. If your organization is Restricted, then select the Request to Join button. This will send a Request to Join notification to the administrator for approval;
  5. If you are a member of multiple organizations, then you can use the organization‑switcher dropdown list from the left menu. Select Create or Join New Organization. Next, select the organization that you want to join that is listed on this page.

Microsoft Viva Goals provides employees and organizations the ability to utilize the successful OKR framework for the successful alignment of business priorities by focusing teams on the impact of their contributions on the organization’s success in achieving its goals. Employees and teams will feel engaged, empowered, and invested in the success of their organization through the sense of community and collaboration when real-time data and progression is presented on the centralized dashboard during town halls, team meetings, and at anytime an individual or team checks their progress. The key success of the OKR framework answers the question of “Why am I working here every day?” by providing a visible and mental connection between individuals, teams, and the organization’s strategic business goals and how their contributions impact the progress of the organization to reach these goals. Viva Goals provides a new, collaborative, community-based employee experience while propelling the organization forward as individuals and teams pull in the same direction for the successful completion of the organization’s strategic goals.

Microsoft Viva Engage

The Microsoft Viva suite, including Viva Learning, Viva Topics, Viva Insights, and Viva Goals, are all available through the Microsoft Teams app. The latest addition to the Viva family is Viva Engage. With Viva Learning, employees hone their skills and grow their knowledge. Viva Topics organizes expertise and knowledge, making it easily discoverable for your staff. Geared towards individual employees, Viva Insights encourages productivity balanced with self-care for one’s healthy well-being. Viva Goals improves business results by aligning teams. Viva Engage will connect people across an organization by creating communities, encouraging conversations, participating in activities like events, and sharing openly on topics ranging from personal experience to data-driven analytics. Viva Engage is a place where people in your organization can connect, share, and create a sense of belonging by creating communities with each other, regardless of their work environment, whether they are working onsite or remotely or a combination of both.

Viva Engage and Yammer: Their Relationship

The surfacing of new and existing employee-high-value experiences in Viva Engage, such as knowledge sharing, community building, self-expression, and leadership engagement, is powered by Yammer services. Being integrated into Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage also introduces Storylines and Stories, and both features will appear in the web, desktop, and mobile versions of Yammer. Users will see the same content and effectively access the same feature set whether they launch Viva Engage or Yammer.

In comparison to Yammer, there are a few features that are limited in Viva Engage:

  1. Live events and other videos hosted in Microsoft Stream (Classic) do not play on iOS;
  2. Settings such as Managing delegate setting and Setting your skin tone, both of which are available only in the new Yammer, are not available;
  3. Viewing community files stored in the document library of SharePoint; and
  4. Editing or Viewing full community info.

Viva Engage and Viva Connections: What’s the Difference?

The best way to describe Viva Connections is that it is the “home” for the Microsoft Viva suite. It is the gateway, the place for your employees to start their day, and easily and quickly catch up on organizational news, resources, and tasks. Viva Connections is a branded company app where staff can find everything they need to stay connected and complete their tasks. As the overall arcing home of Microsoft Viva, Viva Connections provides a structured, tailored, and curated experience that reflects the user’s job role and the organization’s priorities, including resources, tasks, and organizational news. Featuring content from Viva Engage and SharePoint News, Viva Connections’ feed includes announcements, storyline posts from people who staff follow, and @Mentions.

Focusing on individuals, co-workers, leaders, and communities, by connecting and engaging each other, Viva Engage is the social layer of Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365. Viva Engage provides a space for people to socialize through conversations (and they may come onto some unexpectedly), volunteering and sharing of their expertise and knowledge, and asking questions (and these can be work-related or “get to know each other” types such as “Post a pic of your pet”), hosting and/or participating in virtual events, and most importantly, extending their work network with more in-depth interactions and engagement.

Viva Engage: What is it?

Connecting. Sharing. Belonging. Microsoft Teams Viva Engage encourages a positive, inclusive, engaging, and community-based work culture as a social platform. Viva Engage allows individuals to connect with their co-workers, leaders, and communities regardless of their physical location in the work world. By fostering a social work culture, Viva Engage enables all members of a community and network to share:

  1. Questions and Answers: this is a great way to crowdsource solutions to questions being posted. Questions can be posted and pinned, replies can be voted on, and the best answers can be marked.
  2. Conversations: get social! Initiate, join, and build conversations across teams and departments with pinned conversations and @Mention to draw co-workers into the dialogue.
  3. Announcements: there are several announcement types, and with each announcement, team members can be kept informed and engaged as notifications will reach them through the web or on mobile.
  4. Stories and Storylines: using familiar social tools like creating, uploading, sharing, and following, leaders and co-workers can create stories by sharing their thoughts, experiences, and knowledge through conversation and video for colleagues to engage and follow. Storylines will be a feed that features posts from peers along with the most popular posts across the organization and the Following feed will feature the latest posts from the people that you follow.
  5. Virtual Events: staff and leaders can be brought together to have meaningful conversations with virtual Town Halls, Q&A sessions, and video presentations.
  6. Topics: call in experts with @Mentions after creating and following #Topics. #Topics will assist employees in finding relevant content from company resources and learning providers.
  7. Analytics: detailed insights are provided for every conversation, event, and community. These detailed insights measure engagement and activity, providing enough data to act.

Viva Engage: Setting Up

Installing Viva Engage App for Yourself in Teams

  1. Open Microsoft Teams on the desktop client or the web
  2. Select Apps on the left side of Microsoft Teams
  3. In the Search bar, search for Viva Engage
  4. Select the app for Viva Engage
  5. Select Add to add the app to all your Teams clients, including the mobile app

Note: Check with your Teams admin if you do not see Viva Engage in the available apps as they may have renamed the app.

Installing Viva Engage App for Your Organization

If the Microsoft Teams admin chooses to deploy Viva Engage for specific departments, then this can be done through a Teams app setup policy. If the Microsoft Teams admin chooses to deploy for the entire organization, then they deploy and pin the app for all users.

Licensing for Viva Engage and Yammer

As Viva Engage is included in the existing Yammer license, enable Yammer users will be enabled to use Viva Engage.

Configure and Review Privacy and Security Settings in Yammer

The content in Yammer and Viva Engage is managed by the Yammer administrator. However, Privacy and security controls from Yammer are shared with Viva Engage.

Viva Engage: Customizing the Appearance in the Teams Store

For organizations that have given their network custom branding to reflect their corporate identity, Viva Engage can be customized in the Teams app store. The appearances that can be customized for Viva Engage include:

  1. Accent color
  2. App icons
  3. App name
  4. App description

The Microsoft Viva suite has provided Microsoft Teams with several apps, including Viva Learning, Viva Topics, Viva Insights, Viva Goals, and Viva Connections (the home for the suite). Now, with Viva Engage, there is a place where people in your organization can connect, share, and create a sense of belonging by creating communities with each other, regardless of their work environment, whether they are working onsite or remotely, or a combination of both.

Microsoft Ignite 2021 Announcements – Microsoft Viva Updates and Microsoft Viva Suite

Earlier this past spring, Microsoft had announced Viva and their vision to create the employee experience platform (EXP). Consisting of four components, Viva provides resources and support for an organization’s staff so they can communicate, collaborate, and thrive in their collaborations through Viva Connections, Viva Topics, Viva Learning, and Viva Insights. At Microsoft Ignite 2021, it was announced that the four components are available as a bundle through the Viva Suite plan while a fifth component, powered by Ally.io, will be available soon.

Acquired by Microsoft, Ally.io is a leading company that specializes in objectives and key results (OKR). As a fifth component, Ally.io will provide an organization with the tools and power to align the work of staff with the organization’s core priorities and strategic missions. With this fifth component, Viva will power organizations and their people to share expert knowledge, key learning resources, insights on personal productivity, and shape the culture of the organization. Most importantly, it will provide the tools necessary for organizations to monitor and address the stressors causing burnouts in a hybrid work environment.

Microsoft Viva Suite – Simplified Deployment

With Microsoft 365’s centralized admin center, administrators can easily access the guided setup for the deployment of Microsoft Viva Suite. The initial setup is simplified through the admin center experience with the provision of a guide for setting up along with task lists for each Viva module and partner solutions.

Microsoft Viva Connections: Communication and Culture

Through your everyday devices and applications, Viva Connections brings conversations, resources, and relevant news in a company-branded and curated experience.

There are many leading industry partners with integrations that will engage with Viva Connections. While some industry-leading applications help extend the organization’s communications and culture experience, new additions will provide functionalities including document signature ability and the creation of dashboard cards which will allow employees to receive personalized and immediate self-help. For SharePoint, new module webparts are now available.

Microsoft Viva Insights – Wellbeing and Productivity

One of the focuses of Viva is to provide managers and leaders the tools to ensure that their staff is not only productive but that their well-being is also cared for. With Viva Insights, privacy-protected insights based on collected data will provide recommendations to managers and leaders to maximize productivity while ensuring a healthy work-life balance for staff. Viva Insights will also provide recommendations for conducting effective meetings.

These recommendations will be actionable based on tracked data, including outstanding tasks, accomplishments, personal habits affecting team culture, via a sustained connection between managers, leaders, and staff. Viva Insights will be available through Microsoft Teams under the My Team tab in the Viva Insights app. These new management tools and insights will help in developing team policies to ensure life-work balance such as non-meeting days geared for full, uninterrupted, and productive working days.

In the Microsoft Teams Viva Insight app, Effective and efficient meetings are recognized as being important for Microsoft Teams. With the Viva Insight app, meeting organizers will be provided personalized insights and recommendations, providing the data to help affect change and thereby, improve meeting habits. Meeting attendees will be able to include Team links, set meeting norms such as shorter meetings, create meeting plans, and share these plans with their Teams.

Headspace is an integral part of Viva Insights, offering guided meditations to users for mental well-being. As of November 2021, Headspace will be available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German.

Microsoft Viva Topics: Knowledge and Expertise

Leveraging AI to produce topic pages and topic centers by automatically organizing an organization’s content and expertise into related topics such as projects, processes, products, and customers, topic experts can cultivate and share this knowledge across the organization. Topic experts will also be able to use analytics and automate the grouping of related topics into segments through the streamlined topic center. Currently, in SharePoint, Office, and Outlook, this information pops up as topic cards and additional apps such as Yammer, Bing, and people profile cards will also be receiving this functionality. For the early adopters of Viva Topics, they will be able to add this in Microsoft Teams in their Chat and Channels. Rolling out at the end of 2021 is the ability to crawl knowledge written in French, Spanish, and German.

Microsoft Viva Learning: Growth and Skills

Available in Teams desktop and mobile, Microsoft Viva Learning connects an organization’s content with Microsoft, third-party providers, and Learning Management Systems resulting in enterprise learning by bringing it all into the flow of work. Viva Learning will be added soon to Microsoft 365’s tenant and will be searchable in the Teams app menu as Viva Learning.

One of the new features will be the ability to search across all learning sources connected to Viva Learning along with the capability to filter based on provider, interest, or duration. With the ability to filter and search from all learning sources, users will be able to locate the exact content that they are seeking.

In Microsoft Teams, learning will be brought into the flow of work in the Teams channel. The curated set of learning resources can be accessed under the learning resources tab.

If an organization has mandatory training or obligated training, then the integrated Learning Management Systems provides users the ability to see assignments that require action for completion while managers and leaders can track progress.

As the world and corporations continue adjusting their work environments for hybrid collaboration, Microsoft Viva Suite provides an EXP for users, managers, and leaders, bringing them together to collaborate, learn, share knowledge, and most importantly, ensure the well-being of each of them.

Microsoft Viva – Topics

Part 4: Viva Topics

As we continue our series on Microsoft Viva with Viva Connections, Viva Insights, and Viva Learning, we proceed to the fourth module Viva Topics. Announced at Ignite 2021, this is the first employee experience platform (EXP) that brings resources, communications, knowledge, insights, and learning together into an integrated experience that empowers its users and teams to the best that they can be from any location. The first EXP is Microsoft Viva which currently consists of four modules:

  1. Viva Connections;
  2. Viva Insights;
  3. Viva Learning; and
  4. Viva Topics.

In our first article, Microsoft Viva Part 1: Viva Connections, we took a look at how and why Viva Connections is important to the wellbeing of the individuals of an organization. In our second article, Microsoft Viva Part 2: Viva Insights, we delved into how Viva Insights will help leaders, managers, and individuals see areas for improvement for their well-being with the ability to recommend actions that can be taken to combat stress, fatigue, and anxiety. In our third article, Viva Learning, we explore why investing in the individuals of an organization is important and why encouraging growth through accountable learning opportunities impacts the overall future success of the organization. Today, in Viva Topics, we will examine how Microsoft Viva keeps individuals, managers, and leaders connected and how it supports both new and seasoned employees.

Viva Topics

Viva Topics leverages AI so experts with knowledge in the apps they use daily are empowered to organize, connect, protect, and manage content automatically and across the organization into categories of Projects, Processes, Products, and Customers. The knowledge of your organization and the people that are connected to that knowledge is at the fingertips of your people through the apps that they use daily.

Viva Topics is the solution to redundancy with the duplicity of topics and content because the individual cannot find it through their own means. Not only is re-creating existing content time-consuming and frustrating, but it is an inefficient use of your employee’s time. Viva Topics help new hires as well as established employees find the information quickly, reduces the amount of time searching, removes the frustration of not able to locate the information, and prevents the re-creation of existing content.

Built on Microsoft 365 apps (like SharePoint, Microsoft Search, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Office), on the content that is used daily by the people in an organization, and on the connections that exist across the organization, Viva Topics uses AI to reason over the organization’s data. As mentioned above, it automatically organizes across the organization’s systems and teams, content and expertise into four categories.

While working in the Microsoft 365 apps, highlighted topics will appear in messages, pages, and content. Hovering over these highlights will automatically surface a topic card that provides contextual knowledge without having to search or change apps. The topic card summary includes definitions, alternate names, recommended resources, and experts. Queries through Microsoft Search will return topic cards as the primary answer if the query relates to a topic. Another way that Viva Topics is helping individuals find answers to the knowledge they seek is by recommending experts. These experts are found based on user profiles that include their areas of expertise, and this information is extended onto their Microsoft 365 people cards.

Once the topic card is clicked, a topic page appears. What is a topic page? A topic page consists of collected and curated related information from topics that Microsoft Viva identifies, are automatically built by AI, and augmented by experts. Organization experts can easily share, refine, add, and edit pages with wiki-like simplicity. Topic pages provide comprehensive insights on related information including definitions, alternate names, related sites and teams, recommended and suggested content, recommended and suggested people, map of related topics, and optional web part integrations including Yammer communities. The quality of shared knowledge will improve over time and continual contributions from experts and AI reasoning. Viva Topics content is derived from these Topic Pages.

An exciting “coming soon” to Viva Topics is its ability to find answers to common questions. If a question is asked, Viva will return the answer if it knows it, if not, then Viva will turn to the experts for an answer. Repeated questions with the same answer will result in accepted answers being added to the shared knowledge repository.

Content in Viva Topics can be populated with information from Microsoft Cloud and third-party services including Salesforce and ServiceNow. With Graph connectors and integrations made by partners including Avanade, BA Insight, Accenture, ClearPeople, and Raytion, more content can be offered to your employees.

Knowledge managers will have the ability to review suggested topics, approve or remove these suggestions, review interactions and provide feedback from the most helpful topics to the least, and most importantly, they will be able to shape and determine the knowledge life cycle.

Viva Topics upholds privacy by following and applying security and compliance policies to content automatically. The Administrator has full control over knowledge discovery, including what content is included in Viva Topics based on teams, labels, and selected sites. Only licensed users will have access to topic cards, topic pages, and topic centres. Additionally, with SharePoint Syntex, licensed users can only see topics based on content that they can access.

Microsoft Viva and Partners

Microsoft Viva has been designed to be an open and extensible platform for easy integration with tools and systems that companies already have in place. The ecosystem of partners is not only necessary, but this ecosystem will continue to grow in response to the EXP. Microsoft Viva has integrations with third-party products, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform which provides a complete experience for employees in their workflow.

Content partners currently integrated with Microsoft Viva include LinkedIn, Cornerstone OnDemand, Zoom, Coursera, Slack, Glint, Skillsoft, Headspace, edX, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, and Pluralsight. These are just a few and many more are being added to the list.

Global service partners include Accenture, Avanade, EY, and PWC. Again, these are just a few and the list keeps growing.

Microsoft Viva is the next step for bringing people together, connecting them to each other, leveraging insights for the wellbeing of individuals, teams, and the organization, cultivating a learning culture, and sharing knowledge.  Microsoft Viva provides insights for leaders to make better decisions, managers to build and support successful teams, and individuals to prioritize their wellbeing. Microsoft Viva places the employee at the centre of an organization’s success. Microsoft Viva is the employee experience platform, and the most exciting part is this is just the beginning of this technology.

Microsoft Viva – Insights

Part 2: Viva Insights

At Ignite 2021, Microsoft announced the first employee experience platform (EXP) that brings resources, communications, knowledge, insights, and learning together into an integrated experience that empowers its users and teams to the best that they can be from any location. The first EXP is Microsoft Viva which currently consists of four modules:

  1. Viva Connections;
  2. Viva Insights;
  3. Viva Learning; and
  4. Viva Topics.

In our first article, Microsoft Viva Part 1: Viva Connections, we took a look at how and why Viva Connections is important to the wellbeing of individuals of an organization. Today, with Viva Insights, we will take another step forward by supporting employees with their well-being and how Viva Insights helps to accomplish this goal. 

Viva Insights

Because of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the swiftness of ensuing changes in work processes, organizations had to quickly pivot in their operations with great consideration for retaining collaboration, communication, and privacy with individuals, teams, managers, and leaders. Organizations have had to change from having employees on-site full or part-time and employees who are working remotely full or part-time, or a combination of both. This hybrid work environment has tested the ability of individuals, teams, and leaders to value, protect, and maintain their boundaries for a work-life balance, which was much more easily achieved when we physically moved between spaces. With the hybrid environment, it is not easy to switch off and unplug. Employees and teams are reachable throughout the day, evening, and weekends, giving little time for rest, relaxation, and enjoyment of life. By not switching off and unplugging, the health of the employee can change for the worse, which affects morale, productivity, and the ability to contribute to the organization. Burnout, anxiety, low engagement, deteriorating mental health, and overall malaise are the results of a work-life imbalance.

In 2020, Microsoft recognized this and integrated personal experiences such as virtual commute and Headspace to help people stay in a routine and provided a toolkit to learn to manage stress. This was the beginning of Viva Insights for individuals. Viva Insights for individuals is accessible through Microsoft Teams, and these insights will help your people stay connected with their colleagues. It will help them protect their time whether it is for breaks, focused work, or dedicated learning.

Viva Insights provides individuals, managers, and leaders, privacy-protected, actionable, and personalized insights from Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics. This data can be used to help individuals and teams proactively manage their time to support their wellbeing, thereby, preventing high stress and burnout.

Managers have a responsibility of ensuring their teams are productive and team members are not overburdened with immense workloads, causing burnout. With Viva Insights, managers are provided with privacy-protected and data-driven insights along with actionable recommendations to support and cultivate healthy, successful teams.

For company leaders, Viva Insights provides a greater overview of the health and wellbeing of their organization by providing an organizational network analysis which shows the cohesion and connectiveness between and across teams in the organization. From this, opportunities to foster wellbeing will emerge, including space planning to encourage connectiveness in our hybrid work environment. For company leaders, complex challenges and responses to these will become clearer as Viva Insights will provide organizational work patterns and trends.

Organizational insights become even more powerful and revealing when partnered with content providers like LinkedIn Glint. For example, integrating Viva Insights with LinkedIn Glint will, through employee survey data, map how people work and how they feel.

With Viva Insights, privacy and security are of the utmost importance to individuals. Only individuals will have access to their insights while managers and leaders will receive de-identified and aggregated insights. This is set by default and follows differential privacy. 

The Viva Insights app in Teams is already available and can be installed. These insights are now being delivered in Teams to individuals, managers, and leaders. Microsoft Exchange Online users have a public preview of personal insights. For managers and leaders, insights are available for licensed Workplace Analytic customers in public preview.

Over the next few months, Viva Insights will see additional experiences added, including Headspace for meditation and mindfulness as well as integration with Viva Learning.

1. Personal Insights: Announced at Ignite 2021, Viva Insights is available in Teams as a public preview for Microsoft 365 users with Exchange online and features an initial set of wellbeing experiences and personal insights.

Individuals can seamlessly stay connected by prioritizing one on one meetings and staying on top of requests that are received across emails, chats, and shared documents. Managing and prioritizing these from one place will be important as virtual communication continues to grow as the primary form of communicating.

Just as important as answering these requests, is focussing on work that can be done without interruption. The protect time experience does just that for the individual. Individual insights are completely private and are derived from meetings, calls, emails, and chats that the individual already has access to.

As part of the wellbeing insight, additional wellbeing experiences will be added, including the virtual commute which will help individuals mindfully wrap up their day, Headspace for meditation and mindfulness, and check-ins that will prompt individuals to pause and reflect upon their day.

Employees contribute to their organizations in many ways and nothing goes further than the acknowledgment of their work. With personal insights, actionable insights in Teams will allow employees to protect time for learning from courses that are recommended by LinkedIn Learning. By investing in the organization’s employees, they will keep their skills and knowledge current and will increase their retention.

A feature that is already generally available, Cortana can provide a daily Briefing email (in English) to people so they can begin their day with key prompts and insights. These include meetings to prepare for, opportunities to connect, and commitments to follow up on. This flow of everyday work is available through Microsoft Outlook.

Later this year, the daily Briefing email will have new cards which will allow people to prepare for the week ahead. With one-week overviews, individuals will be able to protect time for important activities such as unlocking courses from LinkedIn Learning and learning in protected time blocks.

2. Managers: Managers have always had the role of being the key person for employees to turn to for support and connectivity. With the hybrid work environment that is being experienced globally, this role is more important than ever as they now have the responsibility to ensure their people are engaged with positive experiences while providing support for good morale.

More importantly, Managers will receive insights that will help them detect work patterns that will lead to stress and burnout whether caused by overloading of meetings and work, minimal focus time for their work, and working extra outside of their normal working hours to complete tasks to meet deadlines. Over time, these insights will provide Managers the ability to create team action plans at the individual level, including recommendations for best practices to prioritize, boost productivity, and ensure their wellbeing. As their team members implement these recommendations, Managers will be able to assess the progress of their team against the team goal over a period of time. Individuals can rest assured that their privacy is protected in every way through the use of de-identification, data aggregation, and minimum thresholds.

3. Leaders: From the individual up, Viva Insights in Microsoft Teams provides insights to the Leaders of the organization. Viva Insights is empowering Leaders to ensure that their organization and staff are prepared for their organization’s future. Critical strategic questions can be answered, plans can be created, and action plans actioned so their organization is resilient, agile, and organized, and with strong, positive employee engagement, individuals will feel the connectiveness of a shared purpose. Feeling aligned, employees will work and collaborate, pulling together to succeed.

From Viva Connections that simulates the connectiveness between colleagues, managers, and leaders to Viva Insights that underscores the health and wellness of individuals, Microsoft Viva is creating an exceptional EXP platform.

The privacy of individuals will be protected through security compliance and policies that are in place. Microsoft takes privacy seriously and takes extra steps to ensure this by applying and enforcing minimum thresholds, aggregated data, and de-identification.

Leaders, Managers, and Individuals will be contributing to their well-being as well as to their team and their organization. A healthy work environment will provide healthy team members, a strong team, and an energetic, successful, and positive organization.

In Part 3 of our Microsoft Viva series, we will look at how Viva Learning supports the wellbeing of the people, how it helps an organization grow, and how it keeps an organization agile so it remains at the forefront of its industry sector.

Microsoft Viva – Connections

Part 1: Viva Connections

At Microsoft, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 were built as the organizing layer for people for collaborating, learning, and working. With the onset of the pandemic, businesses pivoted overnight to new realities of how their staff would be working in this new hybrid work environment that combined remote and onsite employees. Even before this pandemic, Microsoft was already laying the foundation for and building a unified system with dynamically growing parts that would support and sustain this system.

Microsoft Teams provides a secure and integrated user experience, a single solution for meetings, chats, content collaboration, calls, and business process workflows. Fun fact – global Microsoft 365 users generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day as people collaborated, communicated, and co-authored content. That is a lot of daily collaboration and communication.

Microsoft recognizes this and has created a new category of technology called the employee experience platform (EXP). This platform provides people with the resources and support they need to continue to succeed and thrive in their collaborations and communications. This platform is seamlessly integrated with the tools that they are already using so there is minimal negative impact with maximum gains for their workflow and production, regardless of their physical location.

The tools that are already currently being used and leveraged under Microsoft 365 include Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that are used daily by people. Today, at Ignite 2021, Microsoft announced the first EXP that brings resources, communications, knowledge, insights, and learning together into an integrated experience that empowers its users and teams to the best that they can be from any location. The first EXP is Microsoft Viva which currently consists of four modules:

  1. Viva Connections;
  2. Viva Insights;
  3. Viva Learning; and
  4. Viva Topics.

As Microsoft Viva evolves, there will be more modules added. In this installment, we will delve into what Viva Connections is all about.

Viva Connections

Viva Connections can be thought of as the gateway to your digital workplace. With businesses turning to hybrid models of work for their staff, the comradery once felt with working side by side, town halls, and events have become harder to capture and support. For new hires, this feeling of connectiveness is even more elusive.

Viva Connections addresses the feeling of being less connected to their colleagues, teammates, and peers by providing a single entry point for internal communications and employee engagement with a curated and branded employee destination.

Built with SharePoint capabilities in Microsoft 365, Viva Connections provides leaders the platform to connect with their people with town halls while employees can keep connected to their organization, teams, and individuals by accessing everything they need, whether it is company news or policies to employee benefits or resource groups or by joining communities through Yammer. With Viva Connections’ dashboard, which can be customized with a personalized feed, employees can find resources across Microsoft Viva and from other apps across the organization’s digital workplace. Fully customizable, the content can contain comprehensive and appropriate resources that are needed for specific roles within the organization.

As part of their existing SharePoint and Microsoft 365 licenses, Viva Connections will be made available to all customers. In other words, if your organization has a license for SharePoint, then all your employees in your organization can use Viva Connections at no additional cost.

The rollout for Viva Connections experience on the desktop for Teams will be generally available to all customers by the end of March 2021 with the mobile Teams experience available in the summer of 2021. An update to the desktop experience will be released in conjunction with the mobile release.

The summer 2021 update for the desktop experience will focus on deployment enhancements and improvements for IT administrators. Webparts for the feed and dashboard will be released as part of the update to align with the mobile experience.

Viva Connections is the Microsoft Viva module that addresses the silo effect and disconnection perceived and felt by employees and their teams, managers, and leaders. These feelings and effects have been heightened by the stay-at-home and work-from-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aviva Connections is a great solution that is available for all licensed SharePoint and Microsoft 365 customers. Don’t leave your people feeling like they are alone, working in silos. Instead, prepare for Microsoft Viva Connections by upgrading to SharePoint Online, deploying a SharePoint home site, and launching Yammer communities in Microsoft Teams and then implement this module for the individuals of your organization.

Join me in the next installment, Microsoft Viva Part 2: Viva Insights, as we look at the values that Viva Insights brings to us.

Microsoft Viva – Learning

Part 3: Viva Learning

We continue our series on Microsoft Viva with Viva Learning. Microsoft announced at Ignite 2021, the first employee experience platform (EXP) that brings resources, communications, knowledge, insights, and learning together into an integrated experience that empowers its users and teams to the best that they can be from any location. The first EXP is Microsoft Viva which currently consists of four modules:

  1. Viva Connections;
  2. Viva Insights;
  3. Viva Learning; and
  4. Viva Topics.

In our first article, Microsoft Viva Part 1: Viva Connections, we took a look at how and why Viva Connections is important to the wellbeing of the individuals of an organization. In our second article, Microsoft Viva Part 2: Viva Insights, we delved into how Viva Insights helps leaders, managers, and individuals see areas for improvement for their wellbeing, and recommend actions that can be taken to combat stress, fatigue, and anxiety. Today, we will delve into Viva Learning and how it not only addresses skill gaps but how it subtly encourages employees to learn, thereby increasing their skills and reducing the skills gaps within an organization.

Viva Learning

An organization is only as good as its talent that it employs and with Viva Learning, an organization can invest in its employees and provide opportunities for growth through learning. Viva Learning creates a work culture that makes daily learning a natural part of every employee’s day.

As a central hub located in Microsoft Teams, the Viva Learning app teams up with AI, recommending the correct content at the right time. Individuals can easily discover courses, share training courses, and participate in microlearning. They can organize, search, and share training in chats, channels, and tabs – all within Microsoft Teams as they would for other types of content in the collaboration tool they are already using daily. Because Viva Learning is in Microsoft Teams, groups of people and Teams can organize their learning tab by customizing and including relevant learning content ranging from formal training videos to informal learning from decks stored in SharePoint.

Content is aggregated from your organization’s custom content, Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning, and training content providers like Coursera, Pluralsight, Skillsoft, and edX. Viva Learning easily integrates with the leading learning management systems like Cornerstone OnDemand, SAP SuccessFactors, Saba, and more.

The deep integration with LinkedIn Learning and Viva Learning will provide learners from Viva Learning and LinkedIn Learning access to the full LinkedIn Learning catalogue. This will all be accessible through an embedded content player in Microsoft Teams. Learning has never been easier and more accessible.

There is a clear connection between an organization’s business performance, employee engagement, and employee learning. With Viva Learning, it motivates and inspires your people to learn new skills, update their present skills, and become agile thinkers that propel your business forward while addressing skill gaps in a supportive environment.

Not only can managers assign learning, but they can also track courses, due dates, and the status of the assignment. Learners will see what learning has been assigned to them, due dates, and any additional pertinent information regardless if the learning has been assigned by their manager with Viva Learning or by a leading management system that has been integrated with Viva Learning. By providing learners support, managers can foster a learning culture in the organization while ensuring the employees have the most current skills to continue supporting the organization’s growth.

As we all know, finding the time to learn is not always an easy task as our calendars fill up quickly with meetings and calls. To help with focused time, the Briefing email from Cortana and the Viva Insights app for Teams will include actionable cards. These actionable cards will help simplify blocking and scheduling dedicated time for learning.

With Viva Learning, your employees will be recommended opportunities to learn from their colleagues and manager but best of all, they can access, share, and search for learning opportunities from Microsoft Teams. With accountability, managers can track and support their staff in learning, understanding, and implementing new and/or improved skills. By investing in their employees, organizations will have happier, better skilled, and dedicated employees that are ready to help position the organization for its planned future growth.

As can be seen with Viva Connections, Viva Insights, and Viva Learning, Microsoft has created an EXP platform that has the employee as the central focus, ensuring that many of the needs of the employee are met. In Viva Topics, we will see how the first four of Microsoft Viva modules work together to benefit not only the employee but the organization as a whole.