4 ways Microsoft Viva can improve your business

Microsoft Viva is an "employee experience platform" – or at least, that’s how Microsoft describes it. No idea what that means? You’re not alone… In slightly simpler terms, Viva is a platform designed to enable effective communication, promote well-being, increase productivity, and essentially create a better employee experience.

The platform aims to create a happier, healthier workplace, empower employees, engage them in the company's vision, and develop a sense of shared purpose. It focuses on communication, learning, knowledge, and insights.

Viva has quite extensive features, so we’ve picked a few highlights to help get you started.

Assign employees training and monitor progress with Viva Learning

Equipping employees with the skills and knowledge they need to develop has always been essential for businesses. You’ll have probably heard the old saying, ‘the only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave, is not training them and having them stay.’

While the vast majority of businesses are fully aware of the need to train employees, many have found managing the delivery of training challenging, from curating learning paths to monitoring progress. Viva Learning might just be the perfect solution to this.

Viva Learning is designed to empower employees and simplify the scheduling and delivery of training for businesses. It provides access to a growing catalogue of training resources, including free Microsoft 365 training and LinkedIn Learning courses. LinkedIn is of course owned by Microsoft, and so far, we haven't seen many third-party providers appear with their own content. It’s obviously still early days in this respect.

However, companies can add their own training content with Viva Learning or can integrate their existing learning management system. To give you an example, our own adoption learning platform, which we call SO Learning 365, is built with SharePoint and deployed into your environment, which means Viva Learning is able to crawl the platform's content and then surface it across Microsoft 365 to support your employees and their training journey during adoption.

With Viva Learning, managers can assign staff with individual training courses or curated learning paths to help them develop the skills and knowledge they need to progress their careers. Once assigned, managers can also keep track of their employees’ progress and identify if additional support is required.

As well as helping employees develop skills for their roles, businesses can use a combination of curated learning paths and organisation-generated content to educate employees about the company, which makes it a great tool for onboarding new employees.

Reduce burnout and stress with Viva Insights

If your business uses Microsoft 365 you might have already encountered a previous iteration of Viva Insights, MyAnalytics. Microsoft introduced MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics to provide employees and employers with useful insights to help them build healthy work habits within their organisations. With the launch of Viva, Microsoft replaced MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics with the new Viva Insights app.

Despite bringing many benefits, hybrid working has made maintaining a healthy work-life balance increasingly challenging. In our always-on world, it’s easy to fall into the habit of working longer hours, and non-stop emails, calls and messages make it difficult to focus or switch off.

Viva Insights gives employees and employers the information they need to spot unhealthy working habits and take steps to address them. This is not Big Brother snooping on employees, so there shouldn’t be any concerns about data privacy and personal activity information being shared with your organisation. All data is anonymised, and Microsoft is clear Viva Insights isn't designed to facilitate employee evaluation, tracking, monitoring, profiling or automated decision-making. Information and insights remain personal and are there to help employees and teams to manage their workload in a healthy manner, reducing burnout and stress across organisations.

Engage employees in your company vision with Viva Goals

It’s easy for employees to feel out-of-touch with their company’s objectives if they don’t understand how their work contributes towards achieving them. Even worse, if these objectives aren’t communicated with employees or they don’t have visibility of the company’s progress, they may switch off completely.

Viva Goals enables companies to set their corporate strategy and outcomes (goals) and to then make these visible to all employees. Departments and Teams can then align their objectives and projects to these goals so that everyone is on the same page and can see their contribution. Viva Goals provides two-way vision – management can see that everything is aligned to the corporate goals and individuals and departments can access dashboards to update their objectives and see how this is helping the business achieve its goals. Providing this visibility helps develop a sense of shared purpose and engages everyone in the company’s vision.

Is Viva Goals just for large companies? Definitely not, in fact we use Viva Goals here at Simply Office 365. We think companies of all sizes can benefit, especially those with distributed workforces.

Build a strong company culture with Viva Connections and Viva Engage

For a company to develop a strong culture, it’s essential that employees can voice their opinions, share ideas, and be kept up to date on what’s happening at the company.

Viva Connections facilitates effective companywide communication, enabling employers to easily share important news and updates with their employees.

It is a great tool for collating your news, updates, and other content from across Microsoft 365, especially Teams and SharePoint. We often incorporate Viva Connections into our intranet builds, allowing organisations to promote news and updates more effectively, especially via mobile devices. Users are presented with compelling content that is specifically designed for them, increasing engagement across the business.

Couple Viva Connections with Viva Engage and you have the perfect tools to enhance companywide communications. Viva Engage provides a social platform, specifically for your business. Create groups around projects or departments, communicate more effectively and build a sense of community within your organisation. If you have multiple offices across the UK or internationally, then Viva Engage is a brilliant tool to boost company-wide communication - we can speak from experience. Our clients love it, maybe you will too!

If you’d like to find out how your business can get more out of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva, get in touch and one of our experts will be happy to help.