Microsoft announced that it has launched Microsoft Viva. It is comprised of four modules: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics. More modules will be coming.
Microsoft describes Viva Connetions as “a gateway to your digital workplace”. They point out that research from their Work Trend Index shows that nearly 60 percent of workers feel less connected to their team since the move to remote work.
Viva Connections is built on Microsoft 365 capabilities like SharePoint to provide a curated and branded employee destination. Leaders can connect with employees via town halls, and employees can access everything from company news, policies and benefits to employee resource groups or communities they want to join with Microsoft Viva’s integration to Yammer.
Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. It brings new personal wellbeing experiences, insights, and recommended actions from Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics into the flow of people’s work in Microsoft Teams.
Viva Learning “makes learning a natural part of both every employee’s daily work and company culture”. Employees can easily discover and share everything from training courses to micro learning content. Managers get the tools they need to assign learning and track the completion of courses to help foster a learning culture.
Viva Topics enables employees to find an expert, understand company acronyms, or surface the content they need. It connects people to the knowledge, in the apps they use every day. Microsoft explains: “Think of Viva Topics as a Wikipedia with AI superpowers for your organization. It uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise into relevant categories like “projects”, “products”, “processes” and “customers”.
Microsoft Viva has been integrated with: Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and third-party products and services that will deliver a complete employee experience in the flow of work.
TechCrunch reported that Viva Insights is “to give managers insights into whether their team (but not individual team members) are at risk of burnout.” It also is to help company leaders “address complex challenges and respond to change by shedding light on organizational work patterns and trends.”
Personally, I think this sounds invasive. In my opinion, it sounds like a mean boss could use Viva Insights to punish an entire team for no reason other than the boss saw analytics that implied that at least one person on the team was less productive than the others.
Microsoft also pointed out that a new dashboard has been introduced for Microsoft Viva and LinkedIn’s Glint customers “that map insights about how people work to employee survey data about how people feel.” Part of the dashboard allows an organization to “leverage data from third-party tools like Zoom, Slack, workday, and SAP SuccessFactors”. It is unclear how Microsoft will prevent those third parties from grabbing employee data via Microsoft Viva.