The world has seen unprecedented change in the past two years, and that trend is here to stay. According to our latest Work Trend Index report, 73% of employees say they want flexible remote work options to stay, and more than 80% of leaders say they expect to make significant changes to accommodate. At the same time, 67% of employees want more in-person work collaboration.
In this blog, you will find:
The Driving Force for Business is always People
How Microsoft Viva Solves Workplace Challenges
ProServeIT Academy: Microsoft Viva Course
There is a whole organizational shift underway spanning the physical environment, including office spaces, culture, talent, and technology. This pace of change can impact the workforce, and many HR leaders and managers want to know how to construct a culture that helps organizations make this change more sustainable and create more resilience. So, this blog will guide organizations to keep their focus on the most important factor, people, to create a great employee experience.
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The Driving Force for Business is Always People
It is widely accepted that employee engagement and satisfaction are linked to positive outcomes for businesses. Research has shown that companies with engaged employees enjoy higher profitability and lower turnover rates.
• Employee Engagement: 86% of top-performing companies reported that digital training programs boosted employee engagement and performance.
• Employee Satisfaction: 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development.
•Employee Retention: Highly engaged employees are 12 times less likely to leave their company than those who are not engaged.
•Profitability: Organizations with highly engaged employees have 21% greater profitability.
Microsoft is well-known for their commitments to tools for communication, teamwork, and collaboration to put people at the centre and look at employee well-being and engagement as central missions.
Six Key Elements of Great Employee Experience 🔑
Regarding employee experience, six key elements are essential for creating an excellent environment for your team.
• Well-being is essential for employees to feel physically and mentally healthy and productive.
• Empowerment helps employees feel they have the autonomy and authority to do their jobs well.
• Growth opportunities allow employees to progress in their careers and feel like they are constantly learning and developing.
• Purpose gives employees a sense of meaning and fulfillment in their work.
• Focus helps employees to stay engaged and motivated.
• Connection allows employees to feel like they are part of a community and have strong relationships with their colleagues.
What is an Employee Experience Platform (EXP)? 📇
A thriving culture starts with engaged employees and inspiring leaders. Employee experience is at the heart of it all. An Employee Experience Platform (EXP) allows organizations, customers, and partners to bring their assets together into that culture to put employees at the centre, which includes:
• Purpose and Alignment: to achieve the mission, goals, and outcomes and to recognize employee achievements.
• Culture and Communications: to communicate company news and events and to provide access to company resources and communities.
• Knowledge and Expertise: to connect employees with experts and knowledge
• Wellbeing and Engagement: to improve employees’ physical, mental, and financial well-being.
• Growth and Development: to support employees with learning, coaching, and onboarding.
Microsoft has constructed an employee experience platform, Microsoft Viva, to help organizations achieve these EXP goals.
What is Microsoft Viva?
Microsoft Viva is distinctive with different features. Viva is a layer of employee experience that brings different aspects of employee experience through Microsoft Teams. It focuses on people to bring skills, resources, and insights into the flow of work. Viva also delivers powerful, personalized experiences with the security, privacy, and compliance of Microsoft 365. Lastly, it is an open and extensible platform with an ecosystem of partners that integrates with existing systems and tools.
Microsoft Viva: Employee Experience Platform for the Hybrid and Digital Era 💻
Microsoft Viva is a new set of branded experiences that combines communications, insights, knowledge and learning within the flow of everyday work and collaboration in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft 365 has foundational capabilities like Yammer, SharePoint, Stream, Workplace Analytics, Microsoft Search and more. Microsoft Viva builds on this foundation by adding innovative new services and insights focused on people development and business success.
Microsoft Viva provides an open and extensible platform with an ecosystem of partners, which works with many of your existing systems and tools. Therefore, you can extend your existing investments by connecting them and making them available in a more modern experience to your employees.
Microsoft Viva has five core modules, including:
☑️ Viva Connections is a system of experiences to help deliver a culture of communications to people through a Teams application that they can address as a branded company experience on desktop, mobile or tablet.
☑️ Viva Insights takes signals from Microsoft Graph to deliver personalized guidance and coaching along with insights for managers and the organization to look at the changes in the workforce and make intelligent decisions based on privacy-protected data.
☑️ Viva Topics uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to construct knowledge from content that people use every day to bring together an automatic system that finds knowledge and delivers it to people as they need it without having to change applications or do a search.
☑️ Viva Learning takes investments that organizations have in third-party learning systems along with Microsoft learning and their assets to deliver learning through the flow of work inside Microsoft Teams.
☑️ Viva Goals helps organizations set and track employee goals. Employees can use Viva Goals to set goals for themselves and their team members. They can also track their progress and see how they are doing against their goals.
How Microsoft Viva Solves Workplace Challenges
You might experience these common challenges in a hybrid working environment. So, here are solutions from Microsoft Viva that you can use right away.
Challenges & Microsoft Viva Solutions
Challenge 1. People Feel Disconnected 🧠
According to the report, nearly 60% of people say they feel less connected to their team after shifting to remote work.
☑️ Viva Connections: Culture and Communications 👨💼👩💼
• Keep everyone connected: Encourage meaningful connections across the organization by enabling employees to easily discover relevant communications and communities.
• Make it easy for people to contribute: Foster a culture of inclusion by empowering every employee to contribute ideas and share feedback.
• Unite and inspire your organization: Align the entire organization around your vision, mission, and strategic priorities.
Challenge 2. Burnout is a global problem 😑
85% say well-being has declined and 56% say job demands have increased.
☑️ Viva Insights: Productivity and Well-being 😎
• Deliver personalized and actionable insights: Empower individuals, teams, and organizations to achieve balance, build better work habits, and improve business outcomes with personalized insights and recommended actions.
• Quantify the impact of work on people and business: Gain data-driven, privacy-protected visibility into how work patterns affect well-being, productivity, and results.
• Address complex business challenges: Use advanced tools and additional data sources to perform deeper analysis, address challenges important to your business, and respond quickly to change.
Challenge 3. People spend about an hour per day searching for or creating information 💻 📱
Using multiple tools drives context switching, drains productivity and creates frustration.
☑️ Viva Topics: Knowledge and expertise 📚
• Turn content into usable knowledge: Use AI to reason over your organization’s content and automatically identify, process, and organize it into easily accessible knowledge.
• Organize knowledge into topic pages: Enable your organization’s experts to share and refine knowledge through curated topic pages, automatically generated and updated by AI.
• Make knowledge easy to discover and use: Deliver relevant topic cards in the applications people use every day.
Challenge 4. CEOs are concerned about talent and skills 🤔
79% of CEOs worldwide are concerned that a lack of essential skills in their workforce is a barrier to future growth.
☑️ Viva Learning: Skilling and growth 💡
• Make learning a natural part of your day: Foster a culture of learning by enabling people to easily discover, share and engage with learning integrated into Microsoft 365.
• Access your learning content from one place: Simplify the learning experience by bringing together world-class content from LinkedIn Learning, third parties, Microsoft Learn, and your own content.
• Drive results that matter: Empower your leaders and employees to organize, recommend, and track learning aligned with business outcomes.
Challenge 5. Employee needs are not aligned with business outcomes 🌪️
The average Enterprise uses over 1000 applications, and none of them tend to talk to each other well, which creates poor visibility, low agility, and a lack of alignment.
☑️ Viva Goals: Intelligent Operating System for Business execution 🎛️
• Goals & OKRs (Objectives & Key Results): Aligning strategy to execution across the organization and between cross-functional groups and helping companies shift to an agile execution cadence and more frequent assessment rhythm.
• Integrated Execution: Connecting with enterprise systems, linking projects, resources, and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to business outcomes, synthesizing data and providing a holistic real-time view of progress and activity.
• Collaboration: Enabling purpose-driven collaboration and execution, bringing outcomes from the fringe to the forefront, and connecting the strategy and goals of the enterprise to the daily work priorities of employees.
ProServeIT Academy 2022: Microsoft Viva Course
ProServeIT encourages CEOs and their C-suite executives to think of brand experience through two lenses: through a customer perspective and through an employee experience perspective. This course, Microsoft Viva, is all about the employee experience.
We want to ensure that we can democratize the employee experience regardless of their role. We also want to be able to digitize corporate culture to make it more attractive for both current and prospective employees.
Joy and Caroline explore Microsoft Viva and its five modules and envisions how this suite of tools can help improve your employees' overall experience. Learn more about ProServeIT Academy 2022-2023 here.
Content from: ProServeIT Academy 2022 Microsoft Viva Course 1 by Joy Fajardo
Edited by: Betty Quon & Hyun-Jin Im
