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Advancing work collaboration and productivity with Viva

03 April 2024

By Matthew Simmons

Microsoft Viva provides a comprehensive suite of Microsoft tools and applications that help leaders and employees engage and empower their workforce.

In this blog, we'll unpack the tools provided by Microsoft Viva and how you can practically utilise these tools within your organisation to boost collaboration and productivity within your teams.

Microsoft Viva: An employee experience platform

With Viva, leaders can readily set their company's strategy, share goals and priorities across the organisation, and equip employees with the right resources, knowledge and skills to continually improve engagement and performance. But how?

Microsoft Viva integrates with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365, and is highly customisable and extensible, allowing organisations to tailor the platform to their specific needs.

Microsoft Viva brings together nine collaborative solutions.

1. Microsoft Viva Connections

Created to improve employee experience, Microsoft Viva Connections consolidates news, conversations, and resources within the apps and devices employees already use. This cultivates a culture of inclusion, giving employees the flexibility to engage and participate from anywhere.

Jungle IT uses Microsoft Viva Connections to provide a hub for communication and sharing resources

2. Microsoft Viva Glint

Providing survey programs, Viva Glint helps leaders within your company to gather data and consider the feedback employees share relating to their employee satisfaction. Viva Glint creates a space for employees to be heard and leaders an opportunity to turn insights into actions.

These features, make Viva Glint a great tool for cultural change and driving strategic direction.

Microsoft Viva Glint enables employees to share their feedback to drive organisational insight and change.

Microsoft Viva Glint enables employees to share feedback to drive organisational insight and change.

3. Microsoft Viva Goals

Viva Goals allows you to align your team's goals with the organisation's wider priorities and purpose.

Viva Goals enables you to set, organise, and track organisational and functional goals through Objective and Key Results or OKRs. In this way, Viva Goals helps you to set strategic goals across the board as each team within your organisation works towards common overarching goals.

Set, outline, and track organisational and functional goals with Microsoft Viva Goals

4. Microsoft Viva Engage

Viva Engage is an employee communication platform that allows everyone within your company to connect through communities and conversations.

As the name implies, Viva Engage is a modern internal social media hub, bringing employees together through communities and conversations. With flexible ways of working, Viva Engage bridges the gap of the casual coffee break talk generally experienced in a working environment.

Viva Engage enables employee communication through communities, similar to a modern social media hub

5. Microsoft Viva Learning

Viva Learning is a tool fostering learning where employees can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries across their company.

79% of CEOs say talent and employee skills are their top issue, however, only 1% of their workweek is spent on formal learning. Viva Learning makes micro-learning simpler, a method that has proven to be more effective in increasing retention rates and upskilling employees.

This tool allows employees to track progress, bookmark relevant content, and keep progress of training assigned to you.

Viva Learning enables employees to discover, recommend, and gain access to learning resources in a centralised, easy access location.

6. Microsoft Viva Insights

Viva Insights is a tool that utilises AI to analyse everyday Microsoft collaboration tools. It provides data data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations to improve productivity and wellbeing

This AI is capable of comprehending how work is carried out, predicting and explaining the effects of work patterns on business outcomes, and monitoring employee well-being.

This intelligence is able to understand how work gets done, explain and predict the impact of work patterns on your business outcomes, and help understand the wellbeing of employees.

It presents the statistics and data collected while working in a comprehensible manner to improve productivity and well-being, and to help users make the most of their time.

Viva Insights utilises AI to carry out, predict, and infer the effects of work patterns to inform business decisions and monitor employee well-being.

7. Microsoft Viva Topics

Viva Topics utilises AI to organise information and knowledge from around the company and present the information to those who actually need it.

This knowledge management hub integrates with Microsoft Search, SharePoint Contributions/News, Teams, Outlook, Office tools (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and Power Tools. It recognises “Topics” in text and highlights them as links giving you the chance to hover over the link and preview information or to jump straight to a topic page with all the information.

Though currently available, Viva Topics will be retired in early 2025 to be replaced by knowledge management tools and resources that Microsoft Copilot will provide.

Viva Topics uses AI to present information and knowledge from around the company to those who need it

8. Microsoft Viva Pulse

Microsoft Viva Pulse facilitates leaders in requesting feedback to understand their needs and to gain insight into what's working well and areas for improvement.

This tool simplifies the process by which team leaders can request and receive feedback to engage employee morale, or feedback on a specific project that has been undertaken.

With engaging reporting, Viva Pulse enables leaders to review feedback results in a comprehensive dashboard which can be used to improve processes.

Request and monitor feedback using Microsoft Viva Pulse to spot areas for improving your work processes

9. Microsoft Viva Amplify

Microsoft Viva Amplify provides a medium through which leaders within an organisation can communicate effectively with their employees. Viva Amplify enables leaders, corporate communications, and Human Resources to have a strategic approach to the communications they send out.

This Microsoft tool offers advice for crafting effective copy, allowing communications to be published across multiple channels. Leaders can also review the engagement with their campaigns to assess how to improve them in the future.

Microsoft Viva Amplify provides a platform which leaders can utilise to communicate effectively with their employees

Additional business benefits of Microsoft Viva

1. Increased productivity

Coveo's 2022 Workplace Relevance Report shared that employees spend 3.6 hours on average daily searching for information, that's approximately 907 working hours per year per employee! Microsoft Viva allows employees to access data and information in a centralised place reducing time wastage and boosting productivity. Microsoft Copilot features further simplifies this process, utilising AI to share insights and information that is most relevant to your employees and teams.

2. Reduced employee attrition

Viva reduces employee dissatisfaction and increases employee retention. The channels facilitating feedback and data insights regarding employee well-being and satisfaction has helped improve this.