Demystifying Viva Engage

Microsoft Viva is one of the newer products appearing and builds on the power of Microsoft Teams, as a central part of Microsoft 365, in order to improve engagement, Wellbeing, Knowledge and learning for employees.

Microsoft describes Viva as "the employee experience platform within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into the flow of work. Viva supports connection, insight, purpose, and growth, empowering people and teams to be their best.”

Microsoft Viva brings together 6 main solutions in order to achieve this, namely:

• Microsoft Viva Connections - a company-branded employee experience destination that brings together news, conversations, and resources in the apps and devices you use daily.
• Microsoft Viva Engage – an employee communication platform that allows everyone at your organisation to connect through communities and conversations.
• Microsoft Viva Learning - the centre for learning where employees can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries across their organisation.
• Microsoft Viva Insights - helps people and businesses thrive with data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations to improve productivity and wellbeing.
• Microsoft Viva Topics - organises content and expertise across your organisation, making it easy for people to find information and put knowledge to work.
• Microsoft Viva Goals - helps to ensure your team’s goals align with the company’s priorities and purpose by setting shared goals in Microsoft Viva.

Microsoft Viva Engage is the part of Viva that creates a modern social media hub, connecting all employees through communities and conversations that also gives leadership new tools to shape culture and align everyone in the same direction. Some may recognise this concept from another Microsoft 365 App, Yammer, and Viva has been built on Yammer principles and technology. However, it is not Yammer re-branded but builds on the Yammer experience bringing the idea of “Storylines” and “Stories” directly into Teams and Outlook through Viva apps.

Essentially, Viva Engage is meant to replace the passing conversations and idle coffee break talk that has dried up in the work-from-home / hybrid era. While you might still have regular conversations with your closest colleagues via video chat and messaging apps, you likely talk to people from other teams or outside of your immediate circle much less frequently. Microsoft suggest that Viva Engage can be used to:

• Strengthen employee relationships 
• Build communities that support diversity, shared interests, and business initiatives 
• Give employees a voice and empower leaders to listen, learn, and engage everyone
• Share updates, experiences, and perspectives

Additionally, Viva Engage builds on the capabilities of Microsoft Teams, as a main collaboration and communication application, to bring a focus on the company culture and therefore overall engagement at all levels in the organisation. With a modern workforce being used to the concept of Facebook, Instagram and other platforms in their private lives, Viva Engage brings the same concepts of status updates, photos, videos, hashtags, mentions, likes and more into the workplace even with your own profile page.

Communities, part of the setup within Viva Engage, bring places to share ideas across the whole organisation with knowledge sharing around these ideas. There are many opportunities for these communities to be used, like keeping up-to-date with policies, organisational changes, creating new #campaigns for an additional product or service being deployed and many more. These work by bringing leaders and employees together whether for webinars and events that include video and a new Q & A feature.

Engage can build communities where leaders and employees can interact more effectively and transparently, creating a space where people can share, ideas, knowledge, and answers. It can introduce individuals to new experiences, empower team members to be more vocal, and contribute to the organisation’s greater good. A good example could be an internal “frequently asked question” area or one organisation that had a community for how people take their coffee and tea for shared facilities.

But what are some of the benefits of Viva Engage?

Leaders have the ability to share organisation wide news, localised department (Community) news, strategy, discussions with employees as well as join in with conversations that they may otherwise not have been part of. This helps to facilitate engagement with employees and even humanises the digital experience, helping to build communities within the organisation that are around commonalities. It can also facilitate two-way dialog between leadership and employees, uniting and align employees around a common vision, shared objective and campaigns allowing them to contribute to ideas and feedback.

From an employee point of view, feeling like you are part of a team or an important cog in the organisation is key when looking at employee satisfaction. Viva Engage gives everyone the ability to build these communities and professional networks, give their opinion on organisational matters but also find answers internally to the questions they may have. Like with other social media platforms, it is an ideal space for everyone to talk and connect with one another.

Stories and Storylines can help reduce meetings with quickly created videos and posts giving the ability for others to interact and connect to them. This helpful information being shared can then keep everyone informed but at their own speed rather than booking in another call or meeting.

Whereas communities rely on group memberships to ensure the right people see the messages posted there, storyline relies on following activity. Find storylines from across your organisation in Viva Engage in Teams desktop, web, and mobile. When someone posts to their storyline, all the people who are following that person will be notified of that post based on their personal notification preferences. They can catch up on that message, and other messages posted by all of the people they follow, through the storylines landing page, which brings together storyline content from all of the people they follow as well as relevant and trending storyline content from across their organisation.

To get the most out of storyline, it is important for to follow the leaders, colleagues and thought leaders you respect, and encourage them to follow you back. Following someone is a social signal that lets them know that you're interested in what they have to say, and encourages them to share their updates, learnings, experiences, and perspectives through storyline.

Stories, however, are photos or short videos which give the possibility to annotate and comment around. These are underpinned by another feature application of Microsoft 365 called Microsoft Stream and can be viewed either through engage or on the Stream application.

Stories gives the chance to upload or record a 90 second video, either landscape or portrait, along with editing or trimming the clip, adding a title and description, adding text and also adding stickers as well. You can post comments and replies to the story directly from the video page and also react.

People you follow and suggested people will appear in your stories feed and all stories will exist in storylines as well, unless they have been deleted. Marketing or Sales could use stories as a tool to communicate informally, authentically, and directly with employees about upcoming releases about product and services. Communicators could share a perspective about what is going on in the world, in their industry, or in the company and Human Resource teams can share a business update or a perspective that amplifies company culture and values.

Some ideas for sharing stories and storylines each day could be:

How can Viva Engage become a central part of Microsoft Teams?

Teams is already a central hub within the Microsoft 365 suite acting as a portal or dashboard to communicate and collaborate. Communication already comes through chat functions, channels, and meetings and the other functions of Viva can help see the news on your intranet via Viva Connections, get information on how you are doing with Viva Insights and learn more with Viva Learning. Viva Engage now brings you the aspects of community into this space as well without having to exit teams or flip between applications.

Microsoft suggests that “As part of Microsoft Viva, Viva Engage connects employees and empowers everybody to contribute and express themselves.”. With these connections and communities come Authentic leadership engagement, Sharing experiences and self-expression, exchange of ideas and continued engagement of frontline workers with everyone in the organisation feeling included and invested.