Developing employee experience with Microsoft Viva: new modules coming to the Viva Suite

Hybrid work is not disappearing as we move into 2023 and Microsoft know that this only makes the digital employee experience more important than ever.

Never one to stand still with new products, they are continuing to place Teams right at the centre of their collaboration and communication tools while expanding the employee experience and productivity technologies beyond what was known as Office 365 little over a year ago.

And so, with employee experience becoming more of a focus, the development of the Viva Suite continues at pace with the next two modules scheduled for full availability in early 2023 and simply called Amplify and Pulse.

Viva Amplify – Streamline communication and energise connections!

Viva Amplify is for employee communications teams to streamline their publishing process. The main aim is to improve the employee experience and—as its name implies—”amplify” one’s voice. It will help users communicate with larger audiences and form strong, more meaningful connections.

The app supports creating content from one place and then publishing it to multiple channels such as email and SharePoint news, although if you are following a Viva roadmap then Viva Connections could also display the news. It also supports metrics to track campaign engagement and reach, to better understand the true results and effectiveness of your message and optimise your communication efforts with data-driven decisions.

Viva Pulse – Request confidential feedback from your team.

Microsoft are billing Viva Pulse as an app that “empowers managers and team leads to seek regular and confidential feedback about their team’s experience, right in the flow of work in Teams. Using smart templates, research-backed questions, and analytics, Viva Pulse enables teams to use their voice to help managers pinpoint what’s working well and where to focus. Viva Pulse also provides suggested learning and actions on relevant topics, making it easy for managers to address team needs. This is complementary and additive to robust company-wide engagement tools like Glint, which will be coming to Viva next year.“

So in essence, this will help leaders to identify what is working well and where to focus the team with suggested actions and recommendations based on the confidential feedback from the whole team. This can work very well alongside Viva Goals with the two applications providing much better transparency between leaders and teams and helping to improve the prioritisation of any of the established goals or objectives.