Viva Connections – Your gateway to Employee Experience!

Viva Connections has been developed as a module of Microsoft Viva, within the Microsoft 365 suite, to try and mitigate social interaction issues and is within the various applications and devices you use already to bring together news, conversations and resources in a company-branded experience. This helps to create a culture of inclusion where everyone’s ideas and voices matter and gives all employees the flexibility to engage and participate from anywhere.

Viva Connections also encourages meaningful connections within an organisation, making it easier to build relationships in all areas and cultivates a dynamic and engaged workforce who are able to grow and learn together, all the while celebrating company values and identity.

A recently updated Gallup poll, August 2022, showed that

“Organizations with highly engaged employees have a 23% greater profitability. The right culture: not just about employee satisfaction.”

Simplified, Viva Connections becomes your gateway to improving employee experiences, with the ability to control the content and tools that are available and give quick access to relevant data and tasks, organisation news, people, resources and communications. All of this using an organisation’s brand, that is the same whether on desktop or mobile applications, and using existing tools and content that exist within the organisation’s SharePoint, Teams, Yammer and Stream applications.

One of the reasons many intranet projects fail is that organisations place too much emphasis on communications and not enough on work integration and connections. Great intranets are not about building websites that mimic the organisation chart (who we are and what we do) and delivering news. A great intranet is about creating experiences and services that help everyone in the organisation do their job.

Since the services that are needed by different types of people in an organisation may differ, the best intranets deliver both services and news targeted to each type of service consumer – based on our role, our geography, our work group, or our interests. Unfortunately, Viva Connections can’t do that work for you but by working on the following simple points, Viva Connections can really start to work for and with you:

• Gain a full understanding of your organisational priorities.
• Document and understand the critical internal services in your organisation and the information that supports these services, including descriptions, forms, policies, procedures, applications, contacts, and training.
• Understand your key user roles or personas and the information and services each one needs to be successful.
• Define the information architecture (sites, navigation, pages, and metadata) and audience groups to support the services.
• Plan governance, including content management and accountability.
• Implement ongoing learning opportunities to ensure that everyone has the right skills and knowledge to be successful.
• Build your intranet in SharePoint and ensure that you have a home site.

While a small amount here can be fairly technical, this can be outsourced to those with the knowledge and tools to do the job. The majority though is around the Governance aspect and creating the scope and definition from a Leadership side that will work for the organisation and the relevant processes and procedures already in place. By scoping and defining first, the IntraNet will become much more effective for everyone in the organisation and relevant stakeholders across the business are needed during the planning stage.

What to expect

Viva Connections doesn’t create the intelligent intranet for you; it provides the infrastructure to deliver your intranet to your users in the context of where they are probably already working — Microsoft Teams — and creates a framework for extending your intranet and making it better.

Initially, the organisation needs to agree on a modern SharePoint home site that provides a customised landing experience, and allows for custom branding to take place as well. This communication site then becomes your home site on SharePoint which then gives it the ability to act as a gateway to other portals, connect with an intranet-wide search experience, showcase targeted news and content and, more importantly, allow you to take advantage of Viva Connections as your new people engagement tool.

Once you have a home site created and branded / adapted then there is the ability to create customised dashboards. The Viva Connections Dashboard enables you to create a controlled and targeted experience using Dashboard cards that give your employee's access to their most critical content and tools. These cards are designed to enable quick task completion either by interacting with a card directly or by opening a quick view in the Dashboard. Think of the Viva Connections Dashboard as a digital toolset for your employees.

An example of the dashboard in desktop mode can be seen on the right above with targeted documents, sites and recommendations sitting alongside the main organisation IntraNet. Dashboard cards come in medium and large sizes for users to interact with to complete a task or gain information.

There are plenty of ways that dashboard cards can be used like displaying a quick view with more information or an input form, navigating to a SharePoint page, accessing a Teams app or accessing a site in the browser. Instead of digging around for information though, you can easily visualize information and quickly interact with the dashboard cards to find what you are looking for from within the Teams application itself.

Within the Viva Connections app, users will see a personalized feed with information from across the organisation. The feed is a great way to stay up to date with corporate communication and engaging content. The feed has great features that automatically balance these two aspects to keep the content fun and engaging. Important messages that require the attention of all employees can be promoted to raise greater awareness. If given permission, the content will be aggregated from a variety of sources, including SharePoint news, Yammer community posts, and for video-type content, Microsoft Stream. 

Leaders can utilise Viva Connections to transform company culture, making it inclusive and empowering employees to succeed with their centralised gateway while employees can stay engaged across the organisation while discovering information that is relevant and targeted to them. In addition, the Dashboard has been designed to act and be totally consistent across mobile and desktop platforms giving the same experience whatever you use. And of course the great part of Viva Connections is that, like with Viva Engage, it is available by default with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Enterprise licenses!