Viva Goals – Presenting progress seamlessly!

It's often said that employees who feel a sense of purpose and have clarity on how their role impacts the business are much more invested in their work. By implementing a framework that measures goals, objectives and their key results, this sense of purpose can be achieved and lead to many improved outcomes for the business. 

Viva Goals also brings goals into the flow of everyday work. Making it easier for employees to connect with data, receive automatic reminders about deadlines and meetings, and update progress across the organisation via customisable dashboards and quick links. This can ensure that the key central objectives for the business are no longer separated from the employee experience in the areas where they do the bulk of their work, whether Teams, Azure DevOps and other management and data tools. 

Let's talk about OKRs 

While Viva Goals allows an organisation to track goals using the OKR framework, OKRs themselves are your organisation's targets, along with the measures in place that help show you are on the right path. With an objective showing you what you want to achieve, your key results provide the benchmarks and measurable progress that are part of your plan.

So if your objective is to sell over £1M of a product or service line, then your Key Results could be to win several deals that, added together, makeup over £1M by the end of the financial year. A second Key Result could be generating multiple marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads that help make that objective. This could then lead to a secondary objective of growing business with Key Results explaining the measure of growth or even reducing the churn by 10% through increasing Customer Success. 

As business leaders and employers, it's our responsibility to create clear goals and measures of success as it has a trickly down effect throughout the organisation. When we are clear about these things, it helps everyone understand what is important and to align their work to the most valued priorities. This is especially important in the current times of hybrid and remote working, where individuals can often become "siloed" in their working practices. 

It sets the context for the level and type of work we are looking for, creating a shared vision and language that has been proven to bring hybrid teams together. It gives departments and their teams a framework to focus their priorities and define their success in connection to what the business's success looks like. 

With clarity around business and team goals, employees are empowered to think, collaborate, and act at both the team and individual levels. With entire teams and departments working towards clear personal and shared goals, everyday work moves the business forward in a more agile way. 

How does Viva Goals bring it together? 

Viva Goals brings your OKRs directly into the main collaboration area as part of the employee experience of Microsoft Teams. This seamless integration allows you to create and assign objectives and tasks within teams and across Microsoft Documents, making tracking key metrics so much simpler. In addition, it brings goals into the flow of everyday work. Making it easier for everyone to connect with data, receive automatic reminders about deadlines and meetings, and update progress across the organisation via customisable dashboards and quick links. 

With clarity around the whole organisation's and individual team goals, it is easier for all employees to think, collaborate, and act in a team context along with an individual one. This clarity around goals at all levels improves agility in the organisation, with clear personal and shared goals contributing to the bigger picture. The main features of Viva Goals will include: 

• Allowing you to list key organisation goals, visions and objectives
• Track goal progress
• Include a list of tasks to achieve goals
• Assign owners to tasks and goals
• Visualising how close you are to achieving business goals through data and graphs
• Allow you to celebrate successes 

As with all Viva elements, Viva Goals helps to bring value and purpose to employees as they can see their direct contributions and the impacts of those contributions on the organisation. When employees see that they're positively impacting the organisation, they will be more motivated to continue their good work.