Viva Insights – Workplace analytics helping you to be more efficient

Over the last few years, working life, patterns and habits have changed, often blurring the lines between life and work especially in the ever connected age that we are in. It’s important to consider the resiliency of an organisation and this is often linked retention of employees and really if it is known just how happy everyone is.

With Microsoft Viva acting as the employee experience platform, Viva Insights as a module has been positioned by Microsoft to:

“empower individuals, teams, and organisations to build better work habits, achieve balance and improve business outcomes offering personalised insights and recommended actions”

Individuals can gain personal insights, visible only to you, helping to identify chances to change how you work so that you can do the best work you can. Leaders, meanwhile, can gain insights that make it easy to understand current norms in the team and take quick actions to help the team improve productivity and well-being. Leader insights can also give broad visibility across the whole organisation to help improve employee experience and business outcomes.

So what is Viva Insights exactly?

Viva Insights applies artificial intelligence to the data generated in the use of the Microsoft Collaboration tools in everyday work. 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. The statistics and data gathered while you work is presented to make sense of this information always with the aim of improving productivity and wellbeing and to put simply to help you try and use time as effectively as possible.

Viva Insights has three main feature areas with Personal Insights being available in a Microsoft 365 plan while Manager / Leader Insights and Advanced Tools are part of a premium Viva license, currently known as Microsoft Workplace Analytics.

Personal Insights are those that are private to you as an individual. These take feeds from Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams or the MyAnalytics dashboard. They are all based around how you work and provide ideas on where you could improve, such as in my first example above showing I could gain some “Focus Time” tomorrow at 8am until 8:30am. Regular breaks are always recommended giving you a chance to then focus on work blocks and help boost productivity. Or within the second example where it shows that I “Multi-tasked” in 7% of my meetings this week, we are always encouraged to “be there” on the meeting not just in spirit!

Manager and Leader Insights meanwhile look more at intelligence around the team as a whole. The ability to focus on work patterns in the team can help to reduce overworking and therefore stress and pressures. They can include patterns such as regular working after hours, too many meetings and minimal time to focus.

Leaders can use Viva Insights to measure the impact as well from big events or milestones, like mergers, acquisitions or product launches, to changes in collaboration as a result of reorgs or broader cultural shifts happening in the company.

The dashboard provides insight into various themes like how to build organisational resilience or drive employee engagement, or how to make sense of the overall meeting culture within an organisation. Viva Insights also offers the ability to run custom queries and reports based on specific areas or opportunities leaders might be trying to investigate or address.

Many organisations want to understand the changes in collaboration that happened as a result of the shift to remote work over the last few years. For leaders in the Viva insights experience, there’s a view that provides this visibility as well.

This example from Microsoft shows how they saw a 20 percent increase in overall collaboration hours once they shifted to remote work in February 2020. Not only does this view allow leaders to see the change over time, but it also provides details about the different tools being used within the organisation, which helps leaders stay informed about the systems and applications that are needed to help people stay productive and connected.

Privacy and ethics

Viva Insights has several privacy and trust safeguards in place helping to meet compliance with privacy legislation such as GDPR and this can include:

• Anonymising employee information when data is processed
• Respecting minimum thresholds
• Aggregating all data

All employee information is immediately de-identified when processed, and all data is aggregated, so it’s impossible to pinpoint individual information, like emails. Viva Insights also requires a minimum group size of five for any measurement to be produced, which means smaller teams won’t show up in the reports to protect their identity. This is different than with Personal Insights where this information is included but that data is strictly restricted to that individual not the organisation as a whole. It is worth noting that all information is stored in your Exchange Online Mailbox to aid in the privacy.

However, it is worth noting that while there are privacy safeguards in place. There are ethical considerations as well and it’s a good idea to work in an open and transparent way, communicating at every step, on how you plan to use analytics. Bringing in stakeholders to these decisions aids in take up of the product as well with Champions who help keep it active and moving.

Additional features

Stay connected – Stay on top of your collaboration with colleagues through features such as AI-based task suggestions and meeting assistance.

Protect time – Find more time to eliminate distractions, stop multi-tasking, and focus on your core priorities.

Send praise – Send acclaim to your employees and coworkers, either in a private chat or in a Teams channel conversation.

Reflect – Take a moment to check in with yourself, to reflect on how you’re feeling.

Headspace – Experience a guided meditation from Headspace.

Take a break – During your workday, take an occasional one-minute “breathing break.”

Start a virtual commute – Mindfully close out your workday. While above shows the mind exercises, you can also view the day ahead and the tasks done today using Microsoft To-Do – Take action on a task in your to-do list.

Why do we need Viva Insights?

Technology applications, whether email, Teams or a spreadsheet, are designed exclusively with productivity in mind. Their purpose is to make it easier for people to work efficiently and collaboratively.

In this day and age of forever being switched on and with remote working prevalent, there is a real risk of burnout for people as it is easier than ever for people to access their work apps and therefore colleagues. Since we often no longer sit in the same room, it is challenging for management and leadership to see this burnout.

As a result, Viva Insights can provide both individuals and organisations with insights into how people are doing at work and personalised, relevant possibilities of how to improve employee engagement and wellbeing. The app has various features that track wellbeing in different ways and offer recommendations for improving it with additional suggestions for senior leaders on those areas and teams that need it improving the most. Navigating through the insights proved simple enough, and the insights you can derive from them are beneficial.

There are additional costs involved over your regular Microsoft 365 license for that manager and organisational view but with the view of engaging employees and even more important, retaining them, it is worth considering the extra investment. Boosting productivity and well-being in a remote environment does not have to be challenging when you have tailored recommendations provided to you.