We already know that hybrid work is here to stay – how can you make it the best experience for your people? Ahead of his session at our Digital Revolution³ virtual event, Modern Workplace Product Director Dan Coleby takes us through the value Microsoft Viva can bring to your people and organisation in the new hybrid workplace.
All the signs point to hybrid working as the new norm for many organisations, but it’s not always easy to recreate the in-office employee experience at home. Microsoft Viva was introduced in an already hybrid, Teams-centric world to address the employee experience gaps that the existing technology alone couldn’t fill. Launching in 2021 with four core modules: Connections, Insights, Learning and Topics, each serving a key purpose, it’s grown rapidly over the past year.
We’ve seen five new modules launched since last summer. These include apps that foster connectivity within your organisation with Engage and Amplify, as well as providing insights into employee sentiment with Pulse and giving your people’s work a wider purpose with Goals.
Microsoft Viva also introduced its first role-based business application with the Sales module. This new app enables sales teams to easily engage with any backend customer relationship management system through Microsoft Teams.
So, what can all these Viva modules do for you? We’re going to keep it simple, looking at the value Microsoft Viva can bring to your people and organisation in the context of connection, insight, purpose and growth.
Improve connections in the new hybrid workplace
One of the biggest changes in the switch to hybrid working is losing that office environment – but it’s not just the physical environment that people are missing out on. According to Cisco’s ‘Employees are ready for hybrid work, are you?’ study, employees can see that organisations aren’t lacking in the technology required to enable us to work in a location-agnostic way, but it’s the softer elements like employee support and HR platforms that need to improve.
Outside the office environment, it’s not always as easy to recognise team efforts from across the organisation. However, Microsoft Viva offers tools for internal communications teams to engage your people – whether that’s through bringing your SharePoint intranet to where they work in Microsoft Teams, making company communications more accessible, or by giving all people a voice through the Viva Engage module.
Get valuable insights into the employee experience
While hybrid work may have become the norm, it can take on a different meaning from person to person. A 2021 Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) study found that people have a range of opinions on the number of days they want to work from home, and that almost half of employees say large meetings tend to be worse online.
With many influencing factors, such as the type of work teams are doing and where they are based, it’s difficult to gauge a solution that is perfect for everyone. However, Microsoft Viva can provide direct insights into how your employees are working and collaborating and how effective meetings are. Ultimately, when you know where and when your people work, you will be able to make use of the space and technology at your disposal much more effectively.
You can also add to this quantitative data about how people are working and get insights into employee wellbeing with valuable qualitative feedback from Viva Pulse and Glint. This goes beyond simply discovering when and where your employees are happiest working – you can get a better understanding of what your people are thinking and feeling with intelligent, research-backed questions as part of a quick pulse.
Giving purpose to the work your people do
Despite some early concerns, it’s now apparent that hybrid working has proven to be just as effective as what we would have expected from the traditional workplace. However, whilst the work may be getting done, employees can far more easily become disconnected from the organisations for whom they work. Even in the past, there has been a disconnect between leaders and employees finding meaning in day-to-day work, with as many as 83% of leaders finding it important compared to only 52% of employees.
As the modern workplace has shifted and people are joining new companies remotely, it can be even harder to connect the work that people are doing every day to your overall purpose and long-term goals. But it really should be a priority – a study from McKinsey found that when people can identify and align themselves with the purpose of their company, they are more engaged, loyal and willing to recommend it.
With the Viva Goals app, you can bring your organisation’s goals to your people. With a clear, consistent goal-setting process, using the popular objectives and key results (OKR) methodology, your people will be more connected and aligned to your organisation’s mission and purpose. Even when everyone is working separately, we can make sure they are all headed in the same direction.
Foster the growth of your people and organisation
In the office, it was always easy to turn to a colleague and ask how to navigate a certain technology or what a specific acronym stands for. Even as your organisation adopted new technology, you could carry out training sessions with your team all in the same room learning together. Now, when all there is to engage your people is a computer screen, creating that engagement and value is all the more important.
Microsoft Viva makes it easy for you to provide learning and development to your people directly where they work in Microsoft Teams. Wherever your people are and whatever they are doing, they can easily access training courses, whether they are assigned to them or part of their own individual development pathway.
You can also provide wider context around specific topics and support the discovery, curation and sharing of knowledge with Microsoft Viva. This helps your people to grow beyond the scope of their own work in the new hybrid workplace – and as your people grow, so will your organisation.
How to bring the value of Microsoft Viva to your organisation
As we see Microsoft Viva growing in functionality, we see organisations becoming increasingly excited about what it can do. You can bring value to your people and your organisation through connection, insight, purpose and growth, not to mention new capabilities that improve the experience for specific roles in the future.
Want to get more information about how each of the Microsoft Viva modules can bring value to your people and organisation? Sign up for more insights from our on-demand Digital Revolution³ virtual event.
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