Microsoft Viva Insights enables organisations to better understand their employees’ experiences.
Viva Insights also addresses critical strategic questions about organisational resilience and agility. Ultimately, it helps leaders and managers to focus their attention where it’s most needed and foster a happier workforce.
What is Viva Insights?
Microsoft Viva Insights is part of the Microsoft Viva family – an employee experience platform. It works across three organisational layers by:
- Delivering personal insights to individuals, helping them to adopt healthier working habits and be more productive.
- Providing visibility to managers, offering insights into work patterns that can lead to burnout and stress, to facilitate a better work-life balance for their teams.
- Empowering business leaders to address critical questions around culture and organisational resilience and see how working practices impact their people and success.
Viva Insights uses data and signals from Microsoft Teams, Outlook Insights, Microsoft MyAnalytics and other Microsoft 365 apps and services. Viva Insights can also access information from an existing ecosystem of collaboration tools and services, including Zoom, Slack, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors.
MyAnalytics – and Microsoft Workplace Analytics, will ultimately come under the Microsoft Viva brand. If you’re a Workplace Analytics customer you can jump-start deep analysis using an open-source repository of functions and share the results using pre-built visualisations and interactive HTML reports.
But while Microsoft is driving greater integration with Teams, it’s worth mentioning that you can still use MyAnalytics and Outlook Insights independently of Teams and Viva.
Viva Insights protects privacy; personal insights are visible only to the individual. At the managerial and business leader levels, safeguards include data aggregation, de-identification and differential privacy by default.
Viva Insights surfaces the information on dashboards in Microsoft Teams, which include advice and calls to action.
Why should you care about Viva Insights?
Amid the global pandemic, technology enabled us to replace in-person interactions with digital connections, proving that even the most complex teamwork can happen from anywhere.
But prolonged remote working combined with physical isolation brought employee wellbeing into the spotlight.
It highlighted to businesses the importance of ensuring that their people could make the transition from office to home working with minimal impact on their mental health.
The Thrive XM Index 2020 insights report applied first-of-its-kind methodology for assessing and quantifying the employee experience. The study indicated that employee wellbeing is connected to organisational outcomes, evidencing that companies that prioritise their people outperform their peers.
How Viva Insights improves employee wellbeing
Microsoft has responded to this by developing the Viva Insights tool to support businesses.
It delivers personal insights to individuals, nudging them towards healthier working habits.
Viva insights deliver actionable recommendations, such as:
- Take regular mental breaks – Disconnect and recharge with Headspace, a meditation and mindfulness app which Microsoft has brought inside Teams
- Add structure to the remote working day with a virtual commute. Begin every day productively and mindfully disconnect in the evening – (coming April 2021)
- Protect time – Schedule calendar appointments for focused work and learning
- Strengthen team bonds and stay connected, with prompts to feed back to colleagues and meet outstanding tasks and commitments
How Viva Insights helps organisations transform employee experiences
Microsoft has shown how managers can promote employee wellbeing through regular one-to-ones.
Meaningful, quality engagement with their line managers helps employees feel more valued and connected to their organisation. Viva Insights flags when employees are becoming isolated, prompting their managers to book one-to-ones.
Viva Insights also helps managers quickly discover work patterns that could lead to burnout and stress. For example, time working outside of hours, experiencing meeting overload and limited focus time. The tool surfaces opportunities for managers to intervene, supported and contextualised by research and best practice tips.
Leaders can enjoy a fascinating view of how their organisation functions and how people collaborate. Insights from Viva can help them identify ways to boost cohesion, break down silos and create alignment and shared purpose.
Viva Insights and Glint
Glint is an organisation acquired by Microsoft which gathers qualitative information through employee surveys.
Through the pairing of powerful datasets, Viva Insights enables organisations to understand their employees’ experiences more deeply than ever.
A Power BI (Business Intelligence) dashboard combines information from LinkedIn’s ‘how people feel’ Glint surveys with aggregated and de-identified collaboration data from Viva Insights on ‘how people work’.
Business leaders will be able to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms and measure the impact of change programmes over time.
The dashboard is available now in public preview for joint Microsoft Workplace Analytics and Glint customers.
Microsoft Viva – Quick Q&A
Why is employee experience important?
Digital transformation continues to drive changes in the workplace and a link exists between employee satisfaction and productivity. Research consistently shows that businesses investing in positive working cultures tend to have healthy bottom lines.
How do you measure employee experience?
Your approach will be specific to your business. It can include developing an employee experience management strategy that combines several aspects, such as an index which uses a scoring system, regular feedback through automated questionnaires and more detailed check-ins with line managers.
When is Viva Insights coming to Microsoft Teams?
The tool is available as an app in Microsoft Teams that you can install today, with the Homepage and Virtual Commute scheduled for April 2021 release.
What will Viva Insights cost?
Two components feed into Viva Insights – MyAnalytics, which can be found as standard in Office 365 and used without an additional license. The second component, Workplace Analytics, requires additional licensing.
Take your next step with Microsoft Viva Insights
For more information on how Viva Insights can help your people and organisation, you’re welcome to contact us.
