In my previous blog, I explored how technical debt associated with rushed adoption impacts the employee experience. I touched on ways organisations can strategise to avoid technical debt and looked at Microsoft’s tools for enhancing the employee experience.
In this blog, I’ll take you on a deeper dive into Microsoft Viva, particularly Viva Insights, looking at how your organisation can utilise this tool to monitor and improve your people’s employee experience.
Recap: what is employee experience?
Employee experience refers to how people’s experiences in the workplace compare to their expectations. Where employee experience is good, staff feel connected and engaged with their work, leading to higher productivity, better work relationships, and improved personal wellbeing.
Where it is poor, staff feel disconnected from their work and colleagues, leading to job dissatisfaction and the decline of personal wellbeing.
In the digital age, when many organisations rely on technology for hybrid and remote working models, the tools people use to carry out their duties has a profound impact on employee experience. The past couple of years, shaped by a global pandemic, accelerated the pace of change. But in many cases, short-term needs will have been prioritised over the longer-term benefits for employee experience, leaving organisations with a form of technical debt.
What is Microsoft Viva?
Viva is Microsoft’s dedicated employee experience platform designed to help organisations bring the full connectedness of a hybrid workplace to their employees.
Running on SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, the Viva portfolio is made up of four modules (with a fifth due for release in the near future). The current modules include:
- Insights – balances productivity and wellbeing
- Topics – organises content and expertise across the business
- Learning – brings learning into the flow of work
- Connections – empowers employees to contribute their best work
What is Microsoft Viva Insights?
Viva Insights is an app which can be accessed through Teams. The insights give users personalised recommendations to help them complete workloads more effectively and efficiently.
These recommendations are based on statistics and analytics taken from employees’ Exchange Online mailbox data (for example., from users’ emails and calendar information).
Enhancing the employee experience with Viva Insights
Here are some of the features users can access within Viva Insights.
Stay connected
The Stay connected featured allows users to connect with colleagues and collaborators. Insights can identify key collaborators and allows users to ‘pin’ them. This feature can also suggest 1:1 meetings where needed and schedule in meeting reminders. Stay connected can also remind employees to RSVP to meetings where they haven’t already done so.
Protect time
With Protect time, Viva users can schedule in dedicated focus time with do not disturb functions to avoid unnecessary distractions. Employees can also start a ‘virtual commute’ at the end of their day, reminding them to wrap up their tasks and plan for the next day.
Send praise
Insights users are able to recognise their employees and colleagues’ hard work by sending praise to them. The praise can either be sent in a private chat or posted in a Teams channel.
Reflect
Reflect lets employees take some time for mindfulness. Insights users can set reminders to self-reflect on how they are feeling, which can lead to improved productivity and wellbeing. Employees can also access their reflection history to see how their feelings have changed over time.
Take a break
Viva users can take a one-minute ‘breathing break’ – an animated experience which they can access as often as they need throughout the day.
Microsoft To Do
To do cards in the Insights app show employees tasks which are due today or have a reminder set for today.
Headspace and Glint
Viva Insights integrates with third-party services Headspace and Glint. Headspace is a mindfulness app which offers guided meditations and music to help users focus. Meditations can also be accessed as part of the virtual commute. Glint is a people success platform from LinkedIn. It uses surveying and employee engagement to assist leaders in gathering qualitative information about their teams.
Viva Insights for leaders
Insights doesn’t just help individual employees with their workloads, it can also help leaders to improve business processes for overall employee experience. Managers can utilise Microsoft Analytics through Insight’s Workplace Analytics tool (which is available within the paid-for versions of Insights) to understand whether their employees have enough focus time, and if time allocation could be adjusted to improve employee wellbeing.
Privacy within Viva Insights
Privacy is a top concern for many people. As Viva uses personalised data and analytics to produce employee insights, Microsoft has put much thought into data protection surrounding this. They have also released privacy guides for both users and admins to describe how data is processed.
How you can harness the power of Viva Insights
Adopting a tool such as Viva Insights is a key step towards establishing the kind of self-managing workplace culture that can transform the employee experience at your organisation.
At Content+Cloud we have some of the world’s leading experts in Microsoft technologies and a passion for helping ambitious organisations succeed. If you’re looking for a partner to help with technical consultancy, business change and adoption, establishing your digital workplace or managed support with your Microsoft technologies, we’d love to talk.
