A lot has changed since last year due to the pandemic. Many of us started working from home, and the world experienced a rapid workplace transformation. Organizations and businesses worldwide re-examined their workplace, realizing the need for a new work culture of connection, support, and resilience.

In a world where everyone is working remotely, creating a good employee experience and work culture with flexibility is more challenging than ever for any organization. Along with this, the organizations are more aware of the wellbeing, connection, engagement, and growth of the employees as these factors play a significant role in employee engagement and organizational success. To fulfill these needs, organizations have started working to ensure that they stay connected, informed, and motivated as the transition to the new hybrid work model occurs. In the Hybrid work model,

• Employees need to feel more connected and aligned towards their goals to grow and make a difference.
• Leaders need to have modern ways for overall employee engagement and development.
• IT needs to quickly upgrade to the modern employee experience without replacing their existing systems.

To fulfill all these requirements, we need to have the right tools and environment to maintain the natural workflow in the new norm of working life.

To make the workplaces as flexible and scalable as possible, Microsoft has announced the Viva Employee Experience Platform, the first employee experience platform (EXP) designed for the digital era to empower people and teams to give their best inputs from wherever they work.

Even though Microsoft Teams is already playing a central Hub in many organizations, Microsoft Viva is valuable. Why?

The reason being that with the Microsoft Viva Employee Experience Platform, companies can not only connect and support their distributed teams working from different locations but also foster a culture of good employee engagement, growth and success. It also gives teams the power to be more productive and informed wherever they are.

As we all know, similar solutions already existed in Microsoft Teams, like intranet functionality and connections to LOB applications. On the other hand, Viva takes this concept to another level and simplifies the office workforce’s transition to a remote workforce. It is known for bringing resources, knowledge, learning, communications, and insights into an integrated experience.

Viva can be best experienced using Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that people use in their daily lives. It is intentionally designed to support employees and facilitate them with the tools that they’re already using for their work.

Microsoft Viva includes the following initial set of modules:

 Viva Topics– Harness knowledge and expertise

• It is an AI-powered solution that automatically organizes content and expertise across your systems and teams into related topics such as projects, products, processes, and customers.
• When you come across an unfamiliar topic or acronym, hover. No need to search for knowledge—knowledge finds you.

 Viva Connections – Amplify culture and communications.

• Easily discover relevant news, conversations and tasks to stay engaged and informed in the flow of work.
• It provides a personalized feed and dashboard to help you find all the helpful resources you need from Microsoft Viva and other apps across your digital workplace.

 Viva Learning: Accelerate Skilling and growth

• It is a central hub for learning in Teams with AI that recommends the right content at the right time. It also aggregates learning content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, an organization’s custom content, and training from leading content providers like Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight, and edX.
• With Viva Learning, employees can easily discover and share training courses, and managers get all the tools to assign and track the completion of courses to help foster a learning culture.
• Individuals can build their own training environments and track their progress on courses. Team leaders and supervisors also have the option to assign specific learning tasks to individual members of staff. Hence, it’s a great way to keep your team growing in any environment.

 Viva Insights:

• Give leaders, managers and employees data-driven, privacy-protected insights that help everyone work smarter and thrive.
• It derives these insights by summarizing your Microsoft 365 data – data you already have access to – about emails, meetings, calls, and chats.

According to  CEO Satya Nadella, “Microsoft participated in the largest remote work experiment ever seen during 2020, and now it’s time to prepare for a future where flexibility is the new norm.”  

Organizations will eventually access an aligned hybrid work environment that simulates the traditional workplace environment with Viva and retain an uninterrupted flow of work in a distributed environment.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this!