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Published on:
30 January 2023
Author:
TechPath
Microsoft Viva: What is It, and How Can It Benefit Your Business?
If you ever stopped to look at just how many apps come included with your Microsoft 365 licence, you might just be surprised. Sure, most organisations subscribe for the best-known apps, like Word, Excel, and Teams, but there is a wealth of great tech that you are already paying for – and there are plenty of reasons that Viva should be on your radar.
Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that deftly brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights, helping improve workflow and prompting individuals and teams to work at their best. It has a lot of new features that can help you to be more organised and more productive, feel more connected, and to create balance even in a busy hybrid workplace.
Bring Teams Back Together
That sense of connection is especially important in the post-Covid workforce. After the bruising effect of a global pandemic, and the sense of isolation from an unplanned stint of working from home, Viva can create a welcome sense of belonging. It helps to connect everyone from the CEO to the newest junior and gives visibility of what each team member is working on. Whether at home, in the office, or wherever else you work, you can get a sense of the team around you.
One of the clever things that Viva does is add actionable insights, using data to help you to establish better work practices. It sends these insights in a daily email, along with a task list and some prompts. Troy Adams, Managing Director of TechPath said ‘If I suggested in an email yesterday that I follow up with a team member on a customer project in a few weeks, Viva will ask if I want to schedule that in my calendar or set a reminder. If I have been flat out, Viva might remind me to schedule a little down time. For anyone juggling work, home, family, and life, it is a great way to carve out some balance while avoiding missing anything important.’
He added, ‘Perhaps my favourite element of Viva, though, is the way it supports a sense of purpose. Especially when we aren’t all in the office at once, it could be easy for team members to lose the sense of where their role fits and why it is important. Viva allows the entire workforce to see how their work impacts the organisation, and there are objective and key results (OKR) template ideas for each part of the business.’ It not only shows organisational goals but also the intricate elements that are needed to reach that goal – so for example, if a goal is to raise customer satisfaction ratings by 10%, the marketing team may be tasked with designing and sending helpful follow-up emails offering post-sales assistance, the sales team might adjust their process to advise customers about how to get more from their purchase, while the cleaning team might display visible signs that show how frequently they sanitise customer environments. Everyone can see that they contribute to a wider purpose beyond their own area.
Supporting Personal and Career Growth
Linking in neatly to this sense of team achievement is the way Viva supports personal growth. In much the same way as organisational goals, it can also be used to help us work towards personal and career aspirations, where we check off each step as we progress. When we feel empowered, we think better, we are more creative, and better at problem solving. Microsoft has taken the work-life balance element seriously too – they have even partnered with Headspace to provide wellbeing information on its daily email. Sometimes, that reminder to take care of ourselves is every bit as important as the prompt to perform a work task – especially when we are working without the physical proximity of a supportive team to check in. Viva doesn’t try to take the place of that human interaction, more to support and enhance what is there, and to make us feel that even though we can’t see them, our team is all around us, sharing our challenges and our successes. As a team, we achieve more.