Increase productivity and wellbeing with Microsoft Viva Insights

Microsoft Viva Insights is one of the four components that Microsoft released as part of the Microsoft Viva platform.

Workers are not machines. This might seem an obvious statement, yet for a long-time business technology has largely ignored this fact. Whether it’s your email, CRM or even a spreadsheet, IT tools are designed with an exclusive focus on productivity. They’re about helping people do work as efficiently as possible.

Of course, helping people do tasks productively is a good thing. But the problem is that most business IT platforms allow you to keep on working as long as you possibly can. However, the fact is that human beings need to stop and sleep sometimes! Especially in the era of remote working where it is easier than ever for people to stay connected to their enterprise productivity platforms, there is a real risk of people burning out.

Viva Insights is therefore designed to provide both individuals and organizations with an idea of how people are doing at work. It comes with a variety of features that help monitor wellbeing in different ways, and then offer recommendations to improve it.

Viva Insights will work at two levels - for the individual and for the management team. Let's look at each of these in more detail.

1. Viva insights for individuals

When you turn Viva Insights on, individual employees will begin to notice a number of features which aim to enhance their personal wellbeing. These include:

·     Focus time: Viva Insights will allow the individual to block out focus time in their diary. They will not be disturbed by alerts and notifications, and the time will be blocked out in their calendar too - so they cannot be invited to meetings. Instead, they can use those hours for quality thinking and creativity.

·     Personal insights: Viva will begin to learn about the individual and help them understand their own workday better. It will use artificial intelligence to provide a picture of how they use their time - in terms of things like writing emails, hours spent on tasks or time in meetings. This can help them understand how they are managing their own days, and perhaps make decisions about what they want to change.

·      Recommendations: Viva Insights will also begin to make personal recommendations to the individual to support their productivity. For example, it might notice you are working on one specific project, and therefore provide suggestions for documents you could read around this topic.

·     Wellbeing focus: Microsoft have built in a number of features to encourage employee wellbeing. This includes things like quick daily surveys about the person’s mood, as well as providing access to mindfulness meditation apps. Viva Insights also includes a daily ‘wrap up’ feature that helps users visualize what they’ve achieved each day, mentally prepare for meetings they have tomorrow and mindfully disconnect from the office.

On the individual level, Viva Insights is about helping workers help themselves. Features are designed to enhance wellbeing and, in the long run, give them greater satisfaction in their jobs.

This is a very forward-thinking innovation from Microsoft. In the past employee wellbeing was almost exclusively the domain of HR teams and management. But with Viva Insights, Microsoft has effectively started to ‘bake’ wellbeing concepts right into productivity software. This will make employee wellbeing initiatives become more pervasive and lead to happier, healthier teams. 

2. Viva Insights for management

For managers, Viva Insights will also help to provide information about how people are doing at the organizational level. Features include:

·     Team cohesion: With Viva Insights, managers will be able to monitor team cohesion by viewing collaboration and interconnection metrics. Insights can track how frequently members of a team are speaking with one another, which can help you get a better idea of the level of collaboration across the organization.

·      Wellbeing factors: Viva Insights is also able to aggregate individual wellbeing metrics and expand this up to the organizational level. Managers will, for example, be able to see how many employees are working after hours. This tells you if people are at risk of burning out.

·      Identify risk factors: Viva Insights also helps to identify possible risks and provide recommendations on how you can manage teams better. For example, if many of your employees are spending a significant proportion of their time in large, lengthy meetings, this could dampen overall productivity. You might use this insight to consider alternative ways of running meetings.

For management teams, Viva Insights is an interesting concept which will help boost your efforts to improve employee wellbeing. Right now, Insights for management is only really applicable in large organizations since large amounts of activity and data are needed to train the underlying AI. Over time, it could become more applicable in smaller businesses too.

Viva Insights is a truly groundbreaking way of thinking about business productivity technology. By building wellbeing features directly into the apps and tools people use every day, Microsoft is making it more likely that employees will remain engaged, happy, and healthy. That’s a truly bold and innovative strategy, and one which will surely benefit the organizations that use Microsoft Viva. 

Prometix as a Microsoft Gold certified partner and certified O365 consultants (Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne & Perth), we have extensive experience in delivering Microsoft 365 based solutions. If you need more information or a demo on Microsoft Viva platform then please contact us from enquiries@prometix.com.au.