All you need to know about Microsoft Viva

What is Microsoft Viva?
Microsoft describes Microsoft Viva as "the first employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work. Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow and thrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity and collaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams."

Microsoft Viva builds on the power of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning and Knowledge — in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best. 

4 Main Pillars + Ally.io (coming soon)

Pillar 1: Microsoft Viva Connections
Viva Connections is a framework through which you can deliver your intranet within Microsoft Teams. Effectively this is the "Home App" in Teams.

Employees can access internal communications and company resources like policies and benefits and participate in communities like employee resource groups, all from a single customisable app within Microsoft Teams. The emphasis here is on "customisable" as it will obviously still require you to deliver and communicate content effectively through an experience that aligns with purpose, objectives and culture of your organisation.

The key is though that today more and more employees are using Microsoft Teams as their primary place to communicate and collaborate with colleagues. Viva Connections is a way of delivering content even if employees don't log into SharePoint daily.

How much does Viva Connections cost? 

Well, there is further good news here. Viva Connections is free! Viva Connections is available to all Microsoft 365 customers as part of any existing Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online license. If a user has access to SharePoint Online, then Viva Connections will be accessible at no additional costs.

Why use Microsoft Viva Connections?

• Get the most from your SharePoint intranet. If people are spending more time in Teams, it might mean they could miss important company news or updates. By bringing the content from your SharePoint intranet into Viva Connections, you create a rich, personalised employee experience.
• Employee Engagement. By bringing company communications and news into Teams, Microsoft is aiming to address engagement challenges.
• More mobile friendly. No matter what your role is in the company - a frontline worker or an information worker - Microsoft Viva Connections will offer a streamlined experience for tackling important tasks from your mobile.

Pillar 2: Microsoft Viva Topics

Viva Topics helps to address a key business issue in many companies — providing the information to users when they need it. For example, new employees need to learn a lot of new information quickly, and encounter terms they know nothing about when reading through company information. To learn more, the user might need to step away from what they are doing and spend valuable time searching for details, such as information about what the term is, who in the organization is a subject matter expert, and maybe sites and documents that are related to the term.

Viva Topics uses AI to automatically search for and identify topics in your organization. It compiles information about them, such as a short description, people working on the topic, and sites, files, and pages that are related to it. A knowledge manager or contributor can choose to update the topic information as needed. The topics are available to your users, which means that for every instance of the topic that appears in a modern SharePoint site in news and pages, the text will be highlighted. Users can choose to select the topic to learn more about it through the topic details. Topics can also be found in SharePoint Search.

Key features of Microsoft Viva Topics 

• Automatically identify topics. Recognise common topics across content and conversations, organise information, and generate topic pages.
• Find related topics. Discover and display complementary topics and expertise from across sources.
• Automatically build topic pages. Create topic pages and topic cards using suggested definitions, related content, relevant conversations, and expertise.
• Curate topics. Cultivate knowledge using your experts and AI to refine topic pages.
• Topic highlights. Show topic highlights and display Topic Cards in any Microsoft 365 app.
• Find topics anywhere. Give people the knowledge they need anytime, anywhere by using Search to discover topics.

Pillar 3: Microsoft Viva Learning

Microsoft Viva Learning empowers people to better themselves with employee training—naturally and without disruption. it encourages a culture of growth that helps people reach their potential.

Microsoft Viva Learning is a personalised learning app within Microsoft Teams that can be fully integrated with an existing Learning Management Systems.

A user will open Microsoft Viva Learning inside Teams and see a selection of courses curated (in other words, automatically selected and organised courses based on the user’s profile and learning history) for them from a range of different providers. Viva Learning can be compared to Spotify in that it is focused on self-discovery and recommendations based on the individual’s profile and learning history.

Microsoft has announced integration with a variety of training content providers and learning management system (LMS) companies.

Content that will be immediately available comes from a variety of sources including:

• Your company’s own learning resources
• Microsoft Learning
• LinkedIn Learning
• Skillsoft
• Coursera
• Pluralsight
• edX

Pillar 4: Microsoft Viva Insights

Encourage personal wellbeing and build organisational resilience with insights and actions in the apps people use every day.

Microsoft Viva Insights provides:

Insights for business leaders

Address critical questions about resilience and work culture, and build better work habits with insights and recommendations fuelled by data and research.

Insights for managers

Understand patterns that lead to burnout and stress like collaboration overload and too little focus time.

As a Microsoft Gold partner and certified Viva consultants in Sydney, Canberra & Melbourne. We have extensive experience in delivering employee engagement solutions. For more information or a Microsoft Viva demo, please contact us from enquiries@prometix.com.au