10 February, 2021; Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Microsoft has announced the launch of Microsoft Viva, the first employee experience platform that brings 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.
“We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience”, said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Every organisation will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams”.
The announcement comes as economic and social trends are driving durable changes in workforce engagement. Amid the shift to an increasingly distributed and digital work environment, demand has grown for solutions that support corporate culture, knowledge discovery, on-the-job learning and employee wellbeing. Analysts size the nascent Employee Experience Platforms category at $300 billion in annual spend. It spans what is today a fragmented market of services, infrastructure, and hundreds of tools, many that go undiscovered and under-utilised by employees at the companies that have invested in them.
Microsoft Viva builds on the power of 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. Initial set of modules in Viva include:
- Viva Connections provides a personalised gateway to your digital workplace where 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 in Microsoft Teams.
- Viva Insights gives individuals, managers and leaders personalised and actionable insights that help everyone in an organisation thrive. Personal experiences and insights, visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks, focused work and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with their colleagues. Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organisation level, as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. The insights are aggregated and deidentified by default to maintain personal privacy.
- Viva Learning makes training and professional development opportunities more discoverable and accessible in the flow of work. It aggregates all the learning resources available to an organisation in one place, including content from LinkedIn Learning; Microsoft Learn; third-party providers including Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX; as well as an organisation’s own content library. From traditional learning courses to microlearning content, users can discover, share, assign and track a wide variety of learning as a natural part of the workday.
- Viva Topics delivers a knowledge discovery experience that helps people connect to information and experts across the company. Using AI to reason over a customer’s Microsoft 365 data, and with the ability to integrate knowledge from a variety of third-party services such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, Viva Topics automatically surfaces topic cards within conversations and documents across Microsoft 365 and Teams.
