Company reimagines fragmented $300 billion market to bring tools for employee communications, wellbeing, learning and knowledge discovery into the flow of work
Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced Microsoft Viva, 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.
“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. “Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders.”
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. Today, Microsoft is announcing an initial set of modules in Viva that will provide built-in capabilities, integrations from a strong and growing ecosystem of Viva partners, and platform extensibility that will enable customers to integrate their existing employee experience systems and tools with Viva to make them more accessible and discoverable to employees:
• Viva Connections provides a personalized 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 customizable app in Microsoft Teams. The Connections app for Teams will be available on desktop in public preview the first half of 2021 with a mobile app coming later this year.
• Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable insights that help everyone in an organization 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. In addition, a new dashboard allows organizations to combine employee feedback from LinkedIn’s Glint with collaboration data from Viva insights, enabling leaders to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms, and then quantify the impact of those changes over time. The Viva Insights app in Teams and the new Glint and Viva Insights dashboard are now available in public preview.
• 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 organization in one place, including content from LinkedIn Learning; Microsoft Learn; third-party providers including Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX; as well as an organization’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. The Viva Learning app is now available in private preview, and starting later this year Viva Learning will offer integrations with leading learning management systems, including Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba and SAP SuccessFactors.
• 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. Viva Topics is now generally available as an add-on to Microsoft 365 commercial plans.
“Microsoft Viva is a groundbreaking Employee Experience Platform, ushering in a new enterprise software category that focuses entirely on the daily needs of employees at work,” said Josh Bersin, research analyst and noted expert on employee experience technology.
A global network of services partners, including Accenture, Avanade, PwC, and EY will provide consulting and advisory services to help customers optimize their existing employee experience investments by bringing them together with Microsoft Viva.
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge.
