Microsoft has unveiled an employee-experience platform, Viva, which the vendor calls a digital “gateway” for employees to access relevant news, learning, analytics and knowledge within their organisation.
Four Viva “modules” — Connections, Insights, Learning and Topics
— will become available in Teams on a staggered basis over the next few months,
Microsoft said, leveraging existing capabilities within the Microsoft 365
portfolio, including SharePoint and analytics tools.
The platform is also designed to provide managers and
leaders better insights into the well-being and performance of workers, the
company said.
Just as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications
connected accounting and finance to core business operations three decades ago,
businesses are now seeking similar alignment with employee facing systems,
Nadella said.
“We believe the same paradigm shift that happened with ERP
then will happen with EXP today,” he said. “People operations will no longer be
limited to HR, but will be integrated across every aspect of the business in
order to improve the overall health and resilience of the organization.
“Every organisation will require a unified employee
experience, from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and
growth," Nadella said. "These can no longer be siloed functions.”
The launch of Viva comes as an enterprise focus remote
workers continues to grow, particularly during the pandemic and rise of
distributed workforces. Microsoft argues that the “fragmented” market for
employee experience tools, which includes from employee training to benefits,
analytics and other wellness issues, is already worth a staggering $300 billion
globally.
“But too often, these technologies are fragmented, hard to
find and disruptive to the flow of work,” Jared Spataro, corporate vice
president for Microsoft 365, said in a blog post.
“Without a doubt, the pandemic has [placed a] bigger focus
on employee experience because of the conditions many had to adapt to,” said
Carolina Milanesi, a principal analyst at Creative Strategies. “This, in turn,
has highlighted the gaps many organisations had when it comes to support,
train[ing] and manage talent.
"People realised that the way they worked does not
reflect the way we should be working. This, coupled with higher visibility
given to working conditions, societal issues and up-skilling creates a very
good moment for Microsoft to deliver an holistic platform.”
Microsoft’s existing strengths around workplace productivity
— and the boom in Teams use, which now has 115 million daily active users — put
the vendor in a good position to introduce employee experience capabilities,
said David Johnson, a principal analyst at Forrester.
“Microsoft understands how important technology is in
people’s daily working lives, that it is a huge part of their overall employee
experience,” said Johnson. “Drawing awareness to this and creating solutions to
help companies create a better experience for their employees is a good move.”
Milanesi also noted that Microsoft has a wider reach than
most companies focused on employee experience.
“The biggest advantage that Microsoft has is that it builds
on solutions that are already present in many organisations like Yammer and
leans into a strong cloud- and AI-enabled platform. Other solutions are more
limited in scope and do not necessarily get the advantage of plugging into as
many resources and will be judged on a much narrower return, which might bring
more scrutiny to their cost.”
For Microsoft 365 customers, the launch of Viva could allow
IT to play a more active role in managing and coordinating employee experience
for their organisation.
“Unless we work in HR, most of us don't use HRIS [HR
information system] software every single day; we use Microsoft or other
productivity software to get our jobs done," said Johnson. "What [the
Viva launch] is doing is to make the CIO's role in employee experience much
more prominent, something that we've been predicting for several years.
“By integrating capabilities into Teams it puts them more in
the flow of people's work and most importantly, it raises awareness.”
The shift to remote work has affected employees' sense of
community and belonging within their organization, especially for new hires,
with 60 per cent of workers feeling disconnected since going remote, according
to Microsoft research.
Viva Connections is a personalised digital workplace built
on SharePoint. From here, employees can access a range of content, including
internal company news, policies and benefits, and interact with various groups
and communities, thanks to integration with Microsoft apps including Yammer,
SharePoint and Stream.
Each employee gets a personalised news feed, which internal
communications teams can use to highlight important information — it's accessed
in the dashboard that serves as the Viva homepage. The Connections app can be
customised with corporate branding and curated content to target groups of
employees with focused information and tools.
Connections is slated to be available on Teams desktop in
the first half of 2021, with the mobile app following in the summer.
Viva Insights
An analytics tools, Viva Insights, is aimed at both
individual employees and managers and can track productivity and well-being at
a personal and business-wide level.
Viva Insights, which replaces two existing Microsoft 365 tools
— MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics — will offer an overview of productivity
levels, said Microsoft. The goal is to ensure employee well-being and avoid
burnout by, for example, detecting when an employee has too many meetings and
not enough focus time.
Additional features such as virtual commutes and integration
with the Headspace meditation and mindfulness app will be available in the
“coming months,” along with an integration with Viva Learning.
In addition to tapping into data from Microsoft’s own
products such as Teams and Outlook, Viva Insights will incorporate data from
third-party applications, including video tools like Zoom and HR platforms from
Workday and SAP SuccessFactors.
Microsoft has drawn criticism for its Productivity Score
tool in recent months, which can allow managers to monitor individual
productivity levels. The company said that personal data derived from Viva
Insights is only be viewable by the individual employee, while higher-level
info is accessible by business leaders and managers only after being aggregated
and anonymised, with privacy set by default.
Viva Insights can be downloaded for Teams today, with
personal insights available for Microsoft Exchange Online users in public
preview, and manager insights available to existing Workplace Analytics
customers.
Viva Learning
The Viva Learning app for Teams, now in private preview, is
a central repository for learning materials. The aim is to help employees
easily hunt down information needed to do their job, from training videos to
PowerPoint presentations.
Teams users can search and share learning content in chat
and create their own “tab” within the collaboration platform to organise their
content.
Learning content is available from a range of sources, from
Microsoft Learn and LinkedIn Learning to third-party providers such as Coursera
and PluralSight. Viva Learning will also integrate with learning management
systems from Cornerstone OnDemand, SAP SuccessFactors and others.
Viva Learning is currently being piloted with select
Microsoft customers with a general release pegged for “later this year.”
Viva Topics
Finally, Viva Topics is a knowledge management platform that
helps an employee access the information that relates to their job role.
Topics uses AI to collect content across an organization
into topic areas such as projects, products, or customers, collating
information from within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem as well as third-party
providers such as Salesforce and ServiceNow. These topic pages are
automatically collated by Microsoft’s AI, with an organization’s “experts” able
to add and edit the wiki-style pages.
Topic “cards” are also available within Microsoft 365 apps,
highlighting topics when they appear in certain messages or other content
within apps, providing quick context around unfamiliar acronyms or terms, for
example.
Topics are arranged around a “topic center” which will
eventually be viewable from Teams and SharePoint, allowing workers to discover
content recommended to them based on topics they follow, and personalised by
the Microsoft Graph.
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