Microsoft Viva is Teams’ attempt to replace your company’s intranet
Microsoft is positioning Microsoft Viva as the digital office for those who can’t go to the office – via Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft has announced Viva, a new ‘employee experience platform’ that integrates with Microsoft Teams. If your company uses Teams, chances are that you’ll see Viva, along with some of its more familiar features like Topics and Insights, soon.
The tech giant already uses Teams as a launchpad for apps like Word and
PowerPoint, plus shared resources on OneDrive and SharePoint. Inside Viva are features that Microsoft is calling Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics. Topics is available today; Insights is available in preview, and Insights in private preview.
Microsoft designed Connections for employee interactions, and Topics to
allow employees to seek out answers from their colleagues. If they can’t help, Learning is designed to provide company-designed and external online courses and videos to help out. Finally, there’s Insights – the management tool that keeps track of what’s working and what isn’t, a respin of the controversial Productivity Score tool. We’ll describe them in more detail below.
Viva is being positioned as a tool that takes the pandemic, and its changes in the workplace, head on. Pre-pandemic, the tech giant had already said that online collaboration was the next step in the evolution of individual employees working on individual documents like Word and PowerPoint. It then tweaked its messaging once the pandemic made remote work a reality. Now, Microsoft is trying to establish Viva as a sort of online community hub – a place for new employees to learn about the company, its policies, and who their co-workers are and what they know about, much like the intranets some companies already maintain.
Microsoft sees Viva as the online manifestation of an office employees can’t physically visit right now. “We need to stop thinking of work as a place, and start thinking about how to maintain culture, connect employees and harness human ingenuity in a hybrid world,”
Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, said during a prerecorded briefing video for reporters.
WHAT’S INSIDE MICROSOFT VIVA?
Viva’s components each play a distinct role, which we’ll describe here:
Viva Connections
Microsoft sees Viva Connections as the gateway to your entire Viva digital workplace, with links to town halls, company policies, and more. It also says that Viva Connections will leverage Yammer to provide a personalized feed of information you’ll need.
Microsoft has tried to make Teams as ‘sticky’ as it can be, bundling more and more around it in a bid to make it a critical part of the workplace. (In the autumn, Teams’ active daily users climbed to 115 million, the firm revealed.) Encouraging users to start their day with Viva is part of that.
Viva Insights
Viva Insights has three different views. Employees will see a dashboard that encourages them to take time and schedule breaks, as well as meeting-free blocks for ‘focused learning’. Managers will have their own dashboard, as will company executives. It’s the latter that
may worry some, as it appears Microsoft is still aggregating employee work habits.
The tech giant appears to have also taken pains to avoid the bad taste its Productivity Score left in some mouths. Though Productivity Score – and, by extension, Insights – was designed to monitor how effectively employees were using Microsoft’s tools, stressed-out employees worried that the tool could be used to track them individually. Still, example screenshots of the Microsoft Viva tool still show, in aggregate, how many workers are putting in more than an eight-hour workday – something that could be used as a reminder to manage work/life balance... or encouragement that workers needed to work more. Still, Microsoft took pains to note that it doesn’t monitor specific workers. “Microsoft Viva uses aggregation, de-identification and
differential privacy,” according to Microsoft, in describing Viva Insights. “This means personal insights are visible only to the employee, while insights for managers and leaders are aggregated and de-identified by default to protect individual privacy.”
Viva Learning
Microsoft said research shows that workers will stay with a company longer if it furthers their own internal development. Viva Learning is the portal to do just that.
Viva Learning, however, also appears to be an easy way for Microsoft or its partners to resell services like online coursework, especially with its LinkedIn subsidiary. Microsoft will make available ‘micro-courses’ and other classes from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, trainings from leading content providers like Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX, plus your own company’s online tutorials and other information.
Viva Topics
It’s probably no surprise that Topics is rolling out today – we’ve seen Microsoft try to connect employees to one another all the way back to 2015’s Delve, with similar features added to Outlook.
Topics is designed to allow an organization to cut through the
corporate jargon. If there’s an unfamiliar acronym or special project that might not be familiar to an employee, Topics is designed to provide a topic card that appears when an employee hovers their cursor over it, and then links to a specific topic page when they click for more information. Microsoft said that Topics is designed for companies to link to their own data, but also connect to partners.
The tech giant hasn’t stopped adding new features to Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Viva appears poised to also receive more content in the future, too. For a multi-billion-dollar company, Microsoft has pivoted hard to online collaboration, and its business customers will be along for the ride.