The “Employee Experience” starts from the moment a new hire is on-boarded into a company to the day they leave and that can be an emotional rollercoaster. We can now make that a much improved experience as …
Viva in Spanish and French roughly means to enjoy a long life!
Microsoft Viva, a reimagining of tried and tested old features in Outlook, SharePoint and Yammer. With new AI and powerful analytics that are easier to access and manage. To spark better employee engagement, improve hybrid work productivity, nurture personal development and enable empathetic leadership.
The format of my 11 stories over the past 21 days has been bite sized chunks (advent calendar windows) to make it easy to consume. Viva is a veritable employee feast! In summary …
Viva Insights is the most popular module at this time. Already freely available in Workplace Analytics just rebranded Personal Insights. With strict privacy protection so only the individual can see their own data pulled from their own Outlook calendar and emails in modern activity reports.
To use Managers Insights that give a temperature check of how a team is performing and perhaps feeling, with better working tips, you need to up your licence, and have more than 10 direct reports.
Viva Learning is ranked second in popularity at this time. Learning Management Systems (LMS) can be difficult to find, navigate, clunky to update with additional costs to host. Viva Learning is far easier to access as built on SharePoint with a robust backend cloud framework using Lists to manage links to a multitude of sources. And with quick links to share on Teams.
If you want an easy to build out-the-box intranet that looks as good as you see on the internet, then Viva Connections is for you! Basically Modern SharePoint and Yammer on the desktop, reached through the lens of Teams, with a simple to use app from a corporate or personal device. Perfect for F1 or F3 Front Line Workers.
It’s time to cut the Slack, disconnect disruptive tools like WhatsApp!
I eagerly await the first previews of the brand new Viva Topics feature as part of the new employee experience. Touted as very good for onboarding new hires to help them find new information in the flow of their work, hovering over specialist unusual words. Also capturing priceless tacit knowledge from trusted information workers heads as they exit a business after a long tenure – turning it into discoverable explicit knowledge in documents.
And if these fantastic four big featured modules are not enough to get our heads round we have a fifth module to be released towards the end of 2022. Ally.io – the icing on the enterprise cake that I imagine embedded in all the modules using Topics as filtered tags to performance content; aligning personal objectives with company key results, sharing real time growth and company performance updates.
To get an appreciation of what this ALL means I chatted with a Realist on what works right now and the licencing implications from F1 to E5.
I also shared my average day, (with some poetic licence) on how I use Teams and Viva.
So, its time to wrap up my calendar and go on holiday with an immense satisfaction, as encouraged by lovely new CloudWay colleagues, generous MVP mentors with a cracking sense of humour, I put on a Growth Mindset Hat and tried to learn something new. I have a shiny new blog site with 12 blogs created in just 21 days, and at least 4 story ideas to kick-off 2022 >>big grin<<
I end my Viva visions at this point with a round-up over the past 5 years on my insights and experience with adoption and change management based on the ADKAR framework.
It’s all very well IT switching all this fantastic stuff on but you need people with relevant up to date content and good digital literacy skills to bring it to life; with leaders who demonstrate empathy and encourage digital wellbeing in the new hybrid workplace. It’s here to stay whether we like it or not.
Follow my Viva visions
08 Dec: M365 UK User Group: A Viva Visionary chats with a Viva Realist (Sara Fennah, MVP)
08 Dec: Yammer Community Festival: Looking forward to catching up with old and new Yammer fans and hearing great success stories
10 Jun: Scottish Summit: MVP’s – The Viva Explorers – Kevin McDonnell, Zoe Wilson, Ana Ines, Sara Fennah, Viva Visionary and more!
MVP, Lesley Crook is a Viva Visionary 
Leave a Reply