The original prose for this blog came from my effort and enthusiasm on writing a chapter for a book on the Viva Suite with three other MVPs. Just as we completed the first draft Copilot landed and knocked out half the Viva Suite with even more amazing features! So I put this to bed but now resurrect it as Viva Engage is still alive and kicking. If you have or are considering buying Copilot Licenses then Viva Engage is your best friend for user adoption for these good reasons:
+Viva Engage seeded features has a ready-made, branded Copilot User Adoption Community!
+This dynamically links to your Copilot Licenses and in seconds you can invite all the users with these sought after licences to this community to share their aha moments! See: Expand your Copilot community.
+Easy to identify your Copilot Community “Experts” with a built-in Champion setting
+On average, those using the Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage see a 35% higher adoption rate than those without. See research.
Here you can find more details on setting this up and deeper insights on Copilot features in Viva Engage, an excellent place for Change Management.
Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption community in Viva Engage | Microsoft Learn
Introducing Community Experts in Viva Engage | Microsoft Community Hub
Viva Engage. Seeded Vs Premium Features
This overview aims to explain the rich employee engagement features to nurture a positive work culture.
Microsoft research tells us that if a new hire is active on Viva Engage within 90 days in terms of reacting to posts and discussions (i.e., responding, liking/reacting), the chance of them being in the organization two years later rises from baseline of 44% to 66%. If the new joiner contributes more deeply (i.e., writes posts themselves), the chance of retention after two years rises from 44% to 77%. Even “viewing” company discussions on Viva Engage has a positive impact, even if there is no contribution. Remember, Viva Engage was Yammer and has been around for over ten years, so this looks at significant data with insights that span:
- Increased productivity: Engaged employees are more productive employees. They’re more likely to go above and beyond in their work, which leads to better results for the company.
- Improved customer satisfaction: Engaged employees are more likely to provide excellent customer service. This leads to happier customers and repeat business.
- Lower turnover: Engaged employees are likelier to stay in their jobs, which saves the company money on recruiting and training costs.
- Higher profitability: All these factors combined lead to higher profits for the company.
A lot goes into employee retention (i.e., wage, manager, benefits); however, participation in an organization’s culture can generate these excellent retention results—even the most passive viewing of content yields better results than employees doing nothing. It has also been noted that Leader interactions positively impact employee engagement.
Let us not forget the simple human nature philosophy of “Working Out Loud.” Sharing your work with a view that someone might find it helpful, and others might help you improve it. Then multiply this with the power of serendipity and the occurrence and development of events by chance, happily or beneficially.
Viva Engage has all the features you would expect of a modern social media platform, including news feeds, profiles, and the ability to post images and videos. The app integrates these experiences into Microsoft Teams and introduces new features, including storylines and stories. The scale of Viva Engage is vast, and you can be a member of 7,000 communities. However, Microsoft recommends that the users be members of 200 or fewer communities, or the performance is impacted.
Viva Engage premium features require a Microsoft Viva suite license. Premium features include crowdsourced knowledge via questions and answers and support for multiple company-branded employee destinations for news and announcements. You can access your Viva Engage activities from the left rail on Teams, neatly merged with the Teams Activities top left icon. The right rail comes to life with your Viva Engage Communities.
From left to right on your Teams header, you have the Viva Engage Home tab with a feed designed to help you keep up with what is happening in your organization. You can find out what your leadership team, colleagues, and people in other departments are talking about. The home feed is tailored to you and surfaces the most relevant stories, announcements, and conversations.
Next to the Home tab are Communities—a principal place for conversations, files, events, and updates. When you create a community, you automatically become an Owner of that community. Communities can be public or private. Ff you need a private space to collaborate, you probably need a Team (Channel).
Communities include – Q&A and Best Answers, a feature where you can ask and respond to questions in Viva Engage communities to share knowledge with other community members. Members can upvote answers to highlight them for others. An answer can be marked Best Answer by the member who posted the question or by a community admin. The marked Best Answer appears at the top of the conversation, under the original question.
Communities include – Ask Me Anything (AMA), previously known on Yammer as a Yamjam, a question-and-answer event session set for a dedicated hour if in a one-time zone or globally over 24 hours. Leaders and employees can connect to ask and answer questions. It is a two-way communication — the leaders create the space for conversation, and the employees drive the agenda through their questions. Anyone can participate in an AMA, which can be customized for the audience and needs of leaders or a big project event.
AMAs are question-and-answer-style event sessions that drive engagement through open conversations and are designed to drive engagement further and modernize the standard Town Hall events. It does this through upvoting, Q&A, and engaging discussion features with GIFs and images. It helps to continue conversations after an in-person event has ended for a set time.
AMAs can collect questions in advance, during, and after a meeting. There is no video component to AMAs in Viva Engage, so it is a purely text-based experience, but you can reference the AMA or screen share the page during the meeting.
Communities include – Live Events. Viva Engage has partnered with Teams to provide the best technology for running a live event. Microsoft Viva Engage uses Microsoft Teams to process and record videos for all live events that can be shared in a Community and Teams Channel.
Story and Storylines are like Facebook or TikTok, with a slightly different layout. Anyone in your organization can visit your Viva Engage Yammer Storyline and Follow you. And, when you follow someone, their posts and stories will be prioritized in your Feed and Carousels. You can also receive notifications when they post. Try not to overthink it. Most reading this has used Facebook or TikTok, and in most instances, no one explained how to post from your device to social media. However, here is a bit more context on what happens post-post.
The Story you create is visible to everyone in your organization. Followers will see your content higher in their feeds, and your posts and stories can be suggested to anyone based on numerous signals, including who follows you, whom you Follow, and who engages with your content. Like the subtleties of Facebook and TikTok.
You can upload a photo or video from your device; videos have a maximum time limit of 1,800 seconds. Content does not disappear from your Storyline. It remains until you might choose to delete it from a folder tucked away in your OneDrive. This is where a Viva Engage Story differs from a Facebook Story, as a Facebook Story disappears within 24 hours. I never create a Facebook Story as I want my posts to appear the following year on the same day in my Facebook Memories when my memory fades. Here are my tips to help you decide when to create a Viva Engage Story that is about You, or make a Community post.
When you want to regularly collaborate with people you “Work” with on project management, strategy, customers, or third parties and have associated meetings with documentation (uploaded to SharePoint or from your OneDrive), post in an appropriate Teams Channel, use @mention colleagues so they know you are trying to reach them, and use Announcements to magnify your message.
There is no right or wrong way here other than there are too many places to share content now. However, this is just a guide, and organizations must create an appropriate collaboration framework and taxonomy. This requires change management communication guidance to help employees decide which feature to use and when.
However, to succeed and continue engaging with the Viva themes, it would be best to make Viva a “sticky” enterprise-wide digital transformation. This means deepening user interest by delivering consistent content value and engaging users to visit regularly even if they are “lurking,” which means reading but not liking or commenting. Hopefully, over time, your Champions will enable a sticky culture shift.
I must mention Champions! A lot has been written about these priceless internal entrepreneurs within a large organization who take direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking, innovation, and new cultural movement. They are self-motivated, proactive, and action-oriented people who take the initiative to pursue an innovative product or service. They have a “Growth Mindset” and are willing to try something new even if it fails; it can be improved with the support of others by “Working Out Loud,” which I referred to in the AMA section.
Creating a Champion movement is at the heart of any successful adoption and change management program. The above image is a guide on the type of Viva Suite Champions you need to support adoption. Depending on their degree of intrapreneurship, you might find they span more than one of the themes. Empathetic leadership should recognise and reward them appropriately for going beyond their day jobs.
Read my story from about 2 years ago on nurturing Champion community Why Viva adoption is like pet adoption – MVP, Lesley Crook is a Viva Visionary
Sensai~teacher of AI 
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