Microsoft unveils new Employee Experience Platform — Microsoft Viva — to help people thrive at work

Company reimagines fragmented $300 billion market to bring tools for employee communications, wellbeing, learning and knowledge discovery into the flow of work

SINGAPORE
– Media OutReach – 5 February 2021 – 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. “Every
organization will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and
collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together
everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single,
integrated experience directly in Teams.”

 

The announcement comes as economic and social
trends are driving durable changes in workforce engagement. Amid the shift to
an increasingly distributed and digital work environment, demand has grown for
solutions that support corporate culture, knowledge discovery, on-the-job
learning and employee wellbeing. Analysts size the nascent Employee Experience
Platforms (EXP) category at $300 billion in annual spend. It spans what is
today a fragmented market of services, infrastructure and hundreds of tools,
many that go undiscovered and underutilized by employees at the companies that
have invested in them.

 

“As the world of work changes, the next
horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and
wellbeing so organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity,”
said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. “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. Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organization level,
  as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. The
  insights are aggregated and deidentified by default to maintain personal
  privacy. 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. In addition to using data and signals from Microsoft apps, customers
  will also be able to incorporate data from third-party services like Zoom,
  Slack, Workday and SAP SuccessFactors. 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.
  Clicking on a card opens a topic page with related documents, conversations,
  videos and people. 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. “Viva will
enable companies to integrate their fragmented workplace tools and provide them
in the flow of work.”

 

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.