12 Ways Microsoft Viva Fosters Productivity and Engagement in Remote Teams

Working from home can leave many people feeling disconnected from their teams. Technology can never truly replicate the in-person work environment, but it can make remote work less isolating. Microsoft Viva has emerged as a key player in the push for connectivity, by seamlessly integrating within Teams. Microsoft Viva was designed to keep employees connected, support productivity and wellbeing, organize company information, and encourage individual growth. 

Learn How Microsoft Viva Can Help Your Team:

What Is Microsoft Viva? 

Stated simply, Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform. This digital platform helps organizations create a thriving culture by engaging employees and supporting their best work. Within Microsoft Viva, there are multiple areas that employees can use to stay organized and engaged. Some of these include: 

• Culture and Communications - Within this area of Viva, employees are encouraged to make meaningful connections across your organization. Viva allows employees to discover and join relevant communities, enabling them to contribute ideas and share feedback about certain topics. These groups can be a springboard for company-wide initiatives, upcoming projects, and business news or updates. 

• Productivity and Wellbeing - Viva delivers personal insights to empower individuals to build better work habits, achieve balance, and improve business outcomes. For example, employees can see how much time per week they spend on specific tasks, or how often their workflow is interrupted. This visibility can help users create rhythms throughout their workday, and schedule quiet time when they need to focus. These insights also provide data-driven visibility on how work patterns affect the wellbeing, results, and productivity of workers. The advanced data tools are able to perform a deep analysis of the insights, address challenges, and respond to change within the business itself.  

• Knowledge and Expertise - As content continues to be pushed out in your business, use AI to identify, process, and organize it into accessible posts through Viva. The information can be grouped into topic pages, which are easy for employees to access, share, and engage with. Rather than sending out multiple email updates, organize company news with these centralized pages. 

• Skills and Growth - Encourage your employees to learn every day by letting people discover, share, and engage with tools in Microsoft 365. Viva can serve as a central hub for shared tools, upcoming education and betterment activities, and learning libraries. Empowering employees to organize, recommend, and track learning drives business results. 

Driving Employee Engagement 

Gallup found that only 15% of the global workforce feels engaged at work, underscoring the importance of meaningful connection with your remote workforce. Managers can use Viva to drive employee engagement by connecting with their employees: 

• Connection - Encourage meaningful connections by giving employees the means to discover relevant communities and tools. There are multiple ways to do this such as creating a personalized landing page experience, targeting the right news to the right employees, giving employees a dashboard of critical resources and applications, or hosting company-wide events to spark engagement and awareness. 

• Inclusion - Foster a culture of inclusion at your organization by empowering employees to contribute ideas and feedback. You can do this by encouraging open sharing of questions, experiences, and updates across the organization, fostering communities of practice to bridge organizational silos, brainstorming, collecting feedback, and working together on common goals, and nurturing communities based on shared interests. 

• Inspiration - Having employees discover relevant communities, communications and tools can spark meaningful connections. Encourage inspiration by giving employees tools and platforms to communicate about projects to encourage good communication, sharing values and visions that drive alignment such as news, blogs, and executive videos through SharePoint, and making time to connect with new hires to increase retention and productivity with a digital onboarding experience. 

Viva Insights 

Insights allow your management team to assess how departments are performing, and ensure that proper measures and strategies are rooted in real world data. Viva offers two types of insights:

• Manager Insights - These insights provide needed visibility into work patterns that can lead to burnout and stress. Some patterns to watch out for are regular after-hour work, meeting overload, or little focus time. If you notice any of these factors in your team, it may be worth checking in to help the employee find a balance between wellbeing and productivity. Viva also has flexible programs available designed to help teams collaborate effectively, make time for uninterrupted work, and disconnection at the end of the day. 

• Personal Insights - Employees receive individual insights that are visible only to them. The goal of these insights are to help employees understand how they work and to assist them in building healthy work habits. Through personal insights, employees can block off periods of time for uninterrupted work. Viva recently added a reflection feature that helps employees recognize how they're feeling and identify patterns over time. Additionally, you can send badges to praise to express appreciation for your colleagues. 

Mindfulness with Viva

Microsoft Viva wants employees to have a sense of ease when working from home and does its best to promote mindfulness. Viva allows employees to tap into moments of mindfulness at any point during the day with interactive meditative modules. Additionally, people can start their days with key insights and prompts. Example insights include opportunities to connect with other employees, meetings to prep for, and commitments to follow up on, which are all delivered via daily email briefings from Cortana. 

Queries in Viva

There are two type of queries within Microsoft Viva: person and meeting queries. These queries allow people to gain inside metrics on what works best for the business:

• Person Queries - The person queries allows employees to analyze data from the person's point of view. Some examples of this include how specific groups spend their time or how one part of collaboration influences workplace behaviors. You can aggregate the data by attribute such as team, location or level to compare and contrast the behaviors of groups within your organization. Options for metrics can include criteria related to work activities such as how many people were invited to a meeting, when emails were sent, how many people were included on an email, time and day of a meeting, etc. 
  
  
• Meeting Queries - The meeting queries analyze data from the meetings point of view. Examples of this include gathering analytics from the duration of the meeting, subject line, or if the meeting is reoccurring. You can use these metrics to understand the relationship between different meeting attributes. Additional metrics to review are the meeting ID, if it's recurring, total number of emails sent during the meeting, etc.
  
  

Get the most out of the productivity platforms that your teams use everyday. If you want to learn more about implementing Microsoft Viva within your organization, contact us at iCorps for a free IT consultation.