What Is Microsoft Viva?

Within the products and business solutions that Microsoft has been incorporating into its catalogue, the tools to facilitate productivity and coordination between employees have taken a leading role in improving the performance and organization of workers. Today we start a series of articles in which we will break down the characteristics of Microsoft VIVA, an employee experience platform (EXP in its acronym in English); a business software that focuses on meeting the daily needs of employees in the new work environment.

Improving employee engagement, learning and well-being are some of the goals set by a digital leader when using this type of software solution. In addition, Microsoft VIVA provides recommendations based on analyzing each person’s work style to improve their productivity.

The hybrid working model and its software solutions

Employee experience platforms are a new category of technology solutions, providing the resources and support people need to succeed and thrive, enabling them to perform better in the new work environment.

But why and what for? Due to our current way of working in a hybrid way, office, travel, and home. This has been aggravated by the pandemic that we have had to live through. We have lost many hallway cafes where we talked to each other and solved problems and likewise where you obtained information about the company.

Given this, Microsoft has created this platform where the employee is once again the centre of the organization and in which he will feel involved, informed, and cared for by his organization.

To solve all this, the Microsoft VIVA platform has 4 pillars of action: VIVA INSIGHTS, VIVA TOPICS, VIVA CONNECTIONS, and VIVA LEARNING.

Live Insights

VIVA INSIGHTS, also known as “VIVA Ideas,” offers personalized and practical information to workers that help them reserve time for breaks, breaks, have moments of concentration, time to dedicate to their training, and strengthen their connection with their mates. Additionally, team leaders and managers can view trends at the workgroup and organization level—experiences and personal data are visible only to each employee—and get recommendations for balancing productivity and well-being. Viva Insights can help team members set limits on their calendars and set daily priorities to focus on what matters most. The information is generated from aggregated and de-identified data to maintain personal privacy. These are its main characteristics.

• Viva Ideas Elements: As a user, learn about how Viva Ideas provides you with information and how you can use them to make good decisions.
• MyAnalytics panel: Provides information on what we have invested our time in during the last month. With this productivity data about work patterns, helpful suggestions for improvement, and information about your network, top contributors, and collaboration activities… we can spot so-called “time thieves” and take action against them.
• Viva Ideas Outlook Add-in: The Ideas for Outlook add-in presents activity cards based on our recent work experience with options to respond or follow up based on our activity, which means that it learns as we work and is, therefore, suits us.
• Summaries: A weekly summary of the highlights of the previous week.
• Online Suggestions in Outlook: Contextual, data-driven recommendations to improve work patterns follow the same technology that personalizes with use and adapts to us.
• Focus Plan: Helps schedule up to two hours of uninterrupted time on the calendar to focus on priority work.
• Delay delivery schedule: When composing an email in Outlook, delay delivery suggests scheduling email deliveries that align with recipients’ business hours in their respective time zones. The delay helps minimize interruptions to recipients outside of your business hours.

Live Topics

Viva Topics, also called Viva Themes, tries to solve the difficulties of locating an expert in a specific topic within the company, deciphering the company’s acronyms, or finding the necessary content to carry out a particular task. Task, especially when new to the organization or working remotely.

In fact, according to Microsoft research, people spend the equivalent of seven weeks a year searching for or redoing information. Viva Topics offers an experience that helps extract value and knowledge and makes employees better informed and connected with company experts.

This new Microsoft Employee Experience Platform module uses Artificial Intelligence technology, which helps analyze and extract value from a user’s Microsoft 365 data. It integrates with various third-party services of this type – like ServiceNow and Salesforce. Viva Topics automatically displays topic cards within conversations and documents across Microsoft 365 and Teams. In this way, clicking on a card opens a topic page with documents, discussions, videos, and people related to the topic you are working on.

The artificial intelligence in Viva Themes could take two weeks or more to index and display themes across Microsoft 365 after initial setup. Viva Themes includes theme cards, theme pages, and theme centre features:

Topic Cards provide a quick snapshot of knowledge and content related to a specific project or topic. Topic cards automatically appear when a topic is detected, providing descriptions, experts, resources, and additional information.

Hover over a topic when Viva Themes identifies a topic to view the topic card; written by AI, it supports more excellent selection by experts. Topics make it easy to find people based on skills, projects, and experience. When you search for a topic, you’ll see a list of people who have added the topic to their profile.

Topics are displayed on people cards in Microsoft 365, which helps identify who works on what within your organization based on existing access and permissions.

Topic pages can be configured in the Topic Center to get a personalized view of relevant knowledge in the organization, including pertinent current topics and open questions. Android users can more easily discover content, experience, and issues related to their work or interests.

The Topic Center provides more web components to integrate knowledge and learn from across the organization. These custom theme hubs are built-in and seamlessly incorporated into your SharePoint.

Also Read: What Is Microsoft Dynamics And What Is It For?