Microsoft today announced Microsoft Viva, a new employee experience platform designed to help people connect, focus, learn, and thrive at work. The platform aims to replace the old intranet sites and help businesses with remote working.
Microsoft Viva said is built on Microsoft 365 to bring together communications, knowledge, learning, and insights into an integrated employee experience that empowers people and teams to be their best‚ from anywhere.
“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,” Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, said in a statement.
“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 tech giant said Microsoft Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow, and thrive, with new experiences that integrate with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams’ productivity and collaboration capabilities.
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.
Microsoft Viva Connections
Viva Connections is your gateway to a modern employee experience. It is personalized and appears in the apps and devices your employees already use daily, such as Microsoft Teams. Viva Connections gives people a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and other resources.
It also offers a new way for leaders to shape culture and invite employees to build an inclusive workplace that helps everyone succeed, said Microsoft.
Microsoft Viva Insights
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, and strengthen relationships with their colleagues.
Microsoft Viva Learning
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; and an organization’s content library. From traditional learning courses to microlearning content, users can discover, share, assign, and track various learning as a natural part of the workday.
Microsoft Viva Topics
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.
Viva Connections will be available for desktop in the first half of 2021 and mobile in summer 2021.
The launch of Microsoft Viva 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.
“Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365.
