Microsoft announces Microsoft Viva, a new employee experience platform that puts people first

Microsoft today announced Microsoft Viva, a new employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery in a single place. Employee Experience Platforms (EXP) is a $300 billion market and it is fragmented with several services, infrastructure and hundreds of tools. Microsoft is trying to tackle this market with Viva, an unified experience built on Microsoft 365 platform.

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.

Microsoft Viva features:

• 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.

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.

Pricing and Availability:

• Viva Topics will be $5pupm (per unit per month) for commercial customers. For education customers, it will be $1pupm for faculty and $0.75pupm for students.
• Microsoft will share pricing and packaging for Viva Insights, Connections and Learning when they become generally available.

Source: Microsoft