Today, organizations spend over $300 billion a year on employee experience. That number includes employee development and training, benefits and wellbeing, and a whole host of employee experience technologies. But too often, these technologies are fragmented, hard to find, and disruptive to the flow of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As digital tools become more crucial to a great employee experience, business leaders across every industry embrace the opportunity to learn, and they\u2019re re-evaluating both their spending and their approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We believe what\u2019s needed is a new approach and a new category of technology solutions called Employee Experience Platforms (EXP). We see EXP as a digital platform that provides people with the resources and support they need, seamlessly integrated within the same tools they use to do their work, so they can succeed and thrive no matter their location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Introducing Microsoft Viva<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Today we\u2019re introducing\u00a0Microsoft Viva<\/a>; the first EXP built for the digital era. Microsoft Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated experience that empowers people and teams to be their best from anywhere. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, it is experienced through Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that people use every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A new kind of employee experience<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To start, Microsoft Viva will include four modules: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics\u2014with more on the way. I\u2019ll walk you through each one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s begin with\u00a0Viva Connections<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research from our Work Trend Index shows\u00a0nearly 60 percent of workers\u00a0<\/strong>feel less connected to their team since the\u00a0move to remote work. And we\u2019re struggling to replace the comradery once created by things like company town halls, offsites, and events. This is challenging for all of us but incredibly impactful on new hires\u2014imagine how it feels for an employee who has never been to the office or ever met anyone face-to-face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Accessed in Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections provides a single-entry point for employee engagement and internal communications. You can think of it as a gateway to your digital workplace<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Connections is built on Microsoft 365 capabilities like SharePoint to provide a curated and branded employee destination. Leaders can connect with employees via company town halls. Employees can access everything from company news, policies, and benefits to employee resource groups or communities they want to join with Microsoft\u00a0Viva\u2019s integration to Yammer. It provides a personalized feed and dashboard to help you find all the helpful resources\u00a0you need from Microsoft Viva and other apps across your digital workplace. The content can also be customized for specific roles within the company\u2014including frontline workers\u2014to have a comprehensive view of just the resources they need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next,\u00a0Viva Insights<\/a>. more important to help people unplug and make the most of their scarcest resource: their time<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable privacy-protected insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. It brings new personal wellbeing experiences, insights, and recommended actions from Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics into the flow of people\u2019s work in Microsoft Teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Accessed in Microsoft Teams, Viva Insights for\u00a0individuals\u00a0<\/strong>help employees stay connected with their colleagues and protect time for regular breaks, focused work, and learning. Experiences we announced last summer, like virtual commute and integration with Headspace, kickstarted our career here. They will now be part of Microsoft Viva and will start rolling out in the coming months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For managers<\/strong>, Viva Insights provides data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations to foster healthy, successful teams. For instance, Viva Insights can help a manager see if their team is at risk of burnout and provide recommendations like encouraging your team to turn off notifications, set boundaries in their calendar, and set daily priorities to focus on what matters most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For\u00a0company leaders<\/strong>, Viva Insights helps address complex challenges and respond to change by shedding light on organizational work patterns and trends. These could include well-being opportunities and things like space planning as companies reimagine their offices for hybrid work. Viva Insights also provides leaders with organizational network analysis to understand the connectedness and cohesion between and across teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These organizational insights are even more powerful when combined with other data sources. Today, we\u2019re excited to\u00a0introduce\u00a0a new dashboard for Microsoft Viva and LinkedIn\u2019s Glint customers\u00a0<\/strong>that maps insights about how And services, Microsoft Viva builds on an organization\u2019s existing investments. A customer can also leverage data from\u00a0third-party tools like Zoom, Slack, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To help ensure\u00a0privacy and security,\u00a0<\/strong>Microsoft Viva uses aggregation, de-identification, and differential privacy. This means personal insights are visible only to the employee, while managers’ and leaders’ understandings are aggregated and de-identified by default to protect individual privacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now onto\u00a0Viva Learning<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Organizations need to develop a culture of learning to keep up with the pace of change and retain great talent. Specifically, a recent LinkedIn report found that\u00a094 percent of employees\u00a0<\/strong>would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Learning helps make learning a natural part of both every employee\u2019s daily work and company culture<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Viva Learning, employees can quickly discover and share everything from training courses to microlearning content. And managers get the tools they need to assign learning and track the completion of techniques to foster a learning culture. Viva Learning creates a central hub for learning in Teams, with AI that recommends the right content at the right\u00a0time. It aggregates content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, your organization\u2019s own custom content, and training from leading content providers like Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight, and edX. Viva Learning also works with leading learning-management systems. Today we\u2019re announcing partnerships with Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba, and\u00a0SAP SuccessFactors. And there are more on the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally,\u00a0Viva Topics<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As we have all experienced, finding an expert, understanding company acronyms, or surfacing the content you need can be tedious, especially when you\u2019re a new employee or working remotely. In fact, our research shows that people spend the equivalent of seven weeks per year <\/strong>searching for or re-creating information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Topics enables you to harness your organization’s knowledge and connect people to that knowledge in the apps they use every day. Think of Viva Topics as a Wikipedia with AI superpowers for your organization. When you come across an unfamiliar topic or acronym, hover. No need to search for knowledge\u2014knowledge finds you. Viva Topics automatically surfaces\u00a0topic cards\u00a0<\/em>as people work in apps like Office, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams. When employees click on a card, a topic page appears with documents, videos, and related people. Experts at the company can also help curate the information shown in Viva Topics by sharing knowledge through simple, highly customizable web sites called Topic Pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along with content from the Microsoft Cloud, Viva Topics also surfaces information from third-party services like ServiceNow and Salesforce and builds on integrations made by partners like Accenture, Avanade, BA Insight, Raytion, and ClearPeople. And Graph connectors make it easy to connect to even more content that employees would find helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Together with our partners<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Designed to be an open and extensible platform with a strong and growing ecosystem of partners, Microsoft Viva is easy to integrate with the systems and tools a company already has in place. Integrations with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and third-party products and services will deliver a complete employee\u00a0experience in the flow of work. In addition to our integration ecosystem, we\u2019re joined in this mission by\u00a0our global network of services partners who provide strategic guidance, advisory services, implementation, adoption and change management, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can hear from some of our partners in this video:<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/saudishopper.com.sa\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Viva-Connections-a-gateway-to-your-digital-workplace-1024x693.gif\")
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<\/strong>At a time when over\u00a030 percent of workers\u00a0<\/strong>say the pandemic has increased their sense of burnout, it has never been<\/p>\n\n\n\n
people\u00a0work\u00a0<\/em>to employee survey data about how people\u00a0feel<\/em>. In addition to using data and signals from Microsoft apps<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/saudishopper.com.sa\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Productivity-and-wellbeing-experiences-in-Viva-Insights-1024x576.gif\")
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It\u00a0uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise\u00a0<\/strong>into relevant categories like\u00a0\u201cprojects,\u201d \u201cproducts,\u201d \u201cprocesses,\u201d and \u201ccustomers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Knowledge](\"https:\/\/saudishopper.com.sa\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Knowledge-discovery-in-Viva-Topics.gif\")
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