REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp.
on Thursday announced Microsoft Viva, the first employee experience
platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning,
wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of
people's work. Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow and
thrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity
and collaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft
Teams.
"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," said Satya
Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. "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 announcement 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. It spans what is today a fragmented market of services,
infrastructure and hundreds of tools, many that go undiscovered and
underutilized by employees at the companies that have invested in
them.
"As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation
will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and wellbeing so
organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity," said
Jared Spataro, corporate vice
president, Microsoft 365. "Our vision is to deliver a platform for
the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving
culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders."
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. 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:
- 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.
"Microsoft Viva is a groundbreaking Employee Experience
Platform, ushering in a new enterprise software category that
focuses entirely on the daily needs of employees at work," said
Josh Bersin, research analyst and
noted expert on employee experience technology. "Viva will enable
companies to integrate their fragmented workplace tools and provide
them in the flow of work."
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.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables
digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and
an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and
every organization on the planet to achieve more.
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SOURCE Microsoft Corporation