Microsoft Unveils New Employee Experience Platform

Microsoft has announced an employee experience platform that enables employee engagement, learning, wellbeing, and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work.

Dubbed Microsoft Viva, the new platform 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.

Having seen how much work has evolved in the past year, the new platform helps to combat pain points like meeting fatigue and a lack of balance between work and life.

Viva helps customers reimagine the employee experience by focusing on the power of the people. This toolset will help employees be their best while working with hybrid and remote teams, ultimately driving the whole organization forward.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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 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.