What is an Employee Experience Platform?|Microsoft Viva

How do you recruit and retain qualified, enthusiastic employees? Thinking about how to attract talent is a good place to start, but the long term task of keeping your team satisfied and happy is more important than ever. 

With the workforce divided between in-person, remote, and hybrid employees, maintaining a consistent employee experience is a challenge. Microsoft Viva addresses this directly by improving the daily communication, collaboration, and overall wellbeing of your team.

What is Employee Experience?

From the moment a prospective hire interviews for a position to their last day at the company, everything they learn, interact with, and feel while on the job informs their employee experience. Job seekers value positive employee experiences even more than salary, and companies are taking note. 

In a recent Forbes article, Jacob Morgan, author of The Employee Experience Advantage, explains: “In a world where money is no longer the primary motivating factor for employees, focusing on the employee experience is the most promising competitive advantage that organizations can create.”

The recruitment stage is your chance to cultivate strong candidates through targeted job advertisements and interviews that effectively screen applicants, while also assuring them that joining your team will be a positive experience. As you onboard new hires, build on their enthusiasm for the job with clear training and support. 

Once an employee is up to speed, they will still benefit from continued opportunities to develop their skills. At this point, investment in positive employee experience helps not only with productivity but also retention. It signals to employees that their contributions are valued and the company is a place where they can grow professionally. 

Finally, whether an employee is leaving for a different company or due to an unrelated life change, they can provide valuable feedback through exit interviews that will help your team reflect on how to further improve your organization. Prioritizing positive employee experience will benefit your company culture. Microsoft Viva harnesses new and existing Microsoft 365 capabilities to help employers at every stage of the employee experience, company-wide.

What is Microsoft Viva?

Powered by Microsoft 365 and accessed through Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva is a communication, knowledge, and learning platform designed to empower teams and individuals to collaborate and reach their goals. Viva is built with the employee experience in mind. Let’s explore two Viva features that give employees the direction and support they need, whether they’re just joining your team or continuing to develop their skills.

What is Viva Insights?

Viva Insights offers an easily accessible central hub for data-driven, privacy-protected insights that drive projects, define priorities, and shape a company’s culture. This level of accessibility supports employee productivity and satisfaction, which are at the core of a positive employee experience. Additionally, employees increasingly expect to be recognized as individuals in the workplace and valued for their achievements. Viva can help facilitate this type of dynamic among your team.

For example, Viva Insights supports individual recognition through personal insights, an AI (Artificial Intelligence) tool that analyzes how an employee’s day is spent and offers suggestions to optimize their routine. Viva Insights also offers recommendations for different employee tasks. Employees may be recommended a relevant Viva Learning video, or be advised to take a refreshing break between tasks.

Viva Insights also helps to cultivate a more balanced mindset through focus time and wellbeing focus. Focus time lets employees set aside time, away from potentially distracting notification, for more demanding and time-consuming tasks. Wellbeing focus offers a “wrap up” feature that summarizes what a user was able to accomplish, next steps they may need to take, and an opportunity to mindfully disconnect from the workday before heading home.

Viva Insights supports employees at the individual level, while also enabling company-wide flexibility and adaptability through a shared communication framework and set of expectations.

What is Viva Learning?

Viva Learning makes onboarding and continued professional development easy to implement, track, and encourage through self-paced lessons that build career-related skills. Users can create their own learning content (such as a company-specific training), or access existing lessons from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Lessons, or a third party. Each user that opens Viva Learning will be met with a hand-picked set of lessons based on their job title, level of experience, and skill set.

As the pace of business continues to accelerate, companies are facing more frequent disruptions that challenge their flexibility and adaptability. Viva Learning offers a solid foundation to diversify the skills of your workforce. Employees can access relevant online lessons on their own time, or save and share them with colleagues through Teams.

Viva Improves Employee Experience

Employee experience is a major defining factor for job seekers, and it is a key component to building and maintaining the team that your company needs. Microsoft Viva centers the employee experience and seamlessly integrates with the existing Microsoft 365 ecosystem to upgrade your company’s flexibility and your employees’ autonomy.