After a yr of coping with pandemic-related points, C-suite leaders now discover themselves targeted on the “employee experience,” in accordance with Chuck Friedman, Microsoft’s company vp in command of the corporate’s new Viva platform.Microsoft Viva, which the corporate highlighted at this yr’s Ignite occasion, is designed to offer digital instruments to assist distant employees. Unveiled final month, it’s an worker expertise platform (EXP), with 4 modules targeted on worker engagement, well-being, studying, and data.Though curiosity in worker expertise had been on the rise, mentioned Friedman, it took off final yr as companies switched to a largely remote-work mannequin and needed to cope with points comparable to entry to on-line coaching and improvement, sustaining firm tradition, and even avoiding burnout.As the COVID-19 pandemic shut down workplaces worldwide, “suddenly we moved from a workplace [where] people could be next to each other to a remote workplace where the demand for these things moved to digital,” Friedman mentioned. “All of these things starting to come together…,” resulting in Viva. Microsoft
Chuck Friedman, Microsoft vp in command of Viva.
As with all areas of digital transformation, the necessity to cope with distant workforce points — all the pieces from HR functions to workforce analytics and worker engagement — boomed in the course of the pandemic, mentioned Raul Castanon, a senior analysis analyst at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. About 4 out of 5 companies (78%) see supporting distant employees as a problem over the subsequent two years, in accordance with 451, with worker expertise points — comparable to work-life stability, entry to expertise, crew morale, and worker retention — amongst high issues.As a end result, mentioned Friedman, a difficulty that had largely fallen on human assets has grown in significance amongst senior enterprise leaders. “That [responsibility] has fundamentally changed,” he mentioned, “and the entire C-suite is now thinking about the experience of their employees: How do they retain employees, how do they maintain morale of their employees?”Pre-pandemic, HR was intently concerned with the worker expertise, significantly worker engagement, whereas CIOs, IT managers ,and line of enterprise (LOB) leaders targeted extra on expertise adoption and alter administration, mentioned Castanon.“What we’re seeing now post-pandemic is a convergence and a growing overlap that is leading to cooperation between these areas…. HR is increasingly concerned with productivity, IT with employee engagement, LOB managers with both, and so on,” he mentioned.Matt Cain, a Gartner vp and distinguished analyst, mentioned in a report that Viva is prone to “elevate the prominence” of worker expertise expertise in IT circles, and may result in elevated curiosity in quite a lot of providers, “requiring greater levels of IT and HR collaboration.”Viva availability At Ignite, Microsoft supplied up extra particulars concerning the 4 Viva modules – Connections, Insights, Learning and Topics. Among the updates is the introduction of a desktop app for Viva Connections, the company-branded intranet portal that makes use of SharePoint on Yammer and gives entry to information, conversations, and different assets. The desktop app can be accessible this month, with a cell model due this summer time. The Connections module can be accessible at no further value to present Microsoft 365 prospects.Viva Learning — which serves up a company’s customized content material together with assets from Microsoft’s LinkedIn Learning and third-party suppliers — will arrive as a public preview in April. Pricing and subscription particulars can be launched when that module turns into accessible, mentioned Microsoft.Viva Insights, the analytics module that mixes components of the present MyAnalytics private productiveness tracker and Workplace Analytics team-wide metrics, is now in public preview. At Ignite, Microsoft touted a “virtual commute” characteristic accessible in preview subsequent month, and an integration with the Headspace guided meditation app arriving later within the yr. Insights is out there at no further value to Microsoft 365 customers, with the organization-level insights accessed as an add-on through Workplace Analytics.Microsoft Viva Topics is the one typically accessible module presently, and prices $5 per consumer every month.Friedman mentioned early curiosity within the platform has come from corporations of all sizes. While Microsoft has labored intently with massive enterprises on Viva, Friedman sees the platform as a very good match for smaller companies, too.“I think the problem is universal; small- and medium-sized businesses have the same set of challenges and they need the same set of tools,” he mentioned, noting that completely different companies will gravitate to varied elements of Viva.“Frontline worker-focused companies are looking at learning and skilling as a real opportunity,” he mentioned, arguing that Viva Connections can hold non-office-based employees within the loop with their wider group through their cell gadget. And info employees can use of Insights to deal with burnout, as an illustration. Teams as an worker expertise portal A key facet of Viva is the supply of its modules inside Microsoft’s Teams collaboration platform, which has 115 million day by day lively customers. But Friedman acknowledged the hazard of overloading customers with an excessive amount of info and too many notifications.Microsoft labored to design a consumer interface (UI) that minimizes info overload, Friedman mentioned. He pointed to Viva Connections, which might function a front-end UI inside Teams to focus on necessary info for a consumer.“The Connections module has the ability to compose all of the Viva capabilities and communicate with a single voice,” he mentioned. “I’m hopeful we can simplify some of the UI inside Teams by using Connections as a sort of front end, a highlighted experience, as opposed to the idea of many different applications trying to reach the employee at the same time.”Machine studying can even assist choose the best time for notifications. “When you’re in the middle of an interview, it’s probably not the right time for a learning [notification] to pop up and say, ‘Hey, Chuck — do you want to take some learning right now?’” he mentioned. “We’re going to … use the right moments of the day to [be] proactive in communication.“The flip side is if you bury things too deeply,” mentioned Friedman. “Learning is another great example. The Learning content exists in many companies today, but when an employee wants to go and learn something new, they often have a hard time finding it.”Employee analytics and privateness With Viva Insights, Microsoft desires the analytics accessible in Microsoft 365 to be extra accessible by staff, managers, and enterprise leaders.Employee analytics is a rising focus for a lot of collaboration and productiveness distributors, and Microsoft’s present MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics are central inside Viva.Microsoft got here beneath fireplace for an additional of its analytics instruments final yr, Productivity Score; it highlighted a employee’s software use to Microsoft 365 admins earlier than modifications have been introduced to anonymize and combination information on the particular person stage.Friedman mentioned sustaining worker privateness is necessary in Viva. “We will build clarity into the UI around what data is shown and what data is not. We’re doing many things on the back-end to make sure that we are only showing aggregate data, that we are removing anything that’s personally identifiable….Then we will build reinforcement methods into the UI and transparency around why they can trust the data, who has access to it, that type of experience.”At the identical time, Friedman mentioned there are advantages to each employees and enterprise leaders in analytics information.“…There’s value in transparency around things like goals, things like purpose for the team,” he mentioned. “We want to help managers do an increasingly effective job of communicating to their teams, what their team is focused on, and then show aggregate sentiment through tools like Glint: ‘When you made this announcement or when you announced this set of goals for your team, here’s what the impact was on the team.’”More to come back?With Viva providers at numerous ranges of availability and the chance of extra modules on the way in which, Microsoft is simply getting began — and analysts see room for enlargement. In his report, Cain described Viva’s modules as “starting investments, rather than fully fledged mature services with clear and tangible business value.”While Microsoft calls Viva an worker expertise platform, Gartner classifies it for instance of EXTech, “a diverse collection of employee-facing applications designed to influence and improve the employee experience and organizational culture,” mentioned Cain.“A fully realized employee experience platform would have a broader top-level organizational structure, address a much larger set of touchpoints and interactions, and meet the needs of a variety of employee types, including desk-less or frontline workers.”Castanon mentioned Microsoft’s funding in Viva quantities to essentially the most bold try to offer a unified platform for worker expertise up to now.“We expect there will be additional capabilities and modules added,” he mentioned. “However, as it stands it is probably among the most comprehensive EXP currently available.”Unifying numerous instruments might help companies adapt to distant work in the long run, he mentioned, and Viva’s complete method might be “instrumental for organizations looking to tackle the challenges of the ‘new normal,’” comparable to “managing employee productivity and engagement for a distributed workforce, and understanding the complexities that enabling secure remote collaboration entails.“This will require a broader organizational transformation effort; the Viva platform could be instrumental for enabling this transformation,” Castanon mentioned.“We’re at this category-creation moment,” mentioned Friedman. In that sense, he mentioned, Microsoft’s technique differs from that of Office 365, the place well-established merchandise have been packaged as a subscription. Although Viva modules rely closely on present Microsoft 365 providers comparable to SharePoint, Yammer, and MyAnalytics, the providers symbolize a brand new focus and new modes of interplay based mostly on the worker expertise.“I would say we’re early in this journey,” he mentioned. “Very often, when Microsoft engages it’s a better-established category. I don’t think employee experience platforms as a category are fully defined yet, and that’s exciting; you can point in a lot of directions….“We expect that this will evolve over time; we’re investing intentionally in being a leader in the space.”
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