Microsoft unveils new employee experience platform Viva with homeworkers in mind

Viva joins a growing list of EXPs designed to better connect employees with their organisations

Microsoft on Thursday launched Viva, its new 'employee experience platform,' which is based on Microsoft Teams and aims to empower employee with learning, engagement, wellbeing and knowledge discovery.

Microsoft says Viva is "built for the digital era" and will bring together communications, resources, and insights into an integrated experience to enable employees and their teams to excel in work, from anywhere.

"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 organisation 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."

Viva is designed for the new flexible era of work from home and works like an intranet by bringing essential parts of a business into a central location.

Microsoft Viva comprises of four specific modules: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning and Viva Topics.

Viva Connections, according to Microsoft, offers a new way for leaders to invite employees to participate in creating an inclusive workplace. It gives them a curated experience that helps to brings together relevant conversations, town halls, news and other resources.

With Viva Connections, employees can easily access company resources while also participating in communities, using a single customisable app in Microsoft Teams. This module serves basically as a dashboard for connecting employees with their colleagues remotely.

Viva Insights, as Microsoft says, gives personalised and actionable insights to employees and their managers. With Viva Insights, managers and leaders can monitor work patterns in their organisation.

The module brings productivity and wellbeing experiences in Microsoft Teams and also enables employees to incorporate data from third-party services like Slack, Workday, Zoom, and SAP SuccessFactors.

Over time, Viva Insights will also bring the power of Microsoft MyAnalytics and Microsoft Workplace Analytics together under the Microsoft Viva brand.

Viva Learning is all about employees learning and development. It empowers workers to gain specific skills by building a central hub for learning in Microsoft Teams. Using this hub, people can learn and share new things from various content libraries available across the organisation.

Microsoft plans to launch Viva Learning app later this year, enabling the company to offer integrations with leading learning management systems, including SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Saba.

Viva Topics, the fourth module, uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to deliver a knowledge discovery experience and empower people with expertise to connect to experts and information across the company.

It is like "Wikipedia for the organization" which will generates topic cards from apps like Teams, Office and SharePoint.

According to Microsoft, Microsoft Viva is partly launching for now and is available for Microsoft 365 customers.