Hybrid work, it’s all about the employee experience

Across many organisations, company culture has suffered over the last 18 months or so. With a distributed workforce it’s not easy to promote your culture effectively when the only platform you have is your company intranet and video conferencing tools.

With hybrid work environments becoming the norm for many, addressing this problem has moved up the agenda. Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform, could be part of the solution for your organisation. Here’s how it works:

What is Microsoft Viva?

Within Viva there are four modules working together to aid the productivity, wellbeing, and learning and development.

1: Viva Connections

Viva Connections is the gateway to the Viva platform and helps employees stay engaged and informed by giving them access to all the tools they need. It allows employees to discover relevant news, conversations and tasks to keep connected with the wider business. The platform is built on the existing capabilities within Microsoft 365, such as SharePoint and Yammer, however organisations can personalise the experience to suit their brand.

A hybrid workforce can feel less connected to their team, this module addresses this issue. Viva Connections supports hybrid working as it provides a central hub to give employees access to relevant company-wide information, regardless of where they are working. Organisations can start using this module at no cost if the users are licensed for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.

2: Viva Insights

Viva Insights is designed to help employees manage the balance between productivity and wellbeing. This module uses a variety of data points to give personalised and actionable insights to empower teams and build better work habits to improve business outcomes. Managers also have access to privacy-protected overall trends so they can effectively manage their team’s workload and overall stress levels.

Unfortunately, over the past 18 months many employees have experienced burnout from overworking whilst remote working. This trend may continue as organisations implement hybrid working schemes. For some, working from home made it difficult to set clear boundaries between their home life and their work life. With Viva Insights the recommendations should help alleviate these stresses and lead to happier, more productive employees. Viva Insights for employees is included with a Microsoft 365 subscription and can be found within the Teams app.

3: Viva Topics

Employees spend about an hour a day searching for, or recreating, information. Alleviating this issue would potentially give employees an additional five hours a week to focus on more value-adding activities. Viva Topics is an AI-powered solution that automatically organises content across systems and teams to allows employees rapid access to content and knowledge. It splits content into related topics such as projects, product, processes and customers, which can be shared via highly customisable web pages.

This module can aid hybrid working as it allows employees to access information without needing to spend time searching through systems or asking other departments to spending their time recreating content.

4: Viva Learning

In many organisations, learning and development opportunities have suffered during the pandemic.  Viva Learning delivers education through Teams with content from multiple world-class learning providers. Having all learning resources in one place makes it easier for employees to make learning a part of their role. Viva Learning also empowers leaders and employees to design and track education that is aligned with business outcomes and individual goals.

In a traditional office working environment, training and education was delivered in person through learning providers. With remote and hybrid working this poses a challenge of ensuring all employees are in the same space at the same time. With Viva Learning, employees can access professional development, regardless of where they are located. As the content is on-demand, it also means that employees can learn at their own pace.

Each module within Microsoft Viva can support hybrid working and the employee experience. However, for maximum engagement the four modules can work together to create a more productive, educated, connected and happy workforce. If you want to find out more on how Microsoft Viva can support your business, get in contact with us today.

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