How do companies make their employees smarter and happier? How do they onboard them effectively during a pandemic?
Microsoft is offering solutions to these questions with the release of Viva, a new product aimed at senior HR and other corporate leaders that assembles pieces of Microsoft 365 into an “employee experience platform” (EXP). (The constituent parts of the package comprise Teams, SharePoint Online, Yammer, MyAnalytics, Workplace Analytics, and Topics, a Project Cortex component, all underpinned by the Microsoft Graph and artificial intelligence.)
Microsoft says Viva supports and facilitates four employee experiences:
Topics leverages AI to organize content and expertise across organizations, making it easier for employees to access institutional knowledge.
Connections makes that information easy to share for internal communications. It creates a unified field from Yammer, Stream video and Teams.
Insights employs analysis tools focused on personal wellbeing to gauge how employees are doing and to suggest solutions (like “schedule some focus time” or “take a break”) to help manage their time better. Meanwhile, managers will get recommendations to “foster healthy, successful teams.”
Learning makes it easier to share courseware with employees, such as onboarding materials or new information about corporate policies or technologies. Like the other experiences, Learning uses AI to identify the best training for any given situation and employee.
So what does all this mean to you?
Clearly, Viva represents an opportunity for marketers to initiate new conversations with your customers about their corporate pain points and how a platform approach can help them.
“Viva could be the first example of app collections designed to meet specific needs,” Tony Redmond, owner and principal of Redmond & Associates consulting and lead author of Office 365 for IT Pros, told Mary Jo Foley. And it also represents a first example of the sorts of all-in-one solutions you can offer to enterprise buyers.
In a corporate landscape that was already growing more dispersed before COVID-19 kicked the process into overdrive, issues of employee wellbeing and alignment with corporate goals, policies and practices need more attention than ever before.
Consider Viva a calling card to involve yourself in your customers’ big conversations on the these pressing topics.
