Microsoft Ties New Viva Employee Experience Platform to Teams

Microsoft has created an employee experience platform (EXP) that extends Teams into a unified workforce engagement and information access tool. The new Microsoft Viva addresses the rise in remote employees and distributed workplaces, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The initial Viva tools will offer provide personalized access to organizational resources, customized dashboards, information discovery and learning content. Viva integrates with the Microsoft 365 platform, including Office 365 and the Teams interface.

“Every organization will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration, to continuous learning and growth,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during the online launch of Viva. “These can no longer be siloed functions. A world of flexible work creates new challenges.”

Microsoft designed Viva to give employees tools they need to thrive, Nadella added.

“Viva will bring learning into the flow of people’s work, surfacing required training and learning opportunities,” he said. “It will provide personalized insights and reminders, so people work smarter, not longer. It will make it simpler to find content and experts related to projects someone is working on. And it will make it easier for leaders to communicate with employees and to foster community with personalized company communications, news forums and resources.”

Scott Gode, chief product marketing officer of managed service provider Unify Square, said Viva is poised to boost Teams’ appeal.

Unify Square’s Scott Gode

“It’s going to make Teams more sticky,” Gode said. “Anybody that’s got apps, or ideas about apps that will plug into Teams that can now plug into Viva. It makes it more interesting from a revenue potential perspective.”

Potential Partner Disruption

Some partners tied to the Teams and SharePoint ecosystem may not warmly welcome the arrival of Viva, according to Gode.

“I think it’s going to be sort of disruptive for a portion of the Microsoft partner community,” Gode said. “There are a lot of smaller partners in the Microsoft ecosystem who are already using the graph API to grab a lot of that analytics data,” he said. “Viva could potentially make some of the current partner offerings less valuable.”

Mike Hicks, CMO of Beezy, a Microsoft SharePoint and Teams partner, said the Viva announcement caught him off guard. Asked if he sees it as a competitive threat, Hicks said: “I think it’s too early to say truly how competitive it is going to be. Microsoft does an extremely good job at building personal productivity apps and tools. They do really well at the individual and the team level. But things tend to fall apart as you get to that sort of broader level. And that’s where products like Beezy will always have a role.”

Annual spending on employee experience is $300 billion, Microsoft 365 corporate VP Jared Spataro said. Included in that amount is employee development and training and benefits.

Microsoft’s Jared Spataro

“Employee experience technologies in most cases are fragmented, hard to find and disruptive to the flow of work,” Spataro said. “Viva digitally reimagines company culture, employee well-being, knowledge sharing and learning for the hybrid work world.”

Microsoft Viva consists of four initial tools: Connections, Insights, Learning and Topics.

Viva Connections

Three in five (60%) employees feel less connected to their teams since shifting to remote work, according to Microsoft research. The new Viva Connections app in teams offers …