Employee Experience Platforms: What's new in Microsoft Viva?

14 Apr Employee Experience Platforms: What’s new in Microsoft Viva?

Posted at 07:00h in Microsoft Viva by Simon Spencer

With the latest round of updates for Viva, Microsoft looks to be fully pushing Viva to become a complete employee experience platform. Understanding what’s new is incredibly important for getting to grips with Viva and using its tools to your best advantage.

In this article, we’re going to go over all of the new features in Microsoft Viva. We’ll also let you know how you can get started today!

What is Microsoft Viva?

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform — a platform which is used to give organisations greater control over how their employees interact with and experience work technology, with an aim of integration into their current systems.

Launched in 2021, the platform aims to bring together learning, tracking, collaboration, and communication into a greater employee experience institution-wide. Ever since, Microsoft has been pushing out new features to turn Viva into an essential employee platform for businesses worldwide.

With massive worldwide companies such as PayPal having implemented Viva into their workplace in the short amount of time since its launch, Microsoft has every reason to support it for a long time.

With this, they’ve been adding new features that have changed the way that businesses think about employee experience and engagement — and they haven’t stopped in 2023. Let’s take a look at all the new features that they’ve been introducing!

Viva Engage: Answers in Viva

Collaboration and communication are key to the success of any modern business. Answers in Viva bring the communication and collaboration process of a forum site to your business.

With Answers in Viva, you can build your own knowledge base while also ensuring that employees within your institution can have access to the answers that they need to complete their tasks.

The forum style means that employees can freely ask questions in an open forum and receive quality feedback and answers from several different employees institution-wide.

Viva Engage: Leadership Corner

Good leadership is a key component of any good team. Leadership Corner is a key tool for ensuring that your team can see the leaders and feel welcome to interact with them — while also staying in the know.

Leaders can set announcements to specific communities and host events, which can further bring together your workforce and ensure that the leadership in your organisation is strong and close to the rest of the team.

Completely customisable — like the rest of the platform — the leadership corner is the key place for your employees to get to know the leaders of their team and interact with them more productively and positively.

Viva Engage: Ask Me Anything Events

An AMA (ask-me-anything) event is a session in which users can ask questions to leaders and other knowledgeable employees to better understand their work.

This will help bring your employees together and help them connect even further, while also being a way for them to remain knowledgeable about key aspects of your organisation.

Ultimately, this is another way to create discussion throughout your organisation and to help employees connect in a more free and open way — creating organic and thoughtful discussions about important issues within your organisation.

Viva Sales: AI-Generated Email Replies

Using GPT technology, Viva Sales now allows for AI email replies — which can save employees throughout your organisation lots of time in automatically replying to emails that they don’t need to be manually replying to.

Viva Sales creates an email ‘kickstart’ for you to be able to examine and change variables within. You can continue generating new kickstarts until you find the right one for you, and change whatever is needed within the email — meaning that control is fully within your hands.

Viva Sales: Live People Cards

Live People Cards let you gain information about the person that you’re communicating with seamlessly, without having to search for the information or leave the application that you’re utilising.

Utilising Live People Cards effectively in your workflow essentially means that you never need to leave your current flow to find out or contextualise whoever you’re communicating with — all the information is there, inline.

Viva Connections: New Home Experience

The new home experience within Viva Connections feels amazing to use and makes utilising the tool far easier for all of your employees — with a new, richer experience all around.

This will make utilising Viva connections far more satisfying and easy for anyone within your organisation, and make sure that they can access the tools that they need without any fuss.

Viva Learning: Learning Path Creation

Development and learning are key to the success of any modern business. Viva Learning enhances this even further with its new Learning Path Creation tool, allowing businesses to create enriching learning experiences throughout their organisation.

Using Learning Path Creation, you can use many resources to help educate and grow employees throughout your organisation — and help them reach their full potential.

All around, this will help your organisation’s developmental capabilities even more, allowing employees to truly enrich their work experience with new learning opportunities and journeys along the way.

How to Get Started

Microsoft Viva is a great employee experience platform with lots of new features to help enrich your workplace experience.

With plenty of tools at your disposal — from collaboration to education and everything in between — Microsoft Viva can help improve your employee satisfaction and help you retain your top talent.

If you’re looking to get started with Microsoft Viva but don’t know how, get in contact with our team of experts today. Our knowledgeable team will be able to guide you through the whole process and ensure that your institution has everything you need to get started with Microsoft Viva.