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12 Dec What is Microsoft Viva Amplify? Your Internal Comms Hub
In this blog post, we will explore some of the challenges of internal communication, and how Viva Amplify’s key features and benefits can solve these challenges and help you transform your internal communication strategy.
Modern Internal Communication Challenges
Information Silos
Within organisations, there are individuals and departments that have incredible knowledge which should be shared for the holistic benefit of the business. However, this information is often not shared effectively between teams and departments, even when employees are all working towards the same goal.
These information silos often result in wasted time and effort due to duplication of work or time spent searching for information.
No Consistent Communication Channels
Different departments typically use different channels for communication. Whilst this is not a challenge when the content does not need to be shared beyond the department, it can fall flat when it needs to be shared company wide. This leads to information not being seen, if the channel is not the primary method of communication across the business.
It can be difficult to reach a unanimous decision on the ‘correct’ channel of communication, so it is often more effective to share internal communications across all channels to increase the chances of viewership.
Lack of Employee Recognition
83.8% of employees state that recognition affects their motivation to succeed at work. Although this seems obvious, many organisations struggle to ensure that all employees receive the recognition they deserve. A lack of employee recognition affects productivity and can increase churn within a workplace.
Every employee is different, however having methods of recognising employee achievement in front of the entire organisation, which is only possible with effective internal communication.
Not Measuring Effectiveness of Internal Communications
For any form of content campaign, from marketing through to internal announcements, if businesses do not measure effectiveness these is no way to know how they can be improved in the future. It can often be difficult to measure effectiveness of internal communications through standard channels, such as staff newsletters or Teams Channel messages.
Lack of Leadership Communication
Having strong leadership communication ensures that all employees know what the company is working to, and how their role plays a part in the success of the company. Typically, this is easy to achieve in small organisations as leaders will work alongside other employees, but as a company grows it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain this level of communication.
Microsoft Viva Amplify
Viva Amplify is a cross-channel internal communications hub that is designed to help teams and leaders share messages across the organisation, manage campaigns and analyse the results.
Key Features and Benefits
The overall goal of Viva Amplify is to simplify communications, with a single hub to manage the lifecycle of various campaign. You are able to have multiple messages delivered to multiple audiences, that can be scheduled ahead of time to reduce time spent executing internal communications whilst ensuring that messages are delivered at the most impactful times.
Being able to plan and collaborate ensures that information silos are broken down with key stakeholders working on internal communications, with built in comments and approvals to make sure messages are clear and concise.
To overcome the challenge of disparate communication channels, Viva Amplify enables organisations to publish to multiple channels and audiences. These channels include Microsoft Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, and email, reaching employees where they are most likely to take in the information.
When internal campaigns are running, teams can compare audiences and channels to view what channels are most effective for different audiences enabling continuous improvement over time.
Within Viva Amplify, creators can use sentiment analysis to either gain insights into employees’ views on certain topics or adjust future campaigns to be more effective.
These features all work together to solve the challenges of modern internal communications and ensure that employees are informed, recognised and engaged in the wider company.
The Microsoft Viva Suite
Viva Amplify is one component of the Microsoft Viva suite, an employee experience and engagement platform that has everything a business needs for communication, feedback, analytics and education. Other components of Viva include:
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 stay connected to the wider business.
Viva Engage is a communication platform that enables employees to connect through internal communities and conversations. Engage is also the social layer of Connections where employees can find belonging at work.
Viva Insights is dedicated to helping employees find the balance between productivity and wellbeing. The module uses different data points from Microsoft products and services to give personalised and actionable insights to empower teams to build better work habits and improve business outcomes.
Viva Glint allows organisations to capture company-wide employee feedback more effectively. It can also enhance employee engagement, promote a positive work culture, and drive organisational success.
Viva Pulse is also a feedback platform, but is designed to enable ad-hoc feedback on topics to gain insights into teams’ needs and address them during projects.
Viva Goals is a goal-setting management solution that helps your team reach new heights, and unlocks their full potential. With Goals, team members can be assigned tasks and targets and help reward success across an organisation.
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.
How To Get Started
Microsoft Viva Amplify is a new way to communicate with your employees. It helps you simplify, elevate, and energize your communication campaigns, and deliver messages that inform, engage, and inspire your people. Contact us now to find out more.
