Microsoft Viva is an upcoming digital employee experience platform built on Microsoft 365, designed to support organisations in putting employees first with tailored experiences that boost engagement, productivity and well-being.
This platform consolidates a variety of existing work tools into one comprehensive platform, delivering personalised support and development opportunities for every individual. It can provide many benefits for businesses, from streamlining common processes and improving productivity rates to cultivating collaboration between colleagues and developing an engaged workforce.
Read on to understand how Microsoft’s Viva platform can help businesses achieve their goals.
Microsoft acquires collaboration software startup Ally to bolster employee experience platform Viva
Microsoft recently took the employee experience platform Viva to the next level by acquiring collaboration software startup Ally.
Viva is an integrated employee experience platform that combines communication and collaboration, learning, wellbeing, and knowledge discovery into a unified solution. In addition, it provides tools and resources to help businesses foster an engaging and productive workplace.
Let’s take a deeper look into Microsoft Viva and its features.
What is Microsoft Viva?
Microsoft Viva is an employee engagement platform created by Microsoft that launched in March 2021. It is designed to help organisations interact with their employees and keep them up-to-date on company news and activities. Viva combines the best of employee communication, learning, and wellbeing into one integrated platform.
Microsoft’s Viva provides a unified experience across all devices, enabling employees to access information wherever they are. It’s an enterprise platform designed for the new world of work – to improve productivity by simplifying collaboration and boosting engagement.
The platform has four main components: Insights for People Leaders, Learning for Education, Topics for Knowledge Management, and Connections for Culture & Community. Each module addresses a different topic and can be tailored to fit any organisation’s needs.
Insights provides organisations with insights into their people including employee sentiment analytics and performance feedback data to inform decisions on how to best engage employees across team and organisation levels.
Learning provides employees with personalised learning experiences including virtual classrooms, courses from leading content providers, microlearnings formats such as videos, audio bites or infographics, and skill assessments like badges or certifications tracks to support professional growth activities within their organisation.
Topics is a knowledge management tool that allows companies to manage content like corporate policies, FAQ’s or other internal documents in one centralised place for easy access anytime by anyone in the organisation — regardless of organisational structure.
Connections lets organisations create connective spaces such as virtual mindfulness sessions, mentorships programs or share ideas on designated discussion boards — providing employees with more opportunities to stay connected and feel personally meaningful.
In addition there are also other connectors such as Outlook email integrations for higher level managers communicating to staff members quickly via email notifications about important work topics at hand, the ability to launch Teams meetings from within Viva quickly, plus integration with Yammer networks. All integrations help provide seamlessly connected user experiences.
Benefits of Viva
Viva is Microsoft’s all-in-one platform to help businesses transition to the remote workplace. It provides easy access to employees’ essential work tools and content and introduces new features that make connecting with colleagues easier. Utilising Microsoft Viva can help employees maintain their productivity and sense of connection among the digital workplace.
Benefits of Viva:
-Connections: With various applications, Viva Connections equips employees with an internal communications hub that keeps everyone in the loop regardless of working from home or in the office. This makes it easier for team members to stay connected on projects and build constructive relationships through shared knowledge. -Insights: Using analytics, Viva Insights will track employee collaboration and engagement, helping workers better understand their productivity levels and where improvements can be made. -Topics: With access to relevant and up-to-date content, teams can work better together by sharing files more collaboratively with topics such as company information, product training materials and any other important information to share in a centralised hub. -Learning: Ensuring employees have the right skills is key in promoting a successful remote workplace culture. Microsoft Viva Learning gives teams access to learning resources across providers like LinkedIn Learning to build skills needed for current or future roles.
Microsoft’s Acquisition of Ally
Microsoft recently announced that it acquired Ally, a collaboration software startup, to bolster their employee experience platform, Viva. This signals a major move in the enterprise software space, as Microsoft aims to provide an integrated platform that provides business solutions to help employees work better and smarter.
This article will look at how Microsoft’s acquisition of Ally will help their Viva platform, and how it can benefit businesses.
What is Ally?
Ally is a cloud-based app platform that provides employees with personalised, connected work experiences. Microsoft acquired the product in December 2020 and will become part of the Microsoft Viva Platform. This article will look at what Ally offers and how its integration into the Viva Platform could help businesses effectively manage their workflows.
Ally is an app platform that helps workers stay connected to their colleagues and workplace activities. It utilises a mobile-centric approach to help employees easily access the resources they need while on the move. It provides notifications, chatbots, task management tools, document sharing capabilities, and custom feedback options to help workers quickly access the information they require while continuing to collaborate with their colleagues productively.
Given its focus on mobile communications, Ally helps workers stay informed of important news and updates. For example, it can remind employees of upcoming events or notifications about new tasks assigned through task management tools like Microsoft To Do or Trello. Additionally, it offers a secure file sharing facility that allows users to securely share documents without incurring any data loss and provides internal communication features like text messages or video calls directly from their phones or tablets.
In addition to these features Ally also puts employee experience at the centre of business processes by offering analytics dashboards which provide valuable insights about customer behaviour and employee performance for better decision-making regarding future business strategies. Thanks to its advanced analytics capabilities, Ally can easily identify patterns that help increase productivity throughout various departments such as HR or Sales teams, making it an incredibly powerful tool for businesses. With its recent acquisition by Microsoft making it part of the Microsoft Viva Platform companies will now be better equipped to manage their workforce more effectively regardless of where they are located at any given time around the world.
Benefits of the Acquisition
Microsoft recently announced its acquisition of Ally, a San Francisco-based tech startup focusing on employee engagement. This move brings together the world’s largest software provider and one of the most advanced enterprise platforms for employee engagement. In addition, Microsoft’s Viva Platform is designed to transform how people work, by promoting collaboration and recognition across an organisation.
The acquisition will allow Microsoft to benefit from Ally’s expertise in building products that support employee experience and culture. By integrating the two companies’ products, Microsoft Viva can provide businesses with deeper insights into their culture and employees through modern applications for employee engagement. It will also offer businesses solutions for workplace well-being, learning and development, and other workplace-related services.
Additionally, Alliance’s HR platforms can help Microsoft provide a comprehensive suite of solutions that covers different aspects of an organisation’s human experience—from developing an effective recruiting process to providing helpful tools that enable better management of one’s career success path within the company. Moreover, this integration makes it easier for organisations to leverage the full potential of cloud technology while improving communication between employers and employees, facilitating better knowledge sharing within teams, and creating personal experiences tailored to individual needs.
With the combination of Microsoft’s engineering expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and Ally’s platform for employee engagement, businesses can now unlock a new level of productivity through innovative technology solutions designed specifically for their needs.
How Viva Can Help Businesses
Microsoft’s Viva platform is a cloud-based suite of employee experiences that is designed to help businesses get the most out of their workforce. It was recently acquired from the startup Ally and includes employee engagement, collaboration, and onboarding tools.
This article will discuss how Viva can help businesses, from enhancing employee experiences to increasing productivity.
Improved Collaboration
Microsoft’s Viva platform is designed to help businesses in today’s digital, remote working environment by providing the tools and technologies they need to collaborate externally and internally. Through integrated applications and services, Viva enables employees to work together from anywhere, collaborate more effectively, stay connected with colleagues, and find resources quickly.
Viva Connections is a personalised intranet experience for employees in Microsoft 365 that provides access to company content and collaboration applications. Team users can also tailor their home view for quick reference to what’s most important in their day-to-day lives. In addition, Viva Topics provides an intelligent search feature that helps people search across people, documents, conversations, SharePoint sites and more from a single place.
Viva Insights monitors your team’s well-being by aggregating data like calendar events marked as work or personal time off and provides tailored suggestions on how to maintain or improve productivity through better collaboration practices. Plus, Teams uses integrations with popular workplace communication applications such as Slack and Cisco Webex Direct Routing to allow users to communicate seamlessly between both platforms.
Overall, Microsoft’s Viva platform helps businesses in many ways including improved collaboration across devices; personalised content tailored just for the organisation; AI-driven insights on team dynamics; integrations with other business tools; enabling secure communication portals between workgroups; tracking productivity metrics that help teams members find balance between work life & personal life; all while maintaining security over all customer data residing inside Microsoft 365—making it a perfect platform for companies who are switching over from an in-office setup to a remote one.
Enhanced Employee Engagement
Microsoft Viva is designed to help companies to further engage and inspire their teams, regardless of where they are located. Viva’s suite of products enhances the employee experience by enabling a more connected and purposeful way of working. It provides access to personalised resources, communication tools, and interactive opportunities for collaboration – all in one place – enabling employees to get the most out of their workplace experience.
Viva Connections extends the Microsoft Teams experience by creating ‘information hubs’ that enable access to personalised content such as news, wellbeing resources, company policies, user groups and team directories. This helps employees stay informed and connected with what’s happening inside the organisation while on the go or remote.
Viva Topics helps companies to create a knowledge base with precise internal records on each topic so they can be quickly accessed and shared amongst employees when needed. In addition, topics store information in an organised manner within Microsoft 365 apps such as SharePoint or OneDrive making it easy for teams to save data immediately available to those needing it. Team members can also stay engaged through setting career development goals and monitoring performance by tracking progress over time with Viva Insight. It then encourages continuous learning across teams from this data-on-demand platform that serves as a central repository for analytics around engagement metrics including employee feedback, learning activities and more.
By consolidating these tools into one platform like Microsoft Viva, businesses gain an effortless way of increasing employee engagement while helping them stay connected even when they are apart or working remotely – preserving company culture even when physical distances may exist between teammates.
Improved Productivity
Microsoft’s Viva platform helps businesses manage collaborative workflows and improve employee productivity. Through its Connect feature, Viva ensures employees can connect, regardless of whether they are in the same office or remotely. It provides a streamlined way for employees to see what their colleagues are working on and share ideas or opinions that help inform business decisions. Additionally, Connect centralises conversations from various applications such as email, instant messaging and video conferencing into one main dashboard for improved task tracking.
The platform also offers personalised support for employees to learn how certain applications work and develop new skills through curated content in its Insights feature. In addition, employees can use Viva’s automated recommendations structure to suggest courses or online training based on their particular job title, focus areas or areas where they need improvement. By helping employees stay up-to-date with the latest technology trends and methods of completing projects quickly, businesses can ensure high quality standards while significantly reducing onboarding time spending.
Finally, Viva provides a comprehensive way to monitor team performance data with its Dashboard feature. This allows business leaders to gain sound insights into employee activities within the organisation to effectively measure team progress against set objectives and identify potential weak points that need improvement within the organisation’s operations. By using this data intelligently, managers and executives can have a higher level control over resources and workflows while making more informed decisions with greater ease without disrupting workers’ production flow more than necessary.