Microsoft Viva for ′dummies′

In this article I would like to shine a light on what Microsoft Viva is and what Viva is not. Initially I was struggling to understand what Viva is. Is it a product? Is it a platform? Is it an evolution? Is it a new bundle? Is it marketing? Is it an aspiration? Is it a vision? Is it a landgrab? Is it a branding exercise? Is it about making sure Microsoft doesn′t come late to market in a growing category? The answer is a bit off all the above.

(This article was first posted on www.adoptic.info. To read in Spanish click here)

What is employee experience?

Josh Bersin estimates the employee experience (EX) market to be $300B in size and to include categories like employee development, employee wellbeing, technology for core HR, surveys &feedback, benefits, HR portals and tools. 

Bersin explains that there are several layers to Employee Experience and that is why he calls it a platform. There is an employee productivity layer (the mobile or portal experience), an application layer (workflows and apps), a services layer (search, indexing, chatbots, search, case and knowledge management), and the back-end transaction systems.

Bersin further states that Employee Experience is a fragmented, complex space. There many employee use-cases and scenarios to consider, and companies also need strategies to deal with retail workers, manufacturing employees, remote salespeople, and many other workforce segments. No one tool or system can address them all. Microsoft states that employee experience technologies in most cases are fragmented, hard to find, and disruptive to the flow of work.

In general companies build and buy these layers through various products, and then try to turn them into platforms for employees, managers, and HR. The overall solution requires a team of IT professionals to build an employee portal. These portals can be very expensive, Bersin gives the example of a pharma client for whom it would cost a $100 Million to revamp their employee portal and related mobile apps.

Microsoft′s role with HR leaders

Microsoft does not have an end-to-end HR applications suite. That has always been a gap compared to companies like SAP, Oracle, Workday etc. However, Microsoft has a very large penetration in an organizations people business. Microsoft owns a large part of the communications and collaboration market. A lot of HR portals and intranets have historically been built on SharePoint. Teams is the number one collaborative app in the enterprise. Every HR department in the world uses LinkedIn.

But Microsoft′s approach to HR buyers has always been fragmented. And Microsoft has a raft of less known tools that are being used in employee related environments like stream, workplace analytics, search, etc. And remember Microsoft has a history of being late to market. Microsoft was late to market making Office a more social tool and had to spend a lot of money to buy Yammer back in 2012. Microsoft allegedly tried to buy Slack but when Slack did not want to sell, Microsoft doubled down on its own solution via Teams but came to market four years later than Slack. Part of the success of Teams is because of the bundling of Teams for free with M/O365 although nobody at Microsoft will openly admit that.  

Employee Experience Platform

Microsoft calls Viva a platform, not a product. Microsoft also refers to Viva as the next evolution of work (Satya Nadella, Microsoft′s CEO), a first major step for a new kind of employee experience that's designed for the digital era, a journey (Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft 365).

Viva is a platform to integrate all these disparate employee platforms and solutions. It is built on Microsoft 365 and delivered through Teams as an interface. 

Nadella talks about Viva impacting three categories, collaboration, learning and wellbeing. (The video below is a Nadellas intro at the global Viva luanch event, duration 7 min)

On collaboration Nadella says:

The reality is, what doesn't begin and end inside a meeting? Anything people work on is accomplished in the context of a holistic process. With Microsoft Teams, we're providing that organizing layer for the entire process.

On learning Nadella states: Going forward, learning in the flow of work will be increasingly important as how we work and what we work on changes. Organizations are ultimately about knowledge turns, how are employees learning from each other, how they are identifying the knowledge and expertise that already exists inside the organization, and how are they learning from customers.

Nadella throws in LinkedIn learning here as well and introduces us to the term knowledge turns. The only definition I have been able to find is: A “knowledge turn” is a cycle of a process by a professional, including the learning generated by the experience, deriving more good and leading to advance.

Nadella then discusses employee wellbeing. Nadella: Productivity can no longer just be about short-term employee output. Employees are working longer hours, often feeling disconnected from colleagues. Sometimes I myself don't know whether I'm working from home or sleeping at work. Nadella mentions things like Virtual commute which Microsoft recently added to Teams.

Nadella then explains that the shift 30 years ago from disparate systems to connecting accounting and finance to the core business processes of a company via ERP systems is like the paradigm shift with EXP now. Nadella: People operations will no longer be limited to HR but will be integrated across every aspect of the business to improve the overall health and resilience of the organization. Every organization will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. These can no longer be siloed functions.

Addressing these challenges and incorporating solutions into everyday workflow tools is more critical than ever. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful from day 1 in a single integrated experience directly in Teams. Viva will bring learning into the flow of people's work, surfacing required training and learning opportunities. It'll provide personalized insights and reminders, so people work smarter not longer. It'll 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.

But what is Viva really?

Jared Spataro brings some additional clarity: Viva digitally reimagines company culture, employee well-being, knowledge sharing, and learning for the hybrid work world. Viva is powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365 and is experienced primarily through Microsoft Teams, and with a strong and growing ecosystem of Viva partners and the fact that Teams is an open and extensible platform, it is easy to integrate all the systems and tools a company already has in one place.

But after all this you might still not understand what Viva is. So, let’s go a level deeper. Viva currently has four modules: connections (culture & Communications), insights (productivity & wellbeing), topics (knowledge and expertise), and learning (skilling &growth).

Connections is based on SharePoint, Yammer, Stream and Live Events. It seems like a way of bringing these tools into one interface or as Microsoft says: a company branded app that lives inside Teams to let people focus on news and communications and resources so that they feel connected to everything that they need to pay attention to in the organization. Spataro states: the connections app provides a single entry point for employee engagement and internal communications. You can think of it as the digital representation of the office or the shop floor where we once gathered as a company.

Insights seems to be the next evolution of products like My analytics and Workplace analytics. As Microsoft states Insights used the Microsoft Graph to deliver coaching, nudges, and guidance. To help shape how works gets done for the individual, for the team and the organization. Helping people protect their time off as well as providing guidance to management about how teams are working together. Also, their seems to be a change in branding with new names like personal insights and manager insights.

Topics (based on project Cortex), integrates information from inside M365 and beyond and organizes it into topics. It recognizes who the experts are and brings this together in topic pages which experts can approve, curate and deliver to employees in the flow of their work. Spataro states: finding an expert, understanding company acronyms, or finding the content you need can be tedious, especially when you are new or working remotely. Research shows people spend the equivalent of seven weeks per year searching for or just recreating information. Think of Viva Topics as a Wikipedia for the organization. It uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise into relevant categories like projects, products, processes, and customers. Topics makes Microsoft Search more powerful and automatically surfaces topic cards as people work in apps like Office, SharePoint, and Teams.

Learning. Viva Learning creates a central hub for learning in Teams with AI that recommends the right content at the right time. It brings together content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and an organization's own custom content. It also has trainings from content providers like Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight, and edX. Viva Learning works with leading learning management systems. As Spataro states: Viva Learning helps make learning a natural part of every employee's daily work and the company culture. With Viva, employees can easily discover and share everything from training courses to microlearning content. Managers get the tools they need to assign learning and then to track the outcomes to help foster a learning culture.

Roadmap and prices

Currently only Topics is in GA (general availability) but only in English with other languages like Spanish, German and French coming by mid-2021. Insights and Learning in preview and Connections is still to be announced.

Topics licensing is $5 per user per month with no info provided on pricing for the other modules. Just to put this in perspective. Microsoft365 Business basic is $5 per user/month, standard $12.50 and premium $20. E1 is $8, E3 is $20 and E5 is $35. Clearly the focus here is on customers that would probably be already in the market for an E5 licences.

Conclusion.

Viva is work in progress. This is clear by how Microsoft is positioning Viva and how carefully the wording is chosen. Although Bersin states that Microsoft has been working on Viva for a while the Corporate VP in charge of Viva, Chuck Friedman, has been in role for only five months. Viva is Microsoft’s attempt to bring together a large part of their existing products with some new developments in order to try to own a category, employee experience, that doesn’t have any real key market share owners in it because it is too fragmented.

 About the Author.

Michiel is managing partner AdopTic, a business and technology consulting company dedicated to Smart Working, and President of the International Association of Microsoft Channel partners in EMEA and Spain (IAMCP). He is also on the global board of IAMCP and is an author of several books on how to engage with Microsoft and is author of the IAMCP guide to partnering with Microsoft. Michiel is also the Chapter Lead in Spain for the European Smart Work Network