You Should be Using Viva Insights to Uplevel your People Analytics!

Over the past few days, I have noticed an uptick in posts around People Analytics. I suppose with all the seismic changes in the tech industry with organizations downsizing from their pandemic hiring booms, the need to understand people trends is perhaps greater than it has ever been. Additionally, I have noticed an interesting trend that it is not just individuals with HR-sounding titles posting about People Analytics but also folks with IT-sounding titles with a peppering of buzzwords like AI & ML to round them out.

So what exactly is People Analytics, you ask? Quite simply, people analytics is collecting organizational, people, and talent data to help drive business decisions. It drives actionable insights to help business leaders make decisions that characteristics of their workforce to help drive outcomes. The Academy to Innovate HR has developed an excellent diagram shown below that highlights data sources for People Analytics and, interestingly enough, is also one of the catalysts for my questions.

"If you're not using Viva Insights, then are you really doing People Analytics?"

So what exactly is Viva Insights and how does it fit in with all of the other Microsoft Viva products you keep hearing about? Viva is Microsoft's Employee Experience Platform (EXP) that has five experience areas:

Viva Insights includes a Microsoft Teams and web application that leverages the Microsoft Graph to understand how people work and collaborate inside the M365 ecosystem and produces recommendations to improve employees' productivity and well-being. The service was designed not to be a "big brother" monitoring what employees are doing or their output. Rather, it focuses on whom they're collaborating with when work activities are happening across a configured working day and other behaviors associated with their daily activities. Viva Insights leverages techniques to de-identify individuals at an organizational level while providing privacy-protected individual and manager-level insights. In plain English:

Employees

Each employee receives targeted e-mail briefings recapping recent work activities and includes a personal dashboard within the Microsoft Teams experience highlighting how often you are working after your planned working day hours, how often you are having 1:1's with your manager and colleagues, etc. It also provides easy access to build healthier habits like calendar blocks, also referred to as "Focus time," where Teams notifications will be muted, and your calendar will be blocked from meeting invitations. It also allows the creation of what used to be periodic coffee breaks that were typical in the physical office but have perhaps morphed into quickly going off-camera to refill your mug.

There are also in-app experiences that help drive better collaboration habits including supporting teams across multiple timezones. One of my favorite features is within the Outlook experience that prompts you to schedule sending your e-mail to a time that is within the working hours of your e-mail recipients. As someone on a Global Team, I absolutely love this nudge as it allows me to work during my core hours but not force my teammates on the West Coast to feel like they need to respond before they have had their first cup of coffee.

Managers

From a manager perspective (assuming >5 direct/indirect reports as configured out the out-of-the-box) you have the ability to start to understand some of the working behaviors of your team including:

• Is your team working after hours?
• Are they having 1:1's with their managers?
• Are they overwhelmed by e-mail?
• Are they having long meetings attended by multiple members of the team?
• Do they have time to focus on work, or are their schedules completely booked with meetings?

As a manager you can then have conversations with your team to help identify opportunities to reduce their e-mail workload, encourage taking time for focus, developing a divide/conquer strategy to reduce overlapping meetings and create space for creativity & productivity. The anonymity of the service helps prevent individual team members from being singled out and allows for an open dialogue about how people are doing. Additionally there is the ability to create shared plans which allows the team to establish working norms and/or common blocked time to enable productivty.

Business Leaders

Taking the Manager insights even one step further, the real power of Viva Insights is when you start to analyze the work trends at an organizational level. The two main objectives from these reports are rolling up data to understand:

• Managers - How are the organizations' managers doing from an ability to coach their team, modeling positive work behaviors, empowering their directs to cover meetings without them, how are they helping network their directs within the organization, and overall how are they doing from a capacity perspective.
• Overall Employees - How are my employees doing from a health/wellness perspective including are they balancing work & life, how often and how long are they collaborating outside of core working hours, are they taking breaks throughout the day, how often and average duration of meetings without manager, how often and how long are they collaborating under "urgent" circumstances as deemed by collaboration headers.

From the "Manager Effectiveness" Power BI Dashboard, you can start to understand the capacity of your managers, if they're holding 1:1's with their direct reports, and are they modeling the behaviors of creating separation between work & life.

Taking that one step further, you have the ability to "double click" into these insights to better understand trends within departments/entities in your organization to better understand what areas of your organization may require additional help & focus.

This is just a small sampling of what is available using the out-of-the-box reporting capabilities of Viva Insights. You also have the ability to enrich your reporting by bringing in additional data sources and creating your own custom reports.

Data Privacy

I will probably dedicate an entire blog post in the future to the Data Privacy and Security considerations for a service like Viva Insights (you can refer to this site in the meantime), but one of the key points that I would like to make is the default configuration settings are intended to help employees maintain anonymity. Individual employees are de-identified and managers have minimum direct/indirect report settings to help reduce the likelihood of an individual employee from being singled out. From a GDPR perspective, the service allows users to opt out and have their user data purged.

When planning to roll-out Viva Insights there should be some planning considerations which would likely include HR, Risk, Privacy, and Security leaders to discuss how the service will be leveraged, who would have access to the data, and what practices should be in-place to help maintain employee anonymity while also gaining access to valuable organizational insights at the larger department/business unit level.

Summary

I believe that organizations who are not yet leveraging Viva Insights are missing out on a real opportunity to help promote healthier working habits and drive better business outcomes. Viva Insights provides both recommendations targeted at employees to embrace better habits, and empowers business leaders to lean in and help their organizations adapt to this new hybrid working environment. As you can see, Viva Insights goes far beyond the standard employee "pulse survey" of asking employees how they are doing, but rather tells them based on their actual behaviors.

This data is invaluable at helping to understand the underlying health of you organization - which areas might need some help whether it be through investments in additional employees, automation, coaching to help adopt healthier work habits, or other interventions to help make work more manageable. Organizations that embrace employee wellness are going to be the ones who attract and retain the best talent which will lead to stronger business outcomes.

Looking for help in planning your Viva Insights roll-out? Feel free to reach out to me, and I'd be happy to pull in some folks to help you really do People Analytics. :-)