News

In 'Dynamic' Job Market, Microsoft Viva Stands as Key Tool

• By Kurt Mackie
• September 28, 2021

Microsoft is positioning its Viva brand as a useful platform to help organizations hurdle the challenges of the current job market.

Specifically, Microsoft is using the context of remote work to tout its Viva "employee experience platform." The company commissioned a study by The Josh Bersin Company, which suggested that the use of employee experience technology increased employee engagement and the ability to retain employees by "5.1 times."

Bersin also noted in a video that 4 million employees "voluntarily quit" in April of this year, "and a third of them did not have another job."

The current job market, affected by the shift to remote work, is "very dynamic," according to Bersin, "which means that if you are not taking good care of your people, you could be losing them, or it might be hard to attract them." 

The Josh Bersin Company and Microsoft created a tool that organizations can use to assess their employee experiences practices and how they affect outcomes, which is available here.

Microsoft also regularly does its own research on remote work trends, and earlier this month released the results from its second "Work Trends Index Report." Microsoft's own employees recently ranked their views about feeling included at the company at 90 percent.

Human resources leaders at Microsoft are using data to deal with the shift to remote work. Some talk to that effect can be found in this "HR in the cloud" Microsoft podcast.

Microsoft Viva is Microsoft's relatively new software product that's designed to gauge and support the employee experience. Viva had its debut in February and currently consists of four applications, which are built into the Microsoft Teams collaboration service. Viva Connections provides a news feed and permits content sharing. Viva Insights is for employee time management. Viva Learning gives employees access to learning libraries. Lastly, Viva Topics is used to surface information within organizations.

So far, only Viva Topics has been commercially released. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that a public preview release of Viva Connections would arrive "in the upcoming weeks," which will include an updated mobile app.

Microsoft described September feature updates to Viva Insights earlier this month. Its time management function is getting ways to measure Teams channels, as well as focus hours and multitasking. Viva Insights is also getting a query designer.

Various Outlook services, such as the MyAnalytics summary of activity and the Insights add-in, are getting the Viva brand. Those changes were announced earlier this month.

Lastly, Microsoft Viva got a high mark in a recent Forrester Research publication on content platforms. Forrester's assessment is described in this Microsoft announcement.

Microsoft luminaries will likely speak more on Microsoft Viva during the 1.5-hour "Microsoft US Hybrid Work Summit" online event. This public event starts on Sept. 29, with sign-up here.