The Microsoft Viva family expands

Viva Pulse - Finger on the pulse

Microsoft Viva Pulse focuses on managing your employees. Managers and team leads can use it to collect feedback from their team members on a regular basis. You immediately have handy pre-defined surveys with research-based questions. This gives you a clear picture of what is going on among colleagues and where you need to pay extra attention.

Viva Engage - Social media within company walls

Yammer already allowed you to share -in a light-hearted way- short messages within company walls to interact with colleagues. Today, Yammer is evolving into Viva Engage and the social communication platform is being better integrated within Teams.

You get a classic timeline, christened 'storyline'. Colleagues can also write posts in which they e.g. share photos or video of an event they attended. You can also build separate channels around certain topics.

It is a convenient environment to share news or communicate internal issues with all colleagues without sending sensitive company information to a public platform. You stay within your organisation's Microsoft 365 environment. This means that colleagues use their company account and so you no longer depend on e.g. Meta (Facebook/instagram) to create a sense of community.
With Leadership Corner, employees can communicate directly with team leads and/or management to exchange ideas or address certain topics.

Viva Sales - CRM and Microsoft 365 connected

Viva Sales ensures that your CRM integrates with Microsoft 365 & Microsoft Teams. This eliminates the need for manual data entry (again) and allows you to fully focus on delivering services or sales.

You solution helps with routine tasks such as data collection and input, and creates actionable insights. A clear view of customer status helps you get the most out of your conversations. AI-powered suggestions and reminders will also only support you to complete a sale more efficiently. Think about:

• Intelligence that analyses conversations
• Recognise customers in e-mails
• Meeting insights for Teams
• Sharing and use of business data
• Salesforce CRM and Dynamics 365 Sales integration

Viva Goals - pulling together on the same rope

To get and keep employees' noses in the same direction, you can engage Viva Goals. You set (strategic) goals and your teams can follow them clearly.
Using the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework, progress can be tracked -by goal and within one central hub- towards the final result.
This way, you not only create clarity for your team, colleagues also focus more on generalised impact, instead of mere output. Viva Goals naturally integrates further into the Microsoft 365 environment, so these predefined goals always remain top of mind. (Think Teams, DevOps, Power BI...)

Viva Amplify - Communicating quickly and efficiently to colleagues

Internal communication remains a challenge for many organisations. With Viva Amplify, on the one hand, you design internal campaigns on the fly; on the other, it also gives you the ability to be read immediately by forcing clear visual notifications within the Windows and Microsoft 365 environment.

So you can finally get handy tips, server reboots or new policies.

New tools in the Viva platform

Answers

Using artificial intelligence and 'crowdsourcing', questions from colleagues are answered. Your employees can use Answers to start a conversation with a bot, in plain human language, to ask questions. The bot then automatically tries to offer the right document or formulate an answer to the question.

The system will also immediately connect you with the right expert within the organisation, and learn from the further communication. Thus, the bot continues to evolve and get better and better because it will have more and more information at its disposal.

People

In today's 'hybrid' working environments, it is not always easy to get to know everyone well. You have smarter profile maps with 'people' within the organisation. These will show extensive details of employees' interests, as well as their knowledge and long-term goals.

This helps to foster cooperation and allows you to immediately find the right people for specific questions. It also makes it easier to find like-minded people with interests in certain topics, the same 'team goals' or the same connections to discuss related topics together, for example. E.g. are you looking for fervent home workers or colleagues who are almost always in the office to discuss related topics? No problem.

The end goal of 'People' is mainly to break down silos in the corporate structure and bring colleagues -independent of their tasks, team or department- together.

You notice that the Microsoft Viva platform is starting to play more and more of a central role in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Some things are already active today, but you can expect the bulk of the updates to the Viva platform in early 2023.
Would you also like to integrate all these technologies optimally in your organisation? Then feel free to speak to our experts, they will be happy to show you how it works: