Microsoft Viva: a new platform designed for the future of remote work

Microsoft Viva is Microsoft’s new drive to help businesses with remote work and a big bet for this new lifestyle to become the norm. It was designed to function as a portal for employees and businesses to navigate the complexities of working from home. Microsoft is launching Viva today, with parts of the platform launching throughout 2021.

“We participated in the largest remote-scale experiment in the world that the world has ever seen,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, highlighting nearly 11 months of a pandemic that has reshaped the way people work, learn and live. “As the world recovers, there is no turning back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be essential. “

Microsoft Viva is not an application or even a service, but a platform to improve remote work and help companies adapt to it. While companies collectively spend billions of dollars each year on employee well-being, Microsoft believes Viva will help in this new digital age of work.

“We need to stop thinking about work as a place and start thinking about how to maintain culture, connect employees and harness human ingenuity in a hybrid world,” says Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365. Spataro was quick to predict from the start in the pandemic that would forever change the way we work and learn, and Microsoft Viva is clearly the result of trends that Microsoft has witnessed.

Designed for this new flexible and digital era of work, Viva integrates with Microsoft Teams and functions like the intranet of yesteryear, bringing together essential parts of a business in one central location. Microsoft is dividing Viva into four specific modules: connections, insights, topics and learning.

Image: Microsoft

Connections include internal communications or features like benefits and company policies. It is also designed to be the portal you access if you have just started working at a company and have never met your co-workers due to pandemic blocks. “You can think of it as a gateway to your digital workplace,” explains Spataro.

Viva Connections was developed based on Microsoft’s SharePoint technology and will include things like company news, city halls or even resource groups of employees and communities. It is basically a panel to connect with colleagues remotely.

Image: Microsoft

Viva Insights appears to be the next step in Microsoft’s controversial Productivity Scoring feature. Microsoft was widely criticized for allowing managers to analyze individual employee data using metadata collected from its software and services. The company was forced to make changes to its Productivity Score and Viva Insights includes similar data-based insights for managers and employees.

Microsoft says Viva Insights will include data for managers and leaders to monitor work patterns and trends, but that privacy will be protected. “This means that personal insights are visible only to the employee, while insights for managers and leaders are aggregated and de-identified by default to protect individual privacy,” says Spataro.

Viva Learning is Microsoft’s third module on Viva and, as the name implies, is about employee learning and development. This is where employers host training materials, courses and other content for employee education. This will include content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn and even content from the company itself, along with training material from third-party vendors.

The last module of Viva is topics. “Think of Viva topics as a Wikipedia for the organization,” explains Spataro. It uses AI to organize content and automatically presents topic cards with documents, videos and related people. Viva Topics will generate topic cards from applications such as Office, Teams and SharePoint.

Microsoft Viva is being released partially today. Viva Topics is now available for Microsoft 365 customers, and a public preview of Viva Insights also starts today. Microsoft is also launching a private preview of Viva Learning and plans to announce more additions to Microsoft Viva throughout 2021.

Microsoft says it is just starting with Microsoft Viva and that it was designed to be an “open and extensible platform” for partners. Viva also promotes Microsoft’s ambition to place Teams at the center of its work strategy and act as a center for everything the company does.

Much like the Microsoft Teams Together feature, Viva is clearly inspired by the pandemic era’s push towards remote work. While there is still a debate about how office jobs will change dramatically when the pandemic is over, Microsoft is betting that the way we are working now is the new normal.