Microsoft’s Viva reinvents the intranet in the post-COVID world

The promise to decrease the number of COVID-19 cases and the development of vaccines are offering hope that workers in exile at home can return to work. While no one expects a quick return to the workplace, one thing seems clear: the way we work has probably changed forever.

Before the pandemic, only 3% of employees worked from home. Last year, thanks to COVID-19, remote work increased to 40% of the workforce.

Reform almost overnight in the way workplaces have been working for years is forcing companies to rethink the way they manage and communicate with employees.

Microsoft says more than 115 million users trust its cloud-based office productivity software and application packages, and its employees understand that their services will need to accommodate the wide range of changes in the coming months and post-pandemic years.

With that change in mind, Microsoft unveiled Viva on Thursday, a suite of tools known as “an employee experience platform” that integrates with Microsoft 365 and Teams.

It connects employees to the company, providing work, research and educational resources in an intranet environment.

Viva includes several modules: Connections offers employees news and company policies; Learning offers educational resources; Topics manages the company’s database and was called “a Wikipedia for the organization” by Jared Spataro, who runs Microsoft 365; and Insights will generate data for managers and leaders to monitor work patterns and trends.

“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,” said Spataro. “As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, involvement and well-being so that organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity.”

Microsoft hopes to reconcile all aspects of an individual’s workday – scheduling, meetings, phone calls, video chats, text messages, research – in a common framework that will help employees navigate a new world of work that accommodates time changes and possible exchanges between working at home and working in the office. At the same time, the system would foster a sense of community.

“We participated in the largest remote-scaling experiment the world has ever seen and it has had a dramatic impact on employee experience,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “As the world recovers, there is no turning back. Flexibility in when, where and how we will work will be crucial.”

The Learning module, which will be made available to everyone later this year, collects educational resources for new employees who are sailing in their early days and for established employees looking to expand their knowledge. It includes content not only from the company, but also from LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, Coursera, EdX and others.

Likewise, Topics coordinates useful data from experts across the company, using AI to check an employee’s database, for example, and combine it with the appropriate resources for analysis.

Insights is in effect the company’s therapist. Keeping control over an employee’s workflow and habits, it can be used to gently suggest breaks and encourage relationships with co-workers. In addition, according to a Microsoft blog post, Insights “allows organizations to combine the comments of LinkedIn Glint employees with collaboration data from Viva Insights, allowing leaders to more accurately identify where teams can to be struggling, proactively adjust labor standards and quantify the impact of these changes over time. “

While Microsoft claims that personal privacy will be protected, this module is eerily similar to last year’s introduction of a “productivity score” feature in Microsoft 365 that drew criticism from privacy experts. The feature enabled managers to track employee activities at work or at home, and scores produced based on factors such as workflow, participation in discussions and number of emails. Rapid criticism of the appeal followed.

“The word dystopian is not strong enough to describe the new hellhole Microsoft just opened,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of the Basecamp office productivity suite, referring to productivity indexes. “Just as the reputation of a new and better company was being built, they blew it up with the most invasive workplace surveillance scheme that has ever become popular. Being under constant surveillance in the workplace is psychological abuse,” he said. it.

Microsoft eventually removed the ability to identify individual users, saying that the score “is a measure of the technology’s organizational adoption – not individual user behavior”.

Microsoft said this week that Insights data is “aggregated and unidentified by default to maintain personal privacy”.

The Topics module is now available for Microsoft 365 customers, and Insights and Learning are available for viewing earlier this week.

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