Viva Goals is Microsoft’s goal setting and measuring tool, and is part of the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform. It sits alongside other apps like Viva Engage, Viva Connections and Viva Amplify.
We take a closer look at Viva Goals and the framework of using OKRs, how to access it, key benefits, and how much it costs.
Jump to:
– What is Viva Goals?
– Where to Access Viva Goals?
– How Does Viva Goals Work?
– Copilot in Viva Goals
– Benefits of Viva Goals
– How Much Does Viva Goals Cost?
What is Viva Goals?
Viva Goals, part of Microsoft’s suite of Viva tools, is a robust goal setting and management solution. It helps to align the efforts of individuals and teams with the strategic priorities of your organisation.
Targets can be made visible across the entire organisation, encouraging accountability and transparency. Employees and leaders can see and track key objectives, bridging the gap between day-to-day tasks and long-term aims.
To help organisations measure and track their strategic targets, Viva Goals uses the OKR framework. If you’re not familiar with OKRs, we’ll take a closer look now.
What are OKRs?
OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. The OKR framework is a proven goal-setting method that helps businesses turn strategy into outcomes.
Most employees are familiar with their organisation’s big picture – the mission, vision, values and strategic priorities. Where it can sometimes start to get grey is the how. What tangible activities, projects and objectives are teams and individuals working towards to execute the strategy?
The 2024 IC Index found that employees need to know how they can personally contribute to the strategy. According to the report, understanding your personal contribution is the biggest difference between employees who understand the strategy vs those who truly believe in it.
The OKR framework does exactly that. Using the framework, company objectives – which can sometimes be quite abstract – are broken down into key results and initiatives that are actionable, measurable and timebound.
Here’s an example:
Objective: Improve employee engagement
Key Result: Improve eNPS by 20 points by end of Q4
Key Result: Achieve 80% adoption within 6 months of launch of new intranet
Initiative: Conduct quarterly eNPS surveys
Initiative: Launch weekly drop-in intranet training sessions
You can see here how broad company-wide targets can be turned into actionable tasks that individuals and departments and measure and be accountable for.
And it works. 96% of employees who use OKRs understand how their work impacts broader company goals.
Where to Access Viva Goals?
Viva Goals is available as a web app, or as an app within Teams. The two experiences are very similar.
The web app can be found by visiting microsoft365.com in your browser, clicking ‘Apps’ and searching for Viva Goals.
Or, employees can search Apps via the left hand navigation panel in Teams.
The Teams app means Viva Goals can be integrated into the flow of work, making it quick and easy for employees, managers and leaders to check, update and track targets. It’s also accessible via Teams on mobile for on-the-go updates.
Later in 2024, users will be able to add a Viva Goals tab to a Teams chat or channel, making it even easier to check in on OKRs in the flow of work. It’s currently pencilled in for November 2024 – keep an eye on the update via the Microsoft Roadmap.
How Does Viva Goals Work?
The cornerstones of Viva Goals are accountability and visibility. Under those areas, there are 3 key activities within Viva Goals:
- Creating your OKRs
- Measuring progress
- Sharing updates
We’ll take a closer look at each one.
Creating Your OKRs
OKRs are made up of Objectives, Key Results and Key Initiatives. The first step is defining your objectives. These should be linked to your organisational strategy – what are your big aims for the year ahead. In Viva Goals, Objectives are labelled with a target symbol.
Next is Key Results. Key Results should directly contribute to Objectives, and should be actionable, measurable and timebound. These are labelled with a speedometer symbol.
Lastly is initiatives. Initiatives, or projects, are the specific tasks teams or individuals are working on that will help achieve each Key Result and Objective. Initiatives are labelled with a calendar symbol.
In Viva Goals, Objectives, Key Results and Initiatives can be assigned to the whole company, departments or individuals. You can have an organisational Objective, with departmental Key Results and personal Initiatives. Or departmental Objectives that feed into the broader company goals. You can flex the set up depending on what works for your business and your people.
You can set roles and permissions to define who can create, manage and view OKRs. Outside of leadership and managers, we recommend assigning employees members. This ensures maximum transparency. There’s more around that from Microsoft here.
The technical set-up around Viva Goals is relatively straightforward. The most important part is defining a solid OKR framework that shows every employee how they contribute.
Measuring Progress
Each OKR has a progress tracker. It will show a percentage of how close the goal is to being met, and whether the OKR is on track, behind or not started.
In Viva Goals, there are two ways to update progress on OKRs. These are known as ‘Check-ins’. The options are:
Manual: You can assign an individual who is responsible for manually entering the latest metrics on each OKR. During a manual check-in, you can also update the status, and add notes and images for extra context.
Automatic: Progress can be automatically updated via integrations with collaboration tools like Teams, or third-party apps. This option requires some extra back-end plumbing.
Updates can be configured to automatically roll up and update the progress of aligned objectives.
Sharing Updates
Visibility is one of the core benefits of Viva Goals. Being able to share regular updates on progress is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle.
This is particularly useful for internal communicators, who are often tasked with sharing progress updates in a meaningful way.
When sharing an update, you can add a message, and choose who receives a notification. Updates are sent via email, and are also available in the ‘Updates’ tab within the Viva Goals app. Employees can react and comment on updates, to help celebrate achievements or ask questions.
Copilot in Viva Goals
Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant, can help you create and manage your OKRs in Viva Goals, making it even easier to adopt and embed in your organisation.
Copilot can:
- Suggest relevant and SMART OKRs based on your role, team, and company vision. Using natural language, you can ask Copilot for suggestions, like “suggest an OKR for improving customer satisfaction” or “suggest an OKR for increasing sales revenue”.
- Analyse your OKRs and provide feedback and tips on how to improve them, including suggestions on how to make them more specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound. You can also ask Copilot for best practices and examples.
- Track and update your progress on OKRs. Copilot can automatically update your progress on OKRs based on data from other Microsoft apps, including Outlook, Teams, Dynamics 365, and Power BI. You can also ask Copilot to update your progress manually – “update my progress on OKR 1 to 50%” or “mark OKR 2 as completed”, for example.
- Send notifications, reminders and progress updates on your OKRs and deadlines. For example, “remind me of the deadline for OKR 3, “show me my OKRs for this quarter” or “show me how I’m doing on OKR 2”.
Copilot can become an ally in helping you manage and achieve your individual OKRs, and wider team goals. The process of writing, sharing and updating doesn’t need to become another admin heavy task languishing at the bottom of your to-do list.
Benefits of Viva Goals
Align Teams with Organisational Strategy
How to engage employees with organisational vision and strategy is an age-old problem. Typically, organisations create a ‘Vision’ page on their intranet and leave it at that. Viva Goals provides the technology to take it one step further.
Visualising how each team and individual contributes to the bigger picture creates a shared sense of direction and purpose.
Other tools in the Microsoft Viva suite can help back this up – like AMA sessions with leaders on strategy and goals, hosted in Viva Engage.
Streamline Reporting
It’s likely that individual business units are using their own tools and software to track progress on their own targets. This can make it tricky for leaders to see the big picture on how the business is progressing without jumping into multiple tools and dashboards.
Viva Goals streamlines the reporting process, and provides a central location to track progress of core goals.
Data Integration
Integrations with Viva Goals mean you don’t need to start from scratch with progress reporting. If you’ve already spent time setting up goal tracking in another platform, this data can be pulled into Viva Goals and used to update OKRs.
This also saves time and duplication of effort, by removing the need to update progress across multiple platforms.
Current integrations include HubSpot, Jira and Monday.com. See the full list of Viva Goals integrations here.
How Much Does Viva Goals Cost?
Viva Goals is priced as a standalone app at £4.90 per user/month. It can be included as an add-on to other Viva licensing packages, like the Employee Communications and Communities bundle or the Workplace Analytics and Employee Feedback bundle.
Alternatively, Viva Goals comes as part of the whole Viva Suite package. The full package is priced at £9.90 per user/month and includes access to all the Microsoft Viva apps.
An Internal Communicator’s Guide to Microsoft Viva
For a more in-depth look at Viva Goals, Viva Engage, Viva Amplify and Viva Connections, including key features and real life use-cases, download our guide to Microsoft Viva especially for internal communicators.
On Demand Webinar
Alvin Ashford-Quaye, Microsoft EX lead, covers Viva Goals, Viva Connections, Viva Engage and Viva Amplify in our on-demand webinar.
Silicon Reef are people-first Microsoft 365 experts. We help organisations make the most of M365 to elevate the employee experience. Get in touch to learn how we can help with Viva Suite, including Goals, or other Microsoft tools like SharePoint or Power Platform.
