Demystifying Microsoft Viva: How to Enable a Connected and Engaged Culture with Microsoft 365

Alex Graves:

Hello everybody and welcome to today’s session.

I am delighted to be welcoming you to this session that’s in association with the Institute of Internal Communications. I’m Alex Graves Chief Visionary Officer at Silicon Reef and in partnership with the IoIC it’s our goal to help inform Communications professionals about the art of the possible with Microsoft 365.

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the IoIC Festival. If you haven’t been it was absolutely fantastic and I’m already looking forward to 2025. I actually saw many of you people that are joining the meeting today, I saw you there and something that I heard from people as I spoke with them is that they hadn’t heard of the Viva Communications and Communities bundle, or Viva Amplify or you weren’t aware of the enhanced features that in Viva Engage offers.

So today we’re planning to break these things down for you so you have a good understanding of what each of them are. But also, provide you with some information that will help you to see how you can build these into your communication strategy and planning going forward.

The format for today is going to be a presentation. I encourage you to use the Q&A and chat features. If there’s anything you’d like to know more about we’ll have a Q&A section at the end of the presentation. I also encourage you to use the reactions feature, so if we cover anything you think “oh that really hits the mark” give it a like or perhaps if you see something new that you didn’t know existed use the surprise face reaction. I would like to see that one up on the screen.

To get us going I’m also delighted to be joined by Alvin Ashford-Quaye from Microsoft, who’s going to be presenting today on the employee communications and engagement products. Alvin I’ll hand over to you for a further introduction and to cover off the agenda.

Alvin Ashford-Quaye:

Awesome, thank you so much Alex for inviting me to the event today. Happy to be here. As Alex mentioned my name is Alvin Ashford-Quaye and I am the Employee Experience Lead. I look after the financial service and insurance industry, a bit of public sector within Microsoft. My role as employee experience effectively allows us to really focus in on the end user and how they can maximize the value from the technologies that Microsoft does provide to them.

So today I’m going to take you through a bit of a presentation and my focus is going to be primarily on how we can really start to shape things around how we communicate with the organization, alongside how can we really drive high level of performance within the organization. So that’s where I really want to focus in today. Really start to understand what those premium features are within the Viva Suite, the Communication and Communities bundle that can really help your organization. And then thinking about how can we start to apply that moving forward.

So I guess the first place that I want to start off with is just by really talking you through what we want to make sure that we hit home during this particular presentation. And that is we really want to think about how people are engaged with the employee the purpose and the company strategy. And of course there’s the role that the communications team plays in that, building trust in leadership with visibility and two-way comms. This has really changed over the last few years especially with us now having a more common practice of hybrid working. Visibility of leadership will now have to come in different ways. So how can we leverage technology to make sure that that is the case.

Thinking about how we reach everybody within the organization is something that seems to be one of the biggest challenges that our communication stakeholders tend to have. Who is reading the content, who is aware of this information, have we reached the right people. Now what I want to be able to discuss today is how can we give you or support you as communication folk to be able to reach the right people at the right time at the right place.

Then the last bit is secure buy-in for the right tech and improve the impact. So everything that we want to be able to do should have some sort of outcome that we can measure. If we can effectively measure the impact of that outcome then that will help to give us the level of buy-in that we need to be able to secure some of these features long term for your organization.

So one thing I want to say before I get into the presentation, just like Alex mentioned, I can’t see any faces so I am heavily reliant upon your reactions. So let’s start off if you could give me a reaction just to let me know that you’re all listening. Awesome, I’m seeing a few and please use them throughout the presentation if there’s something that you find interesting, if there’s something that has resonated with you. Thumbs up is brilliant for me, it just gives me a view on if everything is landing. And hopefully during this presentation we’ll have some time at the end to do a bit of Q&A where we can respond to some questions.

So what’s interesting is in the world of employee experience there’s a lot of talk about productivity. The first thing that I probably want to go back to is in my world people always ask me what is employee experience? Because every organization takes a different view on it. There’s many organizations that I’ve worked with in the past that will have a different lens on what employee experience is. The easiest way for me to explain what that is, is by maybe just using a bit of an analogy.

So I can see at the moment there is roughly around 70-80 people on this webinar today. Let’s just imagine that all 80 of us went to the same restaurant at the same time. We spent an hour and a half there, we’ve all had something to eat, something to drink, and we’ve all left that restaurant. If we were to look back at our experience at that restaurant it’s very likely that our experiences would be different. The reason being is that we will have personal factors that contribute to why we have a type of expectation for what that restaurant could offer, and therefore has an impact on our experience. So the example is some people will say that restaurant was quite expensive, others will say yeah it was reasonably priced, others will say the ambiance, the music was good, the facilities was good, the food menu. We will all have different reasons as to why it was a good experience for us.

The challenge that that restaurant owner has is somehow they have to make sure that all 80 people on this call who showed up to that restaurant have all had a good experience. How did they delight them and how did they make sure that they’ve had a good enough experience to come back again. Not even just come back but also invite more people to the restaurant. So that’s the challenge that the restaurant owner has. What the restaurant owner probably is thinking is if I focus in on a few areas hopefully that should give enough of a good experience for all of those 80 people that have attended the restaurant. So if I focus in on making sure I’ve got a good drinks menu, I’ve got reasonable pricing, I’ve got a good facility and so forth…I’m waiting for some reactions here…if I focus on in on having all of those facets in place that’s the type of thing that will give me the chance of making sure that people return back to this restaurant.

This is no different to what’s happening within our workplace. What we’ve got to do is try and deliver an individualized experience at scale. So what are we relying upon? Some sort of technology platform that is going to give us the ability to focus in on some specific areas. So when I start to talk about Viva, and there will be a slide on Viva, that’s exactly what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a platform that is really allowing us to focus in on some things that we think is going to be important to a wide group of people within our organization.

And within that realm one of the things that is often measured is productivity. And the old equation, the equation of old, was if people are more productive then we will have a greater level of performance. And that’s even changing to the degree that productivity is no longer viewed through one lens. That one lens used to be speed. Now we’re thinking about quality of effort. Quality and effort associated with being productive. So what we’re saying is that it might take me the same amount of time to do this but do I have a better quality of output. So for example from a comms perspective, you’re putting together a briefing or an article that you’re going to share internally. It’s taken me the same time to create that content but the quality of content that I’ve created is far greater than what I’ve created in the past. That’s what we’re talking about in terms of measuring productivity in a different way.

So the new performance equation that we’re really working on at the moment is now looking at three buckets. What we’re saying is we really need to think about how we can energize, empower people in the organization. Thinking about how we can make sure that they’re getting work done. But then there’s also this lens that really started to rear its head in recent years of how can we be more agile as an organization. How can we be more resilient, how can we make sure that people are more flexible, have the skills that they need to do their job as the landscape continues to change.

I was at a customer event yesterday and the example that I gave was that at Microsoft the technology is coming to the fore so quickly that we are being forced to be agile in the way that we skill ourselves in terms of our understanding of the technology that we bring into the market. The speed of change is only getting faster so that era of resilience is very important to this new equation and what we’re saying here is if we can really focus in on engagement, productivity and resilience what we should start to see is high performance. And people ask me how do we categorize high performance? Well the traits that you tend to see is effective leadership a culture that fosters flexibility and wellbeing. Focus and alignment is an area, team collaboration, efficient process and I’m not going to go through all of them, but these are the attributes that you tend to see from high performing organizations.

So how can we help you as Microsoft to get to that stage of high performance. But before we get there just to give you a bit of data. That data is 28% people are more likely to report that they feel a sense of belonging if they’re engaged in the organization. They also feel more confident in leadership, that’s another part of engagement. And then the other part, last but not least, 46% more likely to report that their company does a good job communicating and that is because they’re engaged in what’s happening within the organization. So just some data to really help you bring that home.

But what I wanted to do is just give you a whistle stop tour of Microsoft Viva, and I’m not going to go into all of the specific applications because we’re going to focus in on the communication stack and a bit around sort of performance and goals today.

So there is a set of applications in this top left hand corner that is designed to really help drive a sense of mission and alignment in the organization. Making sure that people are really clear on the objectives, what’s happening within the organization, and how they can have an impact.

To the right hand side is thinking about those tools that is going to allow you to have easy access to the resources, to get things done effectively. Also thinking about how we upskill, re-skill people and make the learning journey more seamless. So thinking about, and I made this point yesterday, when we talk about learning what we’re not talking about is mandatory learning. I think every organization does a good job with mandatory learning. In fact as long as we send out enough emails, we prompt enough people in leadership we can get mandatory learning done. But what we’re thinking about is the non-mandatory learning. The ability to weave in skilling, on the job learning, to be able to pivot in different directions as the industry, the market changes and so forth. So that’s an important bucket.

And the last piece here is we want to be able to understand and measure the impact of all of the things that we are doing within our organization. I’m sure that there are some folk on this call that will have some responsibility for gathering feedback and intelligence around Employee Engagement through an employee survey. We can deliver that through something like Glint, but also thinking about the working behaviours that will have an impact on how we’re getting things done. So an example that we could use with Viva Insights is really understanding how much time people spend in different types of meetings. And what we’re clear on is when people spend a lot of time in long and large meetings, so meetings that are over an hour and has more than nine people in it, it’s very unlikely that decisions will be made in those meetings. So what is the balance between being in those long and large meetings versus being in shorter smaller group size meetings where everybody on that call can have an impact. That’s the example. So we want to be able to compare that to how people feel about the situation within the workplace and so forth.

So across the landscape this is the entire Viva Suite platform, but for today’s call I will be focusing in on these particular applications: Viva Goals, Viva Engage, Viva Amplify and Viva Connections.

So as I mentioned there is a different dynamic since we’ve moved into this world of hybrid working and what that’s rearing is a lot of paranoia at leadership level. So our Work Trend Index reported that the general feedback is people are working longer and harder than ever, but leaders are more and more concerned about the important stuff not being done. So the whole idea of working from home – potentially turning on your laptop at 7:00am and forgetting what’s happening through the day because you’re just working. Before you know it it’s 7:00pm in the evening, you’ve done a 12-hour shift. So you’re working harder than you’ve worked previously because you don’t have any commute time. Your commute time has been absorbed by working both ways and then of course there’s this whole notion of back-to-back meetings. Now we put meetings in people’s diary instead of having a water cooler conversation.

So there’s a lot of things that are changing but the important work is not getting done. That’s the view of leadership. And the whole idea is there is a lot of things that are happening within the organization to try and articulate performance. You’ll find that there’s objectives in certain places, there will be business strategies, there will be rhythm documents, there’ll be projects, plans and so forth in different places. And then of course you’ll have goals and so forth that are set by people. Somehow the organization needs to piece all of this together to then be able to articulate exactly where we are around performance. And a lot of this is fragmented. As you can see here there’s different types of applications that are being used for each of those different verticals. So the interesting piece here is there are a group of people within the organization that are heavily responsible for making sure that performance is articulated well to the business, and that is the communication team. Somehow you’ve got to weave all of this information together coming from different places to be able to create this compelling narrative of where the organization is at the moment.

How can we make that life a little bit easier for you? How can we help people across the organization to have clear visibility on what those objectives are? In fact what role are they playing in reaching that particular objective? And this is where we start to instil a sense of purpose in individuals. This is how we start to give more visibility to performance. And what you’ll find is that what the communications team can shift to becoming, is more so a mouthpiece to amplify the data and information that is readily available to everyone across the organization.

So when I talk about Viva Goals it’s really based on the existing framework of OKRs, which is objectives and key results. And the whole idea is that you want a proven goal setting framework that helps with alignment, focus and business outcomes. And the whole idea is we really want to focus in on having some stretch objectives and really understanding if this is a stretch objective for an individual or for the organization. What are the key results that are going to drive those objectives? And those key results have to be measurable, they have to be time bound and actionable. So if we can do that, have those key results that are effectively linked to those activities that we are doing on a day-to-day basis, what we can do is show a clear line of direction in terms of the activities that individuals are doing on a day-to-day basis that are contributing to the key results that are effectively driving those objectives that we’re trying to achieve as individuals or as a team or an organization.

So the best way for me to be able to visualize this is we find that giving people in the organization a clear view on missions, values and cultures, strategy and priority, that’s quite straightforward. A lot of this we’ll find on the intranet. If we were to go into each of your organization websites we’ll be able to find most of this information and it’s articulated in quite a simple way. Where it starts to become a bit grey is this area. What are the objectives and who’s responsible for what and what are the key results that we need to deliver that’s going to help us reach those objectives. And what are people working on on a day-to-day basis? What are those key initiatives? What are those projects that are going to drive those key results? And more importantly where are they? Where are they at the moment, where are we on this on this scale? Are we ahead of the curve, are we behind the curve, are we challenged, have we not started yet? Where are we? These are all of the things that the business is relying upon the communication team to help to convey.

So the rule behind this OKR framework is if we could be very clear on what those objectives are, and then who owns the key results related to those objectives, and we’ve got a clear indication of what are the key initiatives and projects that need to be delivered. What we can start to do is with those key initiatives and projects have a clearer indication of what those key results are which in turn will give us a clear indication of how we are performing against those business objectives. That’s the whole idea behind the OKR framework. And what we’re saying here is 96% of employees who use OKRs understand how their work ties into the broader company goals. And that is probably one of the toughest parts that the communication team has to communicate on a regular basis. To the best of my knowledge this is being done through information that’s being placed on the intranet. So delegate access or leadership communication into the business. This is being done through email, this is also being done through town halls at certain periods of the year and so forth.

So thinking about all of those briefings, communications that you’re doing, all of the written communication that’s being sent out. What we’re trying to articulate is not just what can you take advantage of in this business, but where are we, where is our performance, this is the direction that we’re going in, this is what the future looks like for us, is part of that. So if we’re utilizing OKRs, 96% of people are very clear on exactly how they’re contributing to the overall objective of the organization.

This is an example of how we bring this technology into the flow of work. So as you can see here, I’m in an M365 environment. This is accessible within Teams. The whole idea here is for me to demonstrate very quickly how we can show how an objective at an organizational level can be trickled down into departments, who can be accountable for some of these activities. So I’ll use the first one as an example. Become an industry leader in generative AI adoption. That’s what we want to achieve as Contoso, this organization. And as you can see here the owner is Patty. So if we fast forward, Patty also has some key results that are going to drive this generative AI adoption. That is 80% have completed the necessary Copilot training, companywide roll out of Copilot, and show a 25% return on investment in year one. Those are the key results that are measurable, they’re actionable, and we’ve given ourselves a timebound to deliver.

What’s interesting here is that you can see that objective overall is on track, and that is being driven by these particular outcomes here. Which is on track, behind, and in progress. So the whole idea is I want to understandvwho is accountable for this at different stages of the organization or different parts of the organization. What I’ve got here is I can show you that the IT team and the marketing team have built their objectives directly from the company objective of being an industry leader in generative AI adoption. And what we’re saying here is for the IT team their objective as you can see here led by Diego is to deliver on the adoption strategy for Copilot that is 500 assigned licenses and an 100% completion rate of the Copilot Academy training. That’s the example.

Now in the same breath the marketing team also has accountability to this overall objective here, which is to leverage generative AI for more efficient delivery of services. And it’s given you some tangible examples and key results. 100% completion of Copilot Academy training but also produce 20% more marketing material by utilizing generative AI. Those are the actions that the marketing team is going to take and I’ve also shown you the actions that the IT team are going to take to contribute to that overall objective. And as you can see for each of these we can see exactly where they are in the process.

One of the questions I normally get is how is this updated? Several ways to do so. We can do this manually by the owner going in and updating that particular record manually, or you could link it to systems such as tasks, your task systems. You can link it to Jira, projects for the web. So thinking about those project management solutions that you could be using at the moment to do some of this, you could link them into this platform to automate that process of updating. And as you can see here, depending on how you set the rules this is visible to everybody in the organization, or those people that would need to see this. So given a real clear understanding of how marketing, IT are contributing to the overall objective of the organization.

And this is where it starts to get a bit fun. So, an organization can create a really large strategy document. This is exactly where we want to get to. So, the question is how can Copilot start to help us around building these OKRs out in the platform? So what I can do is I can use Copilot for M365 search functionality. I can append a strategy document, so this one’s saying a Q4 marketing initiative, and I can ask Copilot to help me to create some OKRs. And the whole idea is I want Copilot to help me create a stretch objective and I want Copilot to also support me with giving some key results that is going to drive that stretch objective. So I can do that quite simply through using generative AI. And you’ll find out a lot of the tools that we talk about today, that’s the direction that we’re going in, is that there will be some version of generative AI in there that will support the way that you compose, understand, summarize and leverage that particular application.

So that was Viva Goals. So let’s now talk about how does your organization approach mass communication with so many channels? And this is partly our fault. We’ve given you the options for email, Teams is available to you, SharePoint is available as a communication channel, and not last but not least is Viva Engage. So there’s four communication channels to leverage. So what my customers ask me a lot of the time is, what’s the right channel for us to use for this particular reason? How do leaders communicate with employees today? Another important question. And to what extent do you measure impact of communication? Those are things that I’d like you to think about as we start to go through this area of communication in this particular presentation.

How we think we can support you is with these three applications. Viva Amplify, Viva Connections, and Viva Engage. The type of things that we’re talking about is how we start to streamline and target news to specific users within the organization. Having a single application that is going to give you a view on employee experience and be your window into that experience in the organization and that it’s hyper personalized for each individual in your organization.

So first things first, let’s talk about what you have available to you now, and if you were to purchase this Communications and Communities bundle what would it cost and what are the type of extra features that you can get from it. So you can see here for those who have E3, F1, F3, E5 licensing you get access to a seeded version of, which was formerly known as Yammer, is now Viva Engage. You’ll have community options, conversation options. Viva Connections is available to you, compliance. All of these areas are there up to this particular license set. And then with the premium features you’ll start to see things such as leadership corner, ask me anything events, which is known as AMAs, storyline delegate posting. Viva Amplify is a standalone application that will help to orchestrate communication. Multi-instances of Viva Connections as an example. But we’ll get into it. But the most important thing is how it would be licensed is it would be tenant wide and it would be as a starting point $2 per user per person, sorry $2 per person per month is what we would be looking at for this particular app bundle of applications. And this is before looking at what discounts and so forth is available to you through your enterprise agreement. The standard, standardized price for this is $2 per user per month.

So let’s get into it. So architecture wise, what you will currently have access to for those who do not have any premium features of the Viva Communications and Community stack is of course you’ve got access to Outlook. That’s your exchange online, you’ve got your SharePoint Online and then you’ve also got Viva Engage, formerly known as Yammer. The tools that your colleagues will be seeing, so all colleagues will have access to Viva Connections if it has been deployed and this is where you can start to position news feeds and targeted content to people in the organization. You can also leverage Viva Engage for storylines, communities and live video feed features. But the most important thing to understand here is these are the personas that we’re really focused on, how can we help to use, leverage this platform to make leadership communication more effective? How can we be more efficient as internal communicators through this type of platform? And then thinking about how we reach everybody in the organization. This is currently what’s available to you as a seeded version, so what will come with your Enterprise M365 licensing.

Now fast forward if you were to purchase the Communications and Community skew you start to see that there’s a lot more available in terms of communication features. So just thinking about what we can do in Connections is one, we can now have multiple instances for Connections, depending on how you want to structure the branding and the company application. Thinking about Viva Engage and the additional features that are available in terms of analytics, answers, ask me anything events, leadership corner. All of this stuff that we’ll start to get into in a little bit. And then Amplify pretty much underpins the entire suite of applications that we’re talking about here. And the whole idea but with Amplify is that you want to create content once and distribute it to one or multiples of the four channels available across the M365 estate. So I want to create a content once, let’s just say I created it in SharePoint. In a SharePoint view I can also distribute that to Outlook to Teams, to Viva Engage. So I create it once, I send it out to the channels that I think is relevant, I target specific users, but most importantly I’ve now got a helicopter view of analytics associated with that.

So let’s talk about the employee communications framework that we’ve got available. So the first things first is the company app. When we think about the company app this is Viva Connections. Viva Connections is what we brand it as but this will be available as on the side ribbon of Teams. All of the Viva applications are available within Teams because that’s where we spend most of our time working. So just thinking about the first thing that we do when we start our working day is we open our laptop and we want to check our calendar, we want to check our calendar, we want to check our chat messages, we want to check our emails, to understand what’s happening, what are the things that I need to action and take care of so I can get my day started. So we want this place to be the first place where you can start to experience what our organization has to offer and what we can do with this Connections page is one, we can rebrand it to whatever you want it to be called for your organization. You can change the logo there and this is effectively your company app.

You can see here that there’s some prime real estate at the top where we can have announcements, but then we also can feed in SharePoint sites to share featured news with people in our organization.

The dashboard cards is the bit that’s really starting to make a difference for people in the organizations that are utilizing Viva Connections. And the whole idea behind the dashboard cards is it should give me some quick actions that I can take that are relevant to me as an individual. So the type of things that we do is you should be able to link this adaptive card into a back office solution potentially where you can quickly book leave without leaving this screen. Example is really driving a personalized or targeted view on specific topics like learning content or knowledge content that we want to share with people. So the whole idea behind this dashboard card set is these dashboard cards will be targeted to specific groups in your organization and it’ll be using Active Directory distribution groups.

Let’s think about managers. There may be a set of approval cards that we want to give to them onl,y so they’re the only ones that will see that dashboard card for approving expenses versus someone who’s not a manager. Versus let’s use a scenario of someone has returned from long-term sickness, and we want to ramp them back up to full productivity. We might target those specific users with a specific dashboard card so that they can take some quick actions there.
So just thinking about the audience and who we want to target, we can have this hyper personalized view where I as an individual can also manage the way that I see these adaptive cards that are available to me.

And then of course we’ve got the traditional sense of being able to hyperlink into different systems, outlets, that we think is useful for our organization.

So here’s some examples of being able to use this adaptive card to be able to take some quick actions. Why not book leave quite quickly. Why not target specific users with a frequently asked questions set, so an FAQ document that’s related to a specific topic. For example, Copilot Champions we might want to target them specifically with an FAQ.

This is an example of what it would look like on mobile. So the Viva Connections company app should be rendered correctly for mobile. As you can see here you can take some quick actions. So examples of leveraging ServiceNow, Workday, and Real Cloud, as well or Moveworks bot.

And the last pieces around Viva Connections is the ability to brand it specifically for your organization. So really making sure that you use this as a window into your culture, how we engage people around your branding, and what’s important to them. Leveraging that real estate at the top to share important news and announcements, really having a hyper personalized view, but more importantly you can see here that it’s heavily branded for the organizations that utilize and that also works in mobile format as well. So just really thinking about where we want our organization to be around our branding and how people start to really intertwine with our culture.

Second bit, intranet. So for those organizations that still want to have a more traditional style intranet page, that’s still available to you. But I mean what you can do is leverage more of a hybrid feel where you still have these adaptive cards available, but you still have the sort of website featured SharePoint site that is used as an intranet. So that option is there.
Now let’s talk about social engagement. Very interestingly, you’ll find that a lot of people now are leveraging social platforms. So things such as self-promotion, but also it’s become a really important source of learning. Why I think this is so important to organizations out there is simply because visibility has changed. Managers are now not in a place where they see every individual in their team on a day-to-day basis. Leaders can no longer attend one office and walk around the shop floor effectively and see everyone in the organization. Leadership visibility is really important. I can, someone can join an organization and not meet the people in the direct team for a number of months. So how do you, how do you promote yourself internally? How do you build your own social profile internally? How do you start to build a wider network than the people that you work with directly? How do you start to crowdsource knowledge as people are doing on social platforms these days? This is the type of thing that can be achieved through leveraging a social platform like Viva Engage.

So the new features that you’ll start to see that are above and beyond what’s available with the current version of Viva Engage, so the seeded version, is things like Copilot within Viva Engage which is going to help people understand what’s happening on the social platform. What are the things to listen out for at the moment? How can it help me get involved in crafting some content on the platform?

Leadership Corner is really shining the light and visibility on leaders. What are they talking about? What’s important? How are they messaging and communicating with the organization?

AMA events is really about how we create an event-based Q&A session. And this has become really important for having an extended view of Q&A. Because normally what tends to happen is we have a session, a live town hall with our leadership team, and not everyone gets to answer all of their questions, gets their questions answered. And the whole idea behind an AMA event is you could start an AMA event before that session so you can start to gather some questions. Or you could continue this event for a period of time after. In fact you could also use an AMA event to engage with a particular part of the organization that you normally don’t tend to so. For example, in Microsoft our product teams host AMA event quarterly and the whole idea behind it is I can now use this event time to go and ask a specific Q&A question that can be moderated, pushed out into the public hemisphere for people to also upvote those particular question.

Campaign features, and we’ll talk about some of this ‘coz I’ve got some visuals for it. Campaign features really allows you to drive a sense of engagement around specific topics.

Answers is how we can start to crowdsource answers from across the organizations where we can use AI to tap subject matter experts on the shoulder.

Intelligent importer is there to automate the process of Q&A as and when required.
And of course if you’re using this platform for all of these benefits there’s a whole host of analytics that’s available to you.

So when we talk about Leadership Corner we talk about people having their own profile and storyline, but then we also want to think about their communities that they’re following and who they’re following at the moment. But for leaders, the whole idea behind Leadership Corner is dependent on how the organization is structured. Each individual will automatically follow people in their upline. This means that anytime someone in their upline posts or communicates on the platform, that post is prioritized in the feed of that particular individual. So thinking about as an individual, my manager, my manager’s manager, skip level all the way to CEO. I will automatically follow them on this platform when we leverage Leadership Corner.

What I want to be able to do is share some impactful insights and have impactful analytics about what’s happening. My social presence as a leader in the organization.

And then of course you’ve got access to rich media as well that you can share. So very similar to the social platforms that we’re utilizing outside.

Communities is a feature that’s been there already and was part of Yammer. But how we think we can show some value with Communities is thinking about how we get a wider set of Communities of practice and how we leverage some really cool features within those Communities. The type of things that I’m talking about is automating Q&As within a Community, and thinking about driving a campaign in that Community. Those are the type of things that we’re talking about that can really start to show value so thinking about how we can take away the burden of different service delivery partners.

So for example IT having a resource community in the platform where people can go and get information resources, ask questions that are automated. That should hopefully reduce the amount of tickets that are going to the service desk for IT. So being able to discover those communities.

This is an example of creating a Copilot Champions community. And, interestingly, one of the features of communities is that you can distinguish between a verified community and a community that is sort of just been spun up unofficially. So verified communities that are business owned communities effectively where you can go and seek information resources and so forth.
As you can also see that there’s Copilot features available within the community as well. This is an example of being able to automate the Q&A process within a community and as you can see here you’ve got the ability to upvote a question and also verify that this is the best answer.

So if I start to type in “What is Microsoft Viva” it should automatically pop up with this response that Lynn has provided already. Rather than waiting for someone to answer that question again.

And for those who deployed a premium version of Viva Engage and are also looking at Copilot, what we are doing for our customers is we have a pre-built Copilot community that will be available. And the whole idea is anyone that receives a Copilot license will automatically be enrolled into that Community. It will give you conversation starters, you can leverage intelligent importer to automate the FAQ Q&A process with Copilot, and then it’ll also give you a number of conversation starters to really get the community moving forward.

Now, bringing together the performance element with also the whole idea of sharing content and having a community filled within the Viva Engage platform. What we’re expecting to happen is the ability to embed goals into a specific community. So thinking about having a resource group around diversity and inclusion. There may be some specific goals that we want to be able to achieve organization wide through diversity and inclusion. What we can do, embed those OKRs and the tracking of it into that community so we can also understand in this community of practice this is how we’re coming along in terms of our performance. So that’s what we expect to have a part where we can start to add and give a view on how this particular objective is currently landing. So thinking about how we start to align communities of practice with performance is something that we’re really excited about at Microsoft.

So this is an example of Leadership Corner once again. The ability to add my own stories, short stories, similar to what we see on other social platforms. Prioritized information from leaders, AMA events that are available for leaders to go and respond to, or the communication team, those who are leading the AMA event.

Answers is something that we really leverage at Microsoft, and the whole idea is rather than me just being reliant upon my own network within the organization I can simply go to this platform and ask a question in the hope that someone will help me answer that. And what it will do is AI will look for any questions that have been asked that are similar to what you’re asking now, and give you a view of what the best answers are. It will also give you the ability to upvote on questions that you are also interested in. And last but not least it will also nudge subject matter experts on the shoulder and let them know that there’s a question on the platform that we think you can help your colleague with. So the whole idea is I want to be able to leverage the wider network and community to help me get the answers I need to do my job.

And this is just an example of the analytics that is available. And I’m conscious that we’re short of time so I’m going to try and whistle through Amplify very quickly. But the whole idea is network analysis. Leaders will have their own view on sentiment and we can drive this down to specific post that leaders are putting on the social platform. What was the sentiment? What was the type of comments that people were making behind this? That type of analytics is available. And for the comms folk that use delegate access quite a lot, yes as someone that has been given delegate access to a leader’s profile you can also view the analytics on behalf of those leaders.

So I’m not going to go into this video here cuz I know we’re short of time. But the whole idea behind it is we can leverage Copilot to craft content for our users.

What’s coming down the line is even further integration with Viva Engage and the Teams platform. And the whole idea is let’s just say I’m a leader within the organization and I want to post something onto the social platform, make an announcement. I do not necessarily have to leave Teams to be able to do that. If I go to my Teams screen, I click on my profile, I can go straight to my storyline from here. As an example, I can craft that content as an announcement, then I can post that announcement without having to leave the Teams window. So what you’ll start to see over the next 12 months is even more integration with Viva Engage and Teams.

Last but not least I we just want to talk a little bit for the last sort of five minutes about Amplify, and then we’ll have a few Q&A questions. And happy to pick up some stuff offline.

But the whole idea behind Amplify is to create content once in one place. When I create that content I want to be able to select the right channel that I want to send that content on. When I push that content out I want to have a helicopter view on how that content is landing on those different channels that I’ve sent that publication to. That’s what I’m trying to achieve with Viva Amplify.
So when I start up Viva Amplify, effectively what it allow me to do is to automatically set up a Teams channel in the background, and that is for all of those users that are part of that campaign. That gives us the ability to communicate about what’s happening with this campaign and we class a campaign as a series of publications that are interlinked. So let’s just say for example the comms team need to help HR send out some content on benefits changes. So you’ll have a benefits enrolment campaign that is set up. You’ll have people from different stakeholders, from different parts of the business, that are involved in that campaign. So you’ll have maybe HR people in there that are approvers of the campaign, you’ll have people in the internal comms team that are creators and owners of the campaign, for example. So they’ll work together. You’ve got a set of templates that you can leverage to create your content. And as you can see here I can invite people and manage the membership of people in the particular campaign.

What I can also see is all the recent publications that we’ve created and where they are. So I can see that this one is published. I can see straight away that this has been viewed by 18,000 people. I can see that this one is in the process of publishing. This one is in the approval stage, and we’re still drafting this content. So really just giving you that view of where we are in that particular campaign.

So the whole idea is I go into this view where I create content here and what we’re looking at is content in the Outlook view. But if I click on the edit piece I can choose the recipients or the distribution group that I want to send this to. I can set up an approval process if I want this to be viewed before it’s published out to the business. I can choose once again who those approvers are. And then I can set a message, send that out, publish, and it will do that automatically. But the most important piece, and I’m going backwards here, is that when I create that content once I can edit it and look at it from a SharePoint, a Viva Engage perspective. And also Teams. And what will happen is that that document will render into the type of view that it will be for that particular solution that I’m sending it on. So we can do it all once and in the same place have an approval process, send it out, be ready to publish. And the most important thing is because I’ve sent it out from one place rather than going into SharePoint, creating content, and sending it out, I’m no longer relying upon each separate channel to provide me with analytics.

What I can see here is that we’ve pushed it out to three channels, 18,000 people have viewed it, what channels are they viewing it on. Outlook, SharePoint and Teams – it looks like Outlook is probably the best place to send this type of information on. I can also see who’s promoting this content, so who’s sharing it further. And it tends to be that when this content is sent out it is more so promoted in SharePoint and Teams, and as you can see here it’s broken down by the application, the views, the promotions, the comments, positive, negative, neutral.

But depending on the attributes you have in Active Directory, I can cut this data further, potentially into geographic groupings of where people are in the organization and so forth.

I want to leave some time for Q&A so I’ll happily post this particular video link which is a case study from CBR where they’re looking at the entire communication suite and how it’s going to help them as an organization. I’ll post this on my LinkedIn page after for people to pick up.

So look I’m going to pause there. I’ve done a lot of talking. There is 5 minutes. We was hoping to have a little bit more time but time has run a little bit short. So if there’s any questions I’ll hand over to Alex. If there was any questions in the chat that I can quickly answer.

Alex Graves:

Alvin, I think firstly thank you very very very very much for that. And I think all of the comments in all the chat are saying wow what a fantastic overview there, you’ve really given me some good insights and actually a lot of the questions that are coming through you’ve covered them throughout the presentation as we’ve gone along. So that’s really fantastic. So thank you very much.

There’s some really specific ones, like some people want to know how to change some certain things in Engage and is it a licensing thing. On that, we’ll pick up with those specific questions afterwards.

But one of the questions that I just wanted to ask you, and ask you in your experience was how do you see people using Viva Engage fitting alongside or perhaps into an intranet and, or Connections.

Alvin Ashford-Quaye:

It’s a very good question. So, the example of use is Microsoft. 200,000 users. And our communications team figured out that every time they send an email, or our leader Satya sends an email, the entire business stops. Not really good when you’re a trillion dollar business and an email has gone out from the CEO and everybody stops working. Not really good for productivity. So what they figured out is if we could move influential leaders’ communication onto that social platform, what it will allow users in the organization to do is digest the information in their own time without grinding the business to a holt.

So when we think about using it alongside Viva Connections, the whole idea is we want to give people a window into the employee experience. But the whole idea behind a social platform is to have two-way dialogue. It is to ambiently push information and reach people at the time that is suitable to them, where they can digest and have a two-way dialogue with it.
We see Connections as the place where it’s going to surface stuff that’s important. So the type of things that you’ll see in Connections is I could follow people in Connections that I’m interested in hearing more about from the social platform. So what it will do is it will drip feed me information from the social platform that is related to people that I follow. This is not groundbreaking we’re doing this already on Facebook. We’re doing this already on Instagram. The people that we follow are the people that we see content from and that’s what’s going to happen in the workplace. So that’s how we would use them together, is information social feeds and so forth will pull through from the platform into Viva Connections, the company app.

Alex Graves:

Thank you. And one other thing on Viva Engage, so how do you see that for perhaps and deskless, those frontline workers. How are they using Viva Engage if they don’t currently use the other Microsoft apps?

Alvin Ashford-Quaye:

So we try to make everything simple for you. Our world view is that every user of Microsoft tools from a collaboration perspective should have one application. Teams. Once you have Teams on your mobile phone that will give you access to all of the Viva applications that are necessary to you. So the whole idea is when I open up my Teams on mobile device the first thing that we want to pop up to them is that company app. And from that company app they can start to consume all of these experiences. So this favours people that are on the go. They don’t have to have a separate Yammer or Viva Engage application on their mobile to have this experience. And hopefully you caught the bit where I showed the integration with Teams and Viva Engage. So the whole idea is they will no longer have to toggle between the two applications. In fact they can start to post, communicate, like, and so forth directly from their Teams chat. That’s where we’re going to for frontline users.

Alex Graves:

So I think with two minutes to go unless anybody has any other questions that are coming through. Let me just do a quick refresh on that one. And as I said, anybody who’s asked a specific question, we’ve just had one about Viva Pulse and Viva Glint. I’ll pick that one up separately. I think we’ll leave that one for the next session.

Do you have an implementation communications plans to launch these apps in the business? I’ll take that one. So I know that when I spoke to Microsoft about this before, part of the voice of the customer early adopters program. One of the things that we’ve talked about is being able to create a bundle, like you talked about the Copilot one, where you’ve got like a prepackage campaign for rolling these out. That’s something that I think we need to speak to Microsoft about, how we can prepackage these into a Viva Amplify campaign package. But again I think I’ll pick that one up separately. But it is possible to launch these apps with the technology being the enabler like Viva Amplify, for example.

So with one minute to go I just finally want to say thank you very much Alvin. One thing that you’ve done fantastically well is to make it really simple for everybody to understand and the analogy of like going to a restaurant – everybody can relate to it. Everybody can relate to it. And you gave some fantastic, good demos and really good examples and I hope that everybody has understood all the applications available to them, particularly in the C&C bundle.

We’ll be following up tomorrow with a recap of everything you’ve heard today and also a link to the recording. And as Alvin said he’ll be posting some links on his own LinkedIn if you want to connect with Alvin. And we’ll be doing that from our Silicon Reef one as well. And again please don’t hesitate to reach out to myself at Silicon Reef, so [email protected], or Alvin on LinkedIn, or however other way they can reach you Alvin if you have any other questions.

Thank you everybody and thanks to Alvin. Thank you very much everyone, cheers guys thanks a lot.