What is Microsoft Viva?

Guide to Microsoft Viva: What’s Inside

Since its launch in 2021, Microsoft Viva has helped organisations engage and connect their employees by unifying key tools.

But despite its continued success, Viva remains a bit of a mystery to many internal communication professionals. This guide demystifies Viva and explains how it can elevate your internal comms and improve the overall employee experience.

Let’s be honest – becoming an expert on every Microsoft 365 application is never going to make it to the top of the priority list for busy internal comms professionals. But as a tool that’s been created specifically to integrate employee experience applications and reduce the admin burden, Viva is certainly worth your attention.

Available as part of Microsoft 365 and built within Teams, Viva provides the ability to utilise your existing IT infrastructure in a more effective and streamlined way. It focuses on connection and integration, and it’s here to make your life easier.

Microsoft Viva is all about simplification; uniting and reframing existing products to enable internal communicators to do their best work.

Over the following three sections, we explain how Microsoft Viva works and how you can use it to level up your approach to internal communications.

What is Microsoft Viva?

In simple terms, Microsoft Viva is a suite of applications that come together to form an all-in employee experience platform.

Before Viva was introduced, Microsoft’s employee experience solution involved internal communicators working across numerous different M365 applications for different tasks, such as SharePoint for employee communication, Yammer for company-wide discussions, Teams for building communities and entirely different third-party platforms for goal-setting and strategy alignment.

While each of these tools might function perfectly well, the approach is all very…fragmented.

Juggling too many digital tools and channels can lead to tech overload and cause inefficiencies, which ultimately damages the qualify of our communications.

And this is exactly why Microsoft Viva is so valuable for busy in-house internal comms teams. It pulls everything together and makes the most of what you already have in order to amplify your impact.

Practically, Microsoft Viva applications are accessed via either the Teams mobile or desktop application. It’s not a new or separate platform, but instead a set of building blocks that come together to form an unrivalled employee experience solution.

“Microsoft Viva builds on the power of Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across five key areas – Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning, Objectives, and Knowledge in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best.” – Microsoft

One of Viva’s key benefits is its ability to integrate with existing employee experience systems and tools, such as Work Day and SAP Success Factors, making its features much more accessible to employees.

And as part of Viva’s growing ecosystem of tools, it offers a core series of applications that are particularly relevant and helpful for IC teams.

In the next section, we introduce the four Microsoft Viva applications that will help bring your internal communications to a new level.

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