31 Jan
Microsoft VIVA Insights: Foster Productivity and Wellbeing In a Hybrid Workplace
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index Report, “The Next Great Disruption is Hybrid Work – Are we ready?”, has spoken about the three major employee experience trends that have emerged post the COVID-19 pandemic, which will transform the future of work in 2021 and beyond –
- Over 70% of workers want flexible remote work options to continue. Therefore, employee productivity will need to be defined much more broadly – inclusive of collaboration, learning, and well-being, while ensuring flexibility in when, where, and how people work.
- Employees are struggling, and leaders need to find new ways to help them. However, with remote work, there are fewer impromptu encounters to ask employees, “Hey, how are you?”
- Employees are overwhelmed. 54% feel overworked, 39% feel exhausted. Time spent in Microsoft Teams meetings has more than doubled (2.5X) globally. The average Teams user is sending 45% more chats per week and 42% more chats per person after hours.
Hybrid work is the future and is inevitable. Moreover, one of the key takeaways from the disruption caused by COVID-19 is that employee experience is always at the heart of an organization’s success. Employee well-being drives innovation, productivity, and engagement at the workplace. Therefore, managers, leaders, and individual employees need the insights to inculcate healthier work habits and build a more conducive work environment that reduces employee burnout.
This blog explores how VIVA Insights, Microsoft’s newest offering in the employee experience space, can help gather the required data to foster productivity and well-being in a hybrid workplace.
Exploring VIVA Insights
For readers new to VIVA, Microsoft’s employee experience platform comprises four modules that deliver modern employee experiences across knowledge, learning, communications, and insights within Microsoft Teams, all in the flow of an employee’s daily work.
VIVA Insights leverages MyAnalytics, Microsoft Workplace Analytics, and Exchange Online to provide data-driven, actionable insights that help manage employee well-being and productivity. Companies that prioritize people experience and holistic well-being of employees outperform their peers in earnings and stock appreciation.
For example, an individual employee receives personalized reminders to book focus time and take regular mental breaks. Managers and leaders can get granular-level insights into work patterns that indicate burnout and help minimize attrition.
While personal insights are privacy protected and visible only to the individual employee, managerial and leadership insights are protected with safety nets like de-identification, differential privacy by default, and aggregation.
Additionally, VIVA can help address unique business challenges through additional data sources and advanced insights on Glink, LinkedIn, and Headspace.
Fostering productivity and well-being in a hybrid workplace with Microsoft VIVA Insights
Let’s explore how VIVA Insights enables individuals, managers, and leaders to build better work habits and foster productivity and well-being in the hybrid work setup.
1. For individuals
- Seamlessly manage daily asks across chats, email, and shared documents in a single place within Teams while taking out time for regular one-on-one meetings to maintain strong work networks.
- A daily briefing email from Cortana (available in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian) that helps people kickstart their workday with prompts and insights on meetings to prepare for, opportunities to connect, and commitments to follow through.
- Focus plan in MyAnalytics enables employees to reserve up to four hours every day for uninterrupted work, indicate preference of time of day for focus time, and mute Teams notifications to reduce distractions.
- A virtual commute experience to help employees peacefully wrap up their workday with reminders to leave work, a quick guide to close out the day’s tasks, preview what’s on the plate for the next day, and mindfully reflect on how they felt during the day.
- Integration with Headspace to deliver a curated set of guided meditations that help employees recoup their mental energy.
- The Delay Delivery inline suggestion feature in Outlook (currently available with Microsoft 365 E5) helps users schedule email delivery in line with the respective time zones of the recipients.
2. For Managers and Leaders
- Managers may look into work trends and patterns that cause burnout, such as too little focus time, stretching beyond work hours, and meeting overload.
- A Glint Microsoft BI dashboard combines feedback from Glint’s “how people feel” with data from VIVA Insights about “how people work” to identify where individuals and teams are struggling, modify work practices, and study the impact of these changes.
- To build organizational resilience and boost overall employee satisfaction and engagement, leaders can use insights from Microsoft VIVA and identify ways to break down silos, strengthen existing connections, and build cohesion.
- An open-source repository of low-code pre-built visualizations, reports, and functions – available for Workplace Analytics customers – to help leaders deep dive and address specific business challenges.
Besides data from Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and other Microsoft 365 apps, leaders can also access and realize exponential value from data from existing collaboration tools and services, including Slack, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, etc.
Microsoft VIVA Insights Pricing
Pricing of VIVA Insights is as follows –
- Free tier – includes the VIVA Insight app (similar to the MyAnalytics app)
- Managerial and organizational insights require a Workplace Analytics license (to be renamed VIVA Insight license) priced at $2 per seat/per month for Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5 subscriptions and $6 per seat/per month if adding to any other license level.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acuvate helps clients deploy Microsoft VIVA Insights to foster productivity, enhance well-being and deliver exceptional employee engagement.
Our autonomous SharePoint intranet solution, Mesh 3.0, connects well with VIVA and complements its capabilities to provide wholesome, end-to-end experiences to users. We help clients surface Mesh 3.0 within Teams to bring together news, conversations, and information into the natural flow of an employee’s work with VIVA Connections.
To know more about Mesh 3.0 and Microsoft VIVA Insights, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.
Poonam Chug is AVP - SaaS Strategy & Business. She has worked in various areas, right from designing and executing sales & account management strategies to reengineering digital workplace solutions. With her determined focus on our mission and progressive approach, she has achieved customer delight in the space of AI, Knowledge Mining, Content & Collaboration, Virtual Assistants, RPA and more. Backed with a deep understanding of customer needs and technology, she leads the SaaS business unit with an upshot of maximizing revenue while ensuring customer satisfaction.
Poonam Chug