Empowering employees with Microsoft Viva and Copilot

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Modern Work – 2024 priorities

Emergence of AI has revolutionized the approach to doing business. And this also means to modernization of workplace – for companies to grow in 2024, they need to:

Increase productivity: companies have to modernize their communications. But that is not all – at the same time, they need to protect endpoints, apps and identities for their users. Advanced security posture is therefore a must.
Enhance performance: a highly performing organization is the one that keeps its employees engaged and energized. To increase the business resiliency, it is best to use data-driven approach which allows you to measure, assess and take informed decisions and actions.

And to do both organizations need to use AI and automation. A new, AI-powered way of working transforms both productivity and performance and brings the to the next level. Together with process automation, artificial intelligence is the most successful means of improving – and modernizing – your workplace.

Smarter workplace

So, what are the solutions to modernize your workplace? Microsoft offers a wide portfolio of AI-fueled technologies that bring automation and innovation into offices around the world. Below are the key ones. In this publication, we want to focus on one of these accelerators – Microsoft Viva.

Microsoft Viva – force of numbers

If driven, engaged and energized employees are pivotal to company’s growth in performance, then we need to focus on Microsoft Viva. Let’s bring some numbers first[1]. Since its beginning, Viva has helped:

Reduced onboarding time by 50%
Improved worker productivity (by 75% reduction in search time)
Reduced employee attrition by 20%

Empowering your employees with Microsoft Viva

The main objective of Microsoft Viva is to make workers more productive. First step towards it is to listen to what they need and in collecting that feedback, managers might want to utilize Viva Goals functionality. A recently launched solution is a goal setting and OKR (objectives and key results) tool for management. It not only allows for continuous feedback flow – what Viva Goals also does is bring clarity to teams as to what is required of them through transparent and effective goal setting.

New, advanced integrations in Viva Goals bring productivity onto the next level. They include:

Enhanced Microsoft Teams app (to collaborate on OKRs within teams)
Extension in Azure DevOps to complete work items
Connection to Power BI datasets to track KPIs and key results
Automatic project management updates via Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project

Modernizing internal collaboration and connection

The shift onto a hybrid work model increased productivity, yet for 68% of leaders it also made team cohesion challenging. In order to rebuild it, leaders need tools to enable more consistent communication and ongoing connection – no matter how and where their employees work. Thanks to Microsoft Viva, management and leadership keep everyone in the loop but also makes them feel included and engaged in day-to-day events.

And thanks to a newly introduced Viva functionality – Leadership Concern in Viva Engage – teams and workers are closer, even when working across multiple digital communities, participating in virtual events, etc.

This default functionality creates a space for leaders for open dialog but also encourages feedback across teams through news, events, meeting and surveys. A big help is also a possibility to use dashboard for metrics or employees’ sentiment and option to build and launch employee activities from a single place. Modern and intuitive.

What’s in store – Copilot in Viva apps

For business and IT leaders who are looking to modernize their workplace via AI or are simply planning their AI readiness – there comes Microsoft Copilot for Viva apps. AI-powered assistance for employee experience discovers new ways to boost employee self-service, satisfaction and productivity. And for management Copilot brings new ways to get data, insights and apps to guide and empower their workers to create a high-performance organization.

Copilot in Viva Insights enables workers to use natural language prompts to generate personalized, dynamic reports about their teams and organization and simplifies the query building process for analysts. This will be in preview early 2024.
Copilot in Viva Goals enables users to easily generate and refine goals with conversational AI and from existing documents and summarize and share goal progress. This will be available to all current Viva Goals customers in public preview December 2023, and GA early next year.
Copilot in Viva Engage helps inspire leaders and employees with AI-created conversation starters, prompts, and images, and enhances the quality of queries with suggested prompts. This will be in public preview in January 2024.
Copilot in Viva Learning allows users to easily create structured learning collections, find the right learning resources, and summarize learning content using conversational AI. This will be in private preview for joint Viva and SAP SuccessFactors customers by the end of 2023.
Copilot in Viva Glint enables leaders to summarize and analyze of employee comments from employee engagement surveys. This can provide a fresh way to explore feedback by asking questions through natural language. Available for private preview in January 2024.

One may want to ask – is it worth it?

According to the brand new report[2] from 15^th November 2023 – indeed it is. This data shows that:

77% people who’ve worked with Copilot said they don’t want to give it up.
in test that Microsoft ran, users were 29% faster across a series of tasks when working with Copilot.
70% said Copilot makes them feel more productive
68% said it improved the quality of their work

[1] All the quoted data comes from The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Viva, September 2022 (Forrester study commissioned by Microsoft)

[2] Work Trend Index Special Report M365