Viva Engage brings people together around org-wide communications, communities, and knowledge sharing. Leaders, frontline workers, employees, and corporate communicators want the benefits of two-way dialog and community participation, but often wonder how to make sure relevant content reaches the right audiences while keeping public spaces safe for all.
When your network is thoughtfully crafted to match your business needs and reflect your culture, users can contribute openly with lots of benefits and minimal risk. To ensure it remains a productive and safe space for all, Engage provides capabilities for network administrators and corporate communicators to moderate content and for end users to control over what reaches them.
Set your Engage network up for success
Like a great party, first you must set up the room to create a welcoming vibe people can lean into right away. Careful planning at the network level can jumpstart engagement and save trouble later.
Define the purpose for the All Company community
By default, everyone in the organization is in this community, creating a central hub for connection and engagement. Some organizations use this as a valuable peer-to-peer sharing channel, while others find it to be noisy with a lack of purpose and flood of irrelevant information.
Many organizations see success turning “All Company” into more of a broadcast channel for company news while encouraging employees to post their content in specific communities or on their storylines. Consider renaming All Company to reflect its purpose, and restricting who can post to it.
Define a few Official Communities with dynamic group membership
Official Communities give people a signal around where to spend time and for what business purposes your organization intends to use Engage. Map them to important topics like leadership updates, business units, employee groups, company initiatives, or geographies, and then use dynamic group membership to get the right people in the community on day one.
Restrict communities to reduce new post noise
Restricting a community means only admins can post, but everyone can comment. In addition to considering this for All Company, you may want to consider restricted communities for communities with large membership, where you want to share leader and company news with control over who starts new conversations.
Post your usage policy
Ask users to accept your usage policy, and any behavioral expectations aligned with your culture and values, before they use Engage. You can edit and restart the acceptance flow any time. Consider letting users know you moderate this space in that policy; open communication about moderation helps users feel comfortable posting content because there are rules of engagement
Enable Report a Conversation
Users can notify admins of questionable or inappropriate content. Define a process to review and respond to issues when enabling this powerful feature. Report a Conversation is off by default in the Engage Admin Center.
Govern the “Move conversation” feature
Move conversation is great for getting discussions into the right place, but sometimes creates confusion among network and community members if someone moves a post without warning. Network administrators can decide if end users can move conversations with a setting in the Engage Admin Center. In communities, community admins can decide if members should be able to move conversations into their spaces. When members can’t move a conversation, roles like network administrators and corporate communicators can put conversations in the right place.
Decide who needs a role
Creating a healthy network requires network admins, corporate communicators, and community admins to work together.
Moderation at scale: How corporate communicators can shape discussions and interactions
Users with the corporate communicator role can do most moderation actions in Engage. This role sets the tone for others to follow, so know what’s available to prepare and plan for impact.
Use theme moderation for broad oversight and automatic action
Theme moderation is a powerful new AI capability in the Communications Dashboard that allows you to input themes that you want to monitor.
You may want to monitor themes to understand employee sentiment or to reduce amplification of conversation on certain topics. Themes pick up conversations based on contextual matches, not straight text.
When a conversation matches a theme, you can notify moderators, automatically mute the conversation, and/or take additional action such as blocking a post.1 Themes created are automatically applied across all languages, unlike keywords monitoring.
Theme moderation is available with Viva Employee Communications and Communities or Viva Suite license.
Create a targeted list for keyword monitoring
Keywords lists are best for terms that require moderation or intervention. Keyword monitoring looks for exact matches of characters, so consider common spellings for deep coverage.
Mute communities for the network
You can remove entire communities from everyone’s Home Feed or email digests, unless they’re a member. Consider this approach for groups that are lively but not necessarily of interest to non-members. Social or special interest communities are good candidates to mute for the network, allowing more focus on relevant news, team updates, and other org-wide communications.
Mute conversations
If something doesn’t need to be in broadly visible in everyone’s home feeds or email digests, use the mute option on the conversation. This keeps the thread visible in communities or storylines, and all aspects of the conversation continue to function as before. Users do not know when moderators mute their conversations.
Close, move, or delete conversations
Depending on the context, it may make sense to limit new comments by closing the conversation, move the thread to a new community, or delete the content entirely to avoid further issues.
Have a plan for how to use these content moderation features aligned with your communication goals and company culture and values, and share widely with community admins, corporate communicators, and other admins.
User controls: Helping people get the most out of Engage
Moderation at the network, community, and conversation levels goes a long way. Even still, there are often calls from users to further finetune their experience.
Users can close, move, or delete their own conversations in Engage. Admins and corporate communicators can also take these actions if necessary.
Notification settings
Stop further notifications from a conversation with the Unfollow control in the overflow menu. Unsubscribe or re-subscribe to email digests in the user settings notifications center.
Mute a community
Building on the network-wide control, any user can mute a community from their home feed and email digests. This is a great tool if posts from a community are popular in the network but not relevant to you.
Hide someone’s messages
Users can reduce the visibility of others’ content, removing posts from the home feed and email digests and visually obscuring that content if seen elsewhere.
Hide messages is coming soon to general availability.
Learn more about moderation in Engage
View the Engage Masterclass for in-depth walkthroughs and best practices.
Watch our moderation webinar, covering features and strategies for new and mature networks.
See how AI theme moderation and keyword monitoring work together for holistic, proactive coverage across a network.
1Theme blocking feature coming soon to general availability.
Microsoft