Make Your Goals a Reality with OKRs and New Capabilities from Microsoft Viva Goals

As we enter a new year, more gyms are packed, more books are read, but within the first month, about a third of individuals will see a dissolution of their goals. Setting goals and sticking to them isn’t just a challenge for personal pursuits—it holds true for your professional life too. 

 

Organizations and business leaders are looking for ways to weather the uncertainty and economic pressures while creating an engaged workforce to achieve business objectives. One of the major challenges they face is building organizational clarity and purpose, while also trying to “do more with less”.

 

This is where combining a goal-setting strategy with the right technology can help. Microsoft leverages the proven goal-setting framework of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) with Microsoft Viva Goals.

 

Having a strategy and consistent model for goal setting ensures that all levels within an organization have a shared context on their top priorities and can track the momentum of achieving those success metrics.  To discover how Microsoft uses Viva Goals to drive organization-wide impact, read our latest case study here.

 

In 2023, we’re focused on making it even easier to accelerate OKR adoption with Viva Goals. With new capabilities now generally available and more exciting features coming soon, Viva Goals' flexible tooling makes OKRs work for you and your organization.

 

1. Provide transparency on progress and increase OKR adoption

 

 

The strongest leaders have a pulse on the successes and areas of improvement within their team, even though they aren’t actively involved in the day-to-day. The new Analytics feature, now generally available in Viva Goals, supports administrators in further building this muscle by diving into OKR adoption, engagement and overall health insights.

 

With this feature, organization level administrators have a holistic dashboard view of not only the number of users and monthly active usage, but also granular details like activity types, how many goals are being met by closing OKRs, and how team members are engaging and collaborating with each other through comments.

 

 

This new feature also empowers organization admins to develop a healthy OKR practice by tracking OKR alignment towards team or organization OKRs as well as viewing which teams have added Viva Goals into their rhythm of business. We’re delighted to announce that coming soon, Viva Goals will offer an Analytics feature to show metrics around OKR performance for team-level administrators. This expands the visibility of Viva Goals engagement to leaders, so they have more insight on how team members are leveraging goal-setting.

 

To simplify adoption and help customers migrate from manual OKR inputs, there will be the ability to Bulk Import OKRs from Excel into Viva Goals soon. This makes Viva Goals readily accessible in a centralized tool and allows customers who have previously maintained their OKRs and projects in Excel to migrate their data into Viva Goals with a few clicks. This new feature encourages adoption of the tool and increases efficiency by not doubling any existing work.  

 

 

2. Foster collaboration with key stakeholders

 

To increase collaboration around shared objectives and success metrics, Viva Goals has grown from a single check-in owner to include multiple check-in owners, so that your team can build an effective and inclusive check-in rhythm.

 

There may be more than one owner who is responsible for an OKR’s success to reach high level team objectives. So, the ability to designate more than one check-in owner helps address customer needs of differentiating ownership, particularly for large projects or during times of transition.

 

And no matter where you work or how you communicate, Viva Goals offers support for your team, expanding its language capabilities to a total of 37 languages. Currently, Viva Goals supports 10 Tier 1 languages.

 

3. Expand global admin control and focus on security and data privacy

 

Microsoft runs on trust, and security continues to be a key priority as we grow and evolve our solutions. New updates within Viva Goals take our commitment to security and data privacy further.

 

By using new updates with Azure Active Directory (AAD), Viva Goals admins can now set up Conditional Access policies, making sure that the right users have access to the right data. Our identity updates also include AAD identity federation using 3^rd party identity solutions: OKTA and Google.

 

Additionally, we are excited to announce the availability of EU Data Residency for new Viva Goals customers. EU Data Residency will be available for Ally.io customers migrating to Viva Goals by the end of January 2023. This update means that EU-based or multi-national customers can store their data in EU data centers.

 

Furthermore, Viva Goals system admins now have more control over what integrations are enabled and which data is shared with Viva Goals. Admins can designate which integrations are available for organization owners to provide to their users.  Users are then able to automatically update their key results (KRs) from these integrated solutions, bringing progress and check-ins into their flow of work.  

 

 

 

4. Bring your favorite products into the flow of work

 

New Viva Goals integrations available now ensure you can bring OKRs into the products you already use every day.

 

Now generally available, Viva Goals and Dynamics 365 integration allows users to make automatic updates on the life cycle of their OKRs from any of the Dynamics 365 apps, including Sales, Field Service, Human Resources and more. At an executive level, this exciting integration generates a comprehensive view across business operations, all within Viva Goals.

 

 

How you can use this integration:

For example, sales teams who regularly leverage the Sales Hub app within Dynamics 365 to track opportunities can now use the new Dynamics 365 integration to tie their opportunities within Sales Hub to a quota KR target within Viva Goals.

 

As they close opportunities as won or update the revenue metric within Sales Hub, their KRs will update to reflect the progression of their deals. With the Viva Goals dashboard, they’ll also have an executive level overview of measurable results they contributed towards their organization’s overall revenue goals.

 

To learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales visit the page on Microsoft Learn.

 

 

 

Now generally available, Viva Goals supports enhanced integrations with Microsoft Teams. As the central hub for remote work, and the tool that keeps us connected across the world, Microsoft Teams is now further embedded with Viva Goals as a fully featured app.

 

 

How you can use this integration:

Users can view OKRs directly assigned to them, pin OKRs for teams they work with, toggle across different departmental OKRs and see notifications in-app for OKR activities. The new dashboard feature in Teams also offers insights for business reviews or meeting updates, where users can present and author the dashboard content within Teams.

 

Coming soon, all within Teams, you will be able to add OKRs as a tab, view notifications directly in your activity feed, and share OKRs into your chats and channels.

 

Now generally available, Viva Goals integrates with Power BI to leverage powerful data driven graphics directly within Viva Goals. With seamless access to Power BI reports, you can point to the metric you want to align your KR to, and automatically visualize the evolution of your KRs, making the integration easy to set up for all users.

 

 

 

Now generally available, Viva Goals integrates with Microsoft Planner so you can connect your Planner tasks and plans to update your KRs and projects in Viva Goals automatically. This integration allows you to track your progress towards your high level KRs and projects based on the completion of day-to-day tasks in Planner.

 

Coming soon, Viva Goals and Project integration allows users to connect Viva Goals OKRs to Microsoft Project. As Project tasks and milestones are completed, the connected OKRs and projects will reflect the latest status. You will also be able to view Project tasks and details, such as due date and owners in Viva Goals, so you can drill down to the relevant information to equip you to make better business decisions.

 

 

With new capabilities from Microsoft Viva Goals now available, and many more coming soon, organizations can ensure that their top priorities are defined and communicated across all levels, so you can make your goals and keep them too.

 

Want to learn more about Microsoft Viva Goals? Visit our website to discover more about Viva Goals and get started on your own goals today! http://aka.ms/vivagoals