By Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience
Nearly a year into our hybrid work experiment, we are now surging ahead to a future in which even the most complex work can be done from anywhere, powered by our seamless digital connections. To thrive in this next phase of the experiment, we’ll need to apply what we’ve learned about work and life.
One of those key take-aways is that employee experience is at the center of our collective success. People’s wellbeing enables their productivity, innovation, and engagement at work. Companies that prioritize employee experience are 25 percent more profitable and twice as innovative than their counterparts that don’t, according to research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Companies that work to enhance wellbeing significantly outperform their peers in earnings and stock appreciation.
We’ve also learned what can happen when the boundary between work and life blurs. A December 2020 study found that 76 percent of US employees experience burnout. In another 2020 study, nearly 70 percent of employees reported higher stress levels, and more than half reported elevated levels of anxiety. Research also reveals a 48 percent greater likelihood that people with low engagement and wellbeing will leave their company. Employees who are not engaged cost their company the equivalent of 18 percent of their annual salary.
To help people achieve balance, collaborate smartly, and find focus wherever and whenever they need it, we’re excited to announce insights and experiences that are part of Microsoft Viva, the employee experience platform built on Microsoft 365 that empowers people and teams to be their best from wherever they work. Microsoft Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an employee experience that integrates seamlessly into the apps you use every day, such as Microsoft Teams.
Introducing Microsoft Viva Insights
Microsoft Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalized and actionable insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. In addition to new productivity and wellbeing experiences and insights in Microsoft Teams, Viva Insights will, over time, bring the power of Microsoft Workplace Analytics and Microsoft MyAnalytics together under the Microsoft Viva brand.
Viva Insights is designed to protect privacy. Personal insights are visible only to the individual, and for manager and leader insights, customers can rely on safeguards like de-identification, aggregation, or differential privacy by default.
We’ve already started to deliver the insights and experiences in Teams for individuals, managers, and leaders that we unveiled at Ignite 2020. In fact, you can install the Viva Insights app in Teams starting today. An initial set of personal insights is available in public preview for users on Microsoft Exchange Online. Manager and leader insights are available in public preview for licensed Workplace Analytics customers.
In the coming months, additional personal wellbeing experiences, including a virtual commute, an integration with Headspace for meditation and mindfulness, and an integration with Microsoft Viva Learning, will be available in Viva Insights.
We’re also excited about features and advanced capabilities to support wellbeing and productivity.
- A new dashboard, in public preview today, enables organizations to combine de-identified and aggregated employee feedback from LinkedIn’s Glint—“how people feel”—with de-identified and aggregated collaboration data from Viva Insights—“how people work.” Leaders will be able to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms, and then quantify the impact of those changes over time. The dashboard is available in public preview for joint Workplace Analytics–Glint customers.
- Workplace Analytics customers can jumpstart deep analysis by using an open-source repository of functions, then easily share results using pre-built visualizations and interactive HTML reports.
Let’s dig into how Viva Insights will support new ways of working and help employees, managers, and leaders build better work habits and achieve balance.
Personal insights
Today we’re happy to announce that Microsoft Viva Insights in Microsoft Teams is now available in public preview for Microsoft 365 users with Exchange Online. The preview features an initial set of personal insights and wellbeing experiences.
The stay connected experience helps employees maintain strong relationships with important people in their network. This experience gives users a seamless way to prioritize time for regular one-on-one meetings and keep up with asks distributed across emails, chats, and shared documents from a single place—important as communications increasingly go virtual.
In addition, the protect time experience makes it easy for users to schedule focus time so that they can work uninterrupted—before the day fills up with meetings.
The insights for individuals that this app presents are completely private, derived by summarizing Microsoft 365 data from emails, meetings, calls, and chats that individuals already have access to.
In the coming months, updates to Viva Insights will bring additional personal wellbeing experiences, such as a virtual commute to help people mindfully wrap up their workday, check-ins to help them pause and reflect on their day, and an integration with Headspace for meditation and mindfulness experiences.
We also know that access to ongoing learning and skill-building is a key part of a great employee experience: 94 percent of employees say that they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development. Learning will be easier to fit into employees’ busy day with new actionable insights, coming in the future to Microsoft Teams, to protect time for learning and course recommendations from LinkedIn Learning to support lifelong development and career growth.
Personal productivity and wellbeing insights are also available in the flow of everyday work within Microsoft Outlook. People can start their day with key insights and prompts—such as opportunities to connect, meetings to prep for, and commitments to follow up on—delivered in their daily Briefing email from Cortana. This feature is generally available today in English, with a Spanish-language option on the way.
To enable people to stay organized and engaged, later this year, new cards in the Briefing email will help people look forward to and prepare for the week ahead. We’re making it easier to carve out time for important activities, such as learning, and to discover unlocked courses from LinkedIn Learning in a new feature that's also coming later this year.
Leaders and managers
We know from research and our recent collective experiment with remote work that the connection between managers and their employees is key to engagement and a positive employee experience. In fact, managers are often lifelines in times of disruption and change.
Microsoft Viva Insights in Microsoft Teams, available in preview today, includes a set of experiences that enable licensed Workplace Analytics customers to help managers and leaders empower their people to be their best. Customers can rely on safeguards such as data aggregation, de-identification, and minimum thresholds to protect privacy every step of the way.
Managers can nurture the wellbeing of their team members through visibility into work patterns that can lead to burnout and stress, such as meeting overload, too little focus time, or time worked outside employees’ chosen work hours. Supported and contextualized by research and tips for best practices, these insights help managers identify the challenges that they most need to address while supporting employees’ varied work and flexibility needs.
This experience will be enriched over time with opportunities for managers to create team action plans. Team members receive recommendations and best practices to help them prioritize wellbeing and boost productivity. And managers can assess progress against team goals over time.
Viva Insights in Microsoft Teams will also empower leaders to address critical strategic questions and take actions to strengthen organizational resilience, boost employee engagement, and improve agility to help ensure that their organization is ready for the future of work. For instance, we know that employees who maintain strong connections with their teammates feel a sense of organizational belonging that boosts overall job satisfaction, while those who don’t have strong connections are at risk of isolation. Leaders can understand the strength of these connections and identify ways to boost cohesion, break down silos, and create alignment and shared purpose.
Today we’re especially excited to introduce the Glint Microsoft Power BI dashboard. Glint is a People Success Platform, acquired by LinkedIn in 2018, that uses real-time people data to help organizations increase employee engagement and develop their people. This dashboard, available now in public preview to joint Glint–Workplace Analytics customers as part of Viva Insights, offers new capabilities that pair two powerful datasets. Customers control access to this data and to data-driven insights. By mapping de-identified and aggregated collaboration insights about “how people work” to de-identified and aggregated engagement data about “how people feel” the dashboard enables leaders to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling, proactively adjust work norms, and then quantify the impact of those changes over time.
Advanced tools for custom analysis
For most companies, these out-of-the-box insights are just a starting point. Not only do our tools and technology continue to evolve but they also provide customers with advanced analysis and robust tools for specific and complex business problems. For example, an open-source repository of low-code pre-built functions, visualizations, and interactive HTML reports can jumpstart deep analysis to help business leaders address specific challenges. These advanced tools are available for Workplace Analytics customers.
Microsoft Viva Insights uses data and signals from Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps and services, and can also access data from an existing ecosystem of collaboration tools and services, including Zoom, Slack, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors. In this way, leaders can see how collaboration patterns influence the outcomes they care about, and organizations can realize exponential value from their data sources.
In addition to the new Glint Power BI dashboard for leaders, we’re partnering to bring organizational insights from Workplace Analytics into Glint. New capabilities, now in pilot, can help leaders analyze engagement data, including comment data, based on metrics such as weekly collaboration hours, workweek span, and manager-employee one-on-one time. Glint Smart Alerts also uses this data to help organizations identify populations with low engagement or burnout so leaders can take action to increase wellbeing before employees decide to leave.
Get started
Get started with Microsoft Viva Insights to help people across the organization thrive:
- Download Viva Insights in Microsoft Teams, now in preview
- Learn more about the daily briefing from Cortana
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Learn more about how Viva Insights helps create a culture where people and business can thrive
- Learn more about Microsoft Viva
- Listen to a special #MSFTViva episode of #TheIntrazone podcast with Jared Spataro: "Viva Las Microsoft." Hear from Jared about the design of Microsoft Viva and its four main components: Connections, Insights, Learnings and Topics.
- Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience