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Customer spotlight: Less inbox, more connection at Nuveen

sarahLundy — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:40:15 GMT

Helping leaders reach employees in new ways

At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, we explored a challenge many communicators are dealing with right now: employees are surrounded by nonstop signals—email, chats, meetings, and posts—and important messages get lost in the noise.

Dan Mulcahey, VP, Internal Comms at Nuveen, a TIAA company, joined us to share how he and his team are evolving their communications approach using Viva Engage to make messages more relevant, visible, and engaging over time.

Mulcahey highlighted how moving away from email to Engage marked a strategic shift in how leaders communicate and build connection with employees.

Why email wasn’t enough

The Nuveen comms team looked at the reality: email volume was high, open rates were going down, and leaders needed a better way to reach employees. From there, they piloted Engage, proved reach first, and built confidence over time. Reach came quickly, while engagement required more patience.

“We proved the reach first… But you need patience for the engagement.”

— Dan Mulcahey, VP, Internal Comms, Nuveen

Create for the channel

One of the biggest lessons from Nuveen was that communicators can’t just copy email content into a social channel and expect different results. The team had to create content for the medium. For example, Nuveen’s CEO launched a recurring “Fun with Facts” series that used humor and short videos to make even routine topics, like compliance training, more engaging.

That shift in content style reflects a broader change toward making communications feel more like what people already consume outside of work: more visual, more direct, and more conversational. What people experience on social platforms and consumer apps shapes what they expect at work, and internal communications need to keep up.

“People don’t come to work and suddenly turn off their brain. They don’t forget the platforms they use in the real world.”

— Dan Mulcahey

Mulcahey reported that since June 2023, for a business unit of around 3,700 employees, that approach generated 2.5 million impressions, 25.5K reactions, and 2K comments on Engage, along with what the team described as “one executive team of believers.”

In a video shared during the session, Josh Shamansky, Chief Human Resources Officer, said Engage had become central not only to communications distribution strategy, but also to content development. He also shared that employees and leaders were engaging in ways that email and the intranet could not support in the same way.

“Viva Engage has become the most important channel for leaders and employees to stay connected across the organization. It is hard to remember that we did it any other way.”

— Josh Shamansky, Chief Human Resources Officer, Nuveen

Start small, build momentum

The Nuveen team described a phased journey that started small in one business area, expanded to a 3,700+ person Nuveen business unit community, then grew to 10 more communities before expanding to the TIAA all-company level. They focused first on the parts of the organization most ready to adopt, used those wins as proof points, and let leadership advocacy help the model spread.

Mulcahey and members of his team — Chris Dickey, Comms Business Partner, and Chris Martin, Communications Operations Lead — talked openly about the importance of “starting small and sending wins up the chain,” democratizing communications operations, and enabling non-communicators to help carry the story forward.

That meant communicators weren’t the only people creating momentum: leaders, advocates, and business-area contributors became part of the engine. That matters even more in an AI era, where the opportunity isn’t just to create more content faster, but to build more distributed participation around the messages that matter.

If there is one takeaway, it’s this: relevance comes from building communications that fit the channel, reflect how people consume content, and unfold over time in a way employees can follow.

We’ll be sharing more blog posts throughout June to recap the Engage Track sessions at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference. Follow along on the Viva Engage Blog | Microsoft Community Hub, and learn about all the new and coming soon experiences in Engage that we highlighted at the conference.

What’s new and next in Engage: June 2026

espnguyen — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:57:51 GMT

The Microsoft 365 Community Conference Viva Engage track demonstrated how communications are changing: for many organizations, leaders are more visible, connection is stronger, and everyday communication is becoming a useful source of organizational knowledge for AI.

Examples from Capgemini, Nuveen, Foot Locker, AdventHealth, and Takeda showed how organizations are using Engage to create two-way dialog with leaders, support Copilot adoption, run employee events, and improve communication in the flow of work.

When product and people come together, the impact is real.
We saw what happens when customer stories, product teams, and community energy meet in the same room. In case you missed it, join our upcoming webinar on June 30, 2026, to catch the highlights, hear what we learned, and see how these conversations are shaping what’s next.

Communications meetup at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference

Engage everywhere: communities, events, and Storylines in Teams, powered by AI

In our “Engage Everywhere” session, the Engage leadership team explained why leadership communication works better when it is visible, relevant, and interactive in the tools employees already use. It matters for employee connection, and it matters for AI too: in organizations using AI, leadership communication gives Copilot more of the context it needs to return useful answers.

Jeanette Vikbacka Castaing from Capgemini shared how her team is using Engage to make leaders more visible, bring corporate events into the flow of work, and create more participation through employee challenges and community conversation. Her examples showed how communities can spark dialogue, strengthen connection, and turn everyday engagement into lasting organizational knowledge.

The Engage team demonstrated the new and coming-soon experiences that bring this vision to life across three categories of intelligence, context, and trust.

Intelligence

Available now: Copilot in Engage

For organizations with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, Microsoft 365 Copilot in Engage helps people quickly catch up and contribute in Engage. Smart catch-up helps employees see what happened recently across their communities and network. Scoped search makes it easier to find relevant information within Engage, and writing assistance helps people draft and refine posts with better context.

Private community content is planned next. That is a meaningful step because some of the most valuable knowledge in an organization lives in smaller, role-based, or more sensitive communities.

The Engage team is also exploring more agentic experiences in Engage to help leaders, communicators, and employees keep up with what matters and take the right next step more easily. The team is considering support for actions like deciding where to respond, what to acknowledge or share, and what may need a closer look, all based on configurable instructions.

Public preview: agents in communities with grounded answers

If you’re a community admin or contribute as an expert in a busy community, it can be hard to keep up with questions. Answering them can feel like a demanding side hustle. Agents in communities can answer questions posted in a community using content from both community conversations and SharePoint sites, so responses are based on internal context instead of generic information.

Admins and experts can review, edit, or verify answers before they are posted, helping organizations scale expertise without sacrificing trust. For companies dealing with repeated questions, distributed knowledge, or hard-to-find answers, this could become one of the most practical ways to reduce effort and connect people with expertise faster.

Launch Demo

Available now: Communities to support AI adoption

We know from our research that peer connection and learning is a critical part of scaling your AI transformation efforts. The Copilot Adoption Community gives organizations a starting point for peer learning, questions, shared prompts, and ongoing education. Instead of relying only on one-way communication about AI, organizations can create spaces where employees learn from each other and build habits over time.

Microsoft’s own data shows that adoption is more sustainable when people have a place to ask questions, compare experiences, and share what is working. Communities help turn individual experimentation into collective learning, which benefits employees and strengthens the knowledge base that AI can draw from later.

Context

Public preview: Communities in Teams

One of the biggest changes coming up is the move to bring communities into Microsoft Teams. As communities become part of the flow of work in Teams, leadership dialogue will become more visible, knowledge sharing will be more habitual, and expertise will be easier to find.

Launch Demo

Public preview: Smarter communication and targeting

Communicators need options for reaching specific audiences with targeted messages while reducing overall noise. Our roadmap includes several investments designed to help communicators reach the right audiences with less manual effort, including audience storyline announcement targeting based on organizational data such as reporting structure, department, country, role, and group membership.

The team also highlighted smart notifications and delivery tracking. Available now for announcements, replies, and reactions in communities, smart notifications in Teams, mobile, and Outlook start in a user’s most frequented channel first, followed by the secondary channel if they don’t see the notification in the primary channel.

Delivery tracking gives communicators more visibility into whether announcements were sent across channels like Teams, Outlook, and Engage. Together, those updates point to a broader focus on relevance, reach, and measurable communication outcomes.

Available now: Events that extend beyond the moment

The new events in Viva Engage experience is now generally available and supports conversation before, during, and after an event. Hosted in communities or storylines, events give people one place for updates, discussion, questions, and follow-up.

These events are easier to discover, easier to revisit later, and better connected to the broader conversation in the community. This also helps turn event participation into lasting organizational knowledge.

Coming soon: Community membership auto-enrollment

Customers tell us that you'd like greater flexibility in managing community membership right within Engage. Community membership auto-enrollment helps communities stay current without manual list management. Admins can define rules based on org data or existing groups, so the right people are added automatically as teams and roles change.

Coming soon: End-to-end leader communications

For high-stakes communications, communicators need a more durable way to coordinate planning, drafting, and timing for multiple posts. The team is working on a concept for managing complex communication campaigns from end to end. Think planned message cascades, coordinated timing, and shared visibility for teams working across large leadership announcements or org-wide changes, all supported by Copilot.

Available now: New analytics

You've told us that your leaders love some healthy competition, which is why we're introducing a frequent contributors view. We're also adding click-through rate reporting so communicators can measure responses to link-based calls to action.

Coming soon: SharePoint News cross-post to Engage

Do you spend time crafting a beautiful SharePoint News post, only to see it reach a limited audience? We’re working to extend the reach of your SharePoint news by bringing it into Engage. Cross-posting brings SharePoint and Engage together in a more connected publishing flow. You’ll be able to publish a news article once and have employees engage with the same conversation across SharePoint, Teams, and Engage.

Available now: Article improvements

Articles in Engage now offer a more polished reading experience with cleaner layouts, better navigation, and richer formatting. Updates like table of contents, improved previews, multi-column layouts, and inline media make long-form communication easier to publish and easier to read.

Trust

Available now: Updated admin experiences

Admins are getting a more modern and consistent management experience across Engage. Updates include support for sensitivity labels, a new Engage email domain, improved admin workflows, and stronger governance options to help organizations manage communication with more confidence.

Coming soon: Company branding

Company branding lets organizations bring more of their visual identity into Engage. With support for custom colors and logos across web and mobile, the experience feels more familiar, more on-brand, and more connected to company culture.

Catch up on all the Microsoft 365 Community Conference news

Look out for blog posts to recap the Viva Engage Track sessions, including videos. More to come like:

Authentic leader communications with Nuveen
Playbook for a Viva Engage deployment
Copilot adoption with Footlocker
And more!

Want to get a closer look at these features and experiences? Join us for the What’s new and next with Engage webinar, 8:00 am Pacific Time, Monday, June 30, 2026

Note: Network analytics frequent contributors; announcement delivery tracker; click through rates; predictive analytics for reach; guided flows for leader posts, announcements, and cascades; and related capabilities described in this blog post are available with a Premium Viva Engage license (for example, Viva Employee Communications & Communities or Viva Suite). Engage private content in Copilot, Community Agent, and other Copilot experiences in Engage require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 6, June 2026

amywheater — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:56:56 GMT

This month’s newsletter brings together the latest updates, insights, and best practices to help you use Viva Glint & Pulse as part of your broader AI transformation strategy. As Copilot adoption grows, employee listening can help organizations better understand employee experiences, identify opportunities for support, and turn feedback into action that drives meaningful business impact.

*Side note: Have you configured your Viva Glint blog notifications to send you an email when a new newsletter or blog is posted but you haven’t been receiving them? You may need to add notifications@communityhub.microsoft.com to your approved email sender domain list to ensure that you get the email notifications. We’ve also added this information here.

New on your Viva Glint platform

This section highlights new capabilities and updates now available to help you strengthen security, reporting, and administrative control in Viva Glint.

Benchmark Refresh: Industry benchmark suites. This month, the industry benchmarks have been updated in alignment with the annual refresh cycle. As part of this update:

Coverage has been refined, with Media added and Retail – Wholesale Distribution removed due to insufficient data.
The one-year data collection suites are labeled “Industry 2025 (Calendar Year)” and include data collected from January 1 to December 31, 2025.
To broaden benchmark coverage, a two-year data collection period (i.e., January 2024 - December 2025) was used to introduce Automotive and Nonprofit and to refresh Pharmaceuticals benchmarks. These benchmarks are labeled "Industry 2024 - 2025" on Viva Glint.

To access external benchmark comparisons in reporting, customers must opt in to benchmarking. Opting in increases the overall benchmark data pool, improves data coverage, and supports a broader set of benchmark suites. Customers who have not opted in won’t be able to view or include external benchmarks in their reports.

Survey Configuration: Custom confidentiality statements. Viva Glint admins now have the option to use Viva Glint’s default confidentiality statement in their survey programs, or they can opt to turn off the default Viva Glint confidentiality statement and define their own organization‑specific confidentiality messaging. This enables clearer, context-appropriate communication to survey participants while maintaining Viva Glint’s core confidentiality protections and trust standards. The update helps organizations meet legal, compliance, and cultural requirements without compromising employee trust. Learn more here and here.

Reporting: Topic Assignments Included in Comment Report Export. When exporting comments from the Comments report to a spreadsheet, Viva Glint now includes the topic(s) assigned to each comment. This enhancement allows analysts to seamlessly extend their analysis into external tools with Viva Glint’s topics already applied.

Coming soon to Viva Glint

The following section offers an early look at capabilities coming to Viva Glint shaping the future of continuous listening, analytics, and AI‑powered insight. Please note that public documentation (e.g., MS Learn articles) is not typically published until a feature is generally available.

Seamless Entra authentication for MTO organizations | Generally available starting mid June. Seamless Domain Discovery (SDD) will simplify the sign-in experience for multitenant organizations and support users by introducing automatic tenant discovery. This new Entra‑based experience reduces reliance on MTO policies, lowers admin overhead, and aligns Viva Glint access with standard Microsoft 365 sign‑in—delivering a more scalable and seamless authentication experience. For scenarios where users need to explicitly access a different tenant (for example, guest or support access) or they have access to more than a one Viva Glint instance with their credentials, domain selection remains available to ensure flexibility and control. This feature will start rolling out to MTO customers in mid June with the rollout expected to be complete by the end of June.

Custom data retention policy | Generally available starting late June. Viva Glint admins will be able to set how long survey data is retained before deletion to help meet organizational and compliance needs. This policy will apply across Viva Glint survey data, including engagement, ad hoc, recurring, always-on, and 360 surveys, as well as focus areas and goals. Customers with an existing retention policy will see their current settings carried over automatically.

Improved audit activity logs for user data import | Generally available starting late June. Viva Glint audit activity logs will soon provide enhanced visibility into successful data imports with a downloadable processed file details report. With this feature, admins can quickly review processed, updated, or partially ingested records for SFTP and MODIS user data imports.

“Select All” toggle for report filters | General availability coming soon. A new “Select All” option in the reporting filter panel will let users select or clear every attribute value in one click. This removes the pain of managing filters with long value lists, speeding up analysis and reducing manual effort. We aim to make this feature generally available in the next couple of months.

Copilot Reporting: Dynamic Topics with Copilot | General availability coming soon. By leveraging Copilot, this functionality is designed to enhance the relevance and context of comment themes by extending beyond the current static set of topics and identifying customer-specific topics that can be tracked over time. These custom topics will remain confined to your platform and will not be accessible to Microsoft or other customers. This feature will also improve the accuracy of assignment to topics for both standard and dynamic categorization. We aim to make this feature generally available in the next couple of months.

Copilot-supported commenting for Viva Glint survey takers | Private preview ongoing. Soon, Viva Glint survey participants will be able to use an in-survey Copilot experience to polish their written feedback (please note: this capability is not available for respondents accessing surveys via attribute-based login or personalized links). Copilot can rephrase comments so employees can communicate more clearly and with greater confidence. By helping reduce distinctive writing patterns and making it easier to provide thoughtful input, the feature can increase comfort and perceived privacy—driving higher participation, richer responses, and more candid insights that organizations can act on.

Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics | Private preview ongoing. Improve actionability for Work-Life Balance and Collaboration focus areas by integrating Viva Insights workplace metrics into Viva Glint reporting. This feature will help Senior Leaders in your organization access supplementary data points, in conjunction with survey responses, to better understand their team's experience and conduct more data-driven discussions on what can be improved in these areas. Between survey cycles, leaders can also enable notifications to keep track of changes in their team's workplace patterns, allowing them to keep a better pulse on behavior change commitments. Private Preview is targeted in May 2026. Future capabilities will include the ability to map Viva Insights and Copilot metrics to survey items and bring in additional data sources from M365, such as meeting metadata and content.

To express your interest, please complete the following: Private Preview: Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics.
If you are already part of the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program, request to join our Workplace Patterns & Continuous Listening EECC Teams subchannel through the main Viva Glint EECC Teams channel so you can iterate on the future of continuous engagement with the product team in monthly calls. If you aren’t already part of the EECC, see the Connect with us section in this newsletter for more detail on how to join.

Employee Feedback Agent | Private preview ongoing. Enhance your Employee Listen program with The Employee Feedback Agent a dynamic, AI-powered conversation, where employees can share what matters most through natural, chat-like interactions, whether prompted or always-on, enabling real-time feedback and deeper insights into the drivers behind their experiences. By combining Copilot intelligence and People Science principles, the agent streamlines feedback collection and reduces administrative overhead for HR and leaders. Unlike traditional Copilot tools that simply summarize information, the Employee Feedback Agent collects experiential data through probing questions and back and forth dialogue with employees. Future capabilities will expand impact with an actionable insights reporting experience, accelerating the “feedback-to-action” cycle.

Raw Data Export API Egress | Private preview ongoing. Unlock seamless, automated access to raw survey data—no more manual downloads. Built on Microsoft Graph, these APIs make integrations easier and help admins move faster with greater efficiency. Express your interest here.

See our public roadmap for more feature updates.

Events and learning opportunities

Stay up to date with upcoming events, recent documentation updates, and highlights from EECC customer sessions—designed to help you learn, connect, and get more value from Viva Glint & Pulse.

Recent documentation enhancements:

Have technical questions about Viva Glint? Microsoft Learn is your best source for clear, current guidance. We’ve expanded and refined our documentation to add detail on new capabilities, address frequent questions, and strengthen the topics customers rely on most. These updates improve clarity and consistency, making it easier to use Viva Glint with confidence. Below are a few of the most impactful recent updates now live on Microsoft Learn:

Additional notes added to live survey updates
Update to allowed email sender domain list to ensure receipt of blog notifications
Focus area cascading guidance clarification
360 configuration guidance updates here and here
Important note added around adding survey reminders

EECC Customer Engagement Sessions:

Previous sessions:

May 28th – Help Shape What’s Next for Viva Glint 360 Assessments

Target Audience: Viva Glint 360 Admins

We invited Viva Glint 360 admins to join an interactive listening session focused on the real-world experience of running 360 assessments in Viva Glint. The session created a space for admins to share candid feedback and directly influence the future direction of Viva Glint 360s, which have seen limited evolution to date.

The discussion centered on where the 360 process creates friction for admins, managers, and participants; moments where workflows slow down, break, or require manual workarounds; and small, high-impact improvements that could meaningfully enhance the overall experience. It was a candid, discussion-driven session with the Viva Glint Product team and customer peers sharing what’s working well and where challenges remain.

Key takeaways:

Aggregate reporting emerged as one of the top customer requests, with many customers emphasizing the need for easier ways to consolidate and analyze 360 feedback data.
Customers also exchanged creative workarounds and best practices during the session, showcasing strong peer collaboration within the community.
Poll results helped validate the highest-priority enhancement areas, which will help inform future Viva Glint 360 investment planning.

If you are not yet a member of the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) but would like to participate in upcoming sessions, as well as gain access to numerous other engaging and valuable Viva Glint and Pulse customer activities, please see the sign-up information below.

Customer Success Stories

See how organizations are using Viva Glint, Pulse, and Copilot to turn employee insight into measurable impact.

Energy Company Advances from Copilot Adoption to Measured, HR‑Led AI Transformation with Microsoft EVE

After scaling Microsoft 365 Copilot across 20,000 employees, Energy company partnered with Microsoft’s Viva Glint team to introduce AI transformation measurement—aligning HR and IT around shared readiness, governance, and priorities for scalable agentic automation.

Situation

The customer scaled Microsoft 365 Copilot across 20,000 employees, but maturity varied across business units. As the organization shifts toward agentic automation, leaders need consistent, data‑driven measurement of readiness, impact, and transformation maturity to guide aligned enterprise investment.

Solution

At this critical inflection point, Microsoft's Viva Glint team engaged alongside the Microsoft FastTrack and broader account teams, introducing the Frontier Firm AI Transformation Measurement framework, enabling the customer to establish a common language for AI maturity and shift from qualitative discussions to data‑driven insight.

Working closely with Group HR, Employee Experience (EEX), and IT, they leveraged Viva Glint to establish an enterprise‑wide measurement baseline—positioning HR as a strategic co‑driver of AI transformation alongside IT governance.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration: HR and IT in Action

Two priority areas emerged through joint HR–IT alignment:

AI Transformation Measurement

HR and IT partnered to create shared visibility into workforce readiness, adoption quality, and transformation maturity across the enterprise
Viva Glint enabled scalable, repeatable measurement tied to business and technology priorities

HR‑Led Agentic Experimentation

HR partnered with IT governance to align agentic automation experiments to workforce readiness
Ensured automation scaled responsibly, with employee experience, engagement, and change readiness embedded from the start

Impact

This customer is positioned to shift from AI experimentation to measured, governed, and scalable agentic transformation. Expected improvements in coming months include increases in Copilot MAU, higher usage frequency visible in dashboards, and strengthened employee engagement scores reflecting greater clarity and readiness for AI‑enabled work.

Connect with us

Stay engaged with the Viva Glint & Pulse community through the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program.

The Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program offers our customers an opportunity to be part of a feedback community as employee experiences continue to evolve with Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

What the program provides:

Product team engagement for Employee Experiences powered by Viva and M365 Copilot
Forums for you to influence product direction & unlock value for your organization
Early insight into product roadmap
Private preview engagement opportunities
Connection with other enterprise customers

If you’re interested in joining, please fill out this form so we can guide you through the enrollment process and help you get started.

We look forward to partnering with you to build better products—together.

Training & Learning Paths – Request for Guidance and Walkthrough

AB5 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:53:00 GMT

Jumeirah Hospitality Group is looking to develop structured training and learning paths for our teams. We would like to understand the end-to-end process, including:

How to design and structure learning paths
How to upload and organize content
How to assign paths to different roles or departments
How to track completion and performance

We would appreciate it if someone could walk us through the process and provide clear guidance on the steps involved.

Please let us know who we should contact and when availability can be arranged.

Video links becoming attachments rather than embeds

JordsAU — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:18:53 GMT

Since 3 weeks ago, whenever I paste a Vimeo link into Viva Engage it becomes an attachment that, when posted, requires the post to be expanded before it can be watched.

Previously it's always scraped the vid and embedded to the post, so both the player and copy are immediately viewable by the community.

None of my Vimeo settings have changed so I'm unsure why this has occurred.

Could someone please assist?

Microsoft Account 2FA Email Wording

olgn — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:31:20 GMT

Previously, logging into microsoft accounts via email 2FA would send an email to the recovery inbox worded roughly:

Security Code

Please use the following security code for your personal account email address removed for privacy reasons

Security code: xxxxxx

Recently, the wording has shifted into:

Hi email address removed for privacy reasons
We received your request for a single-use code to use with your Microsoft account.
Your single-use code is: xxxxxx

2FA emails seem to no longer state the account linked to your recovery email that issued the code.

This ambiguous wording makes phishing and social engineering attacks easier.

I suggest revert back to using the original emailing 2FA format, or at least stating the account in the email.

Leadership communication in the flow of work

samsearth — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:10:44 GMT

Leadership today is less about occasional broadcasts and more about consistent, credible presence. Employees expect leaders to:

Provide clarity amid constant change
Show follow-through, not just direction
Communicate in ways that feel human and accessible

Why this matters

This playbook scales based on a leader’s scope and audience size – from company-wide executives to function and team leaders.

Research from Engage UX Researcher Paula Wellings, shared during our Masterclass series, outlines what employees expect from leader communications. This research (and our internal experience) consistently show that visible, two-way leadership communication is a key driver of trust, engagement, and successful change. When leaders participate directly, downstream employee engagement increases.

Ongoing dialogue—through posts, responses, and visible follow-through—is the foundation of leadership presence on Engage. Structured moments such as ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions and organization-wide events can reinforce that dialogue and deepen trust at scale.

At the same time, leaders face real constraints: limited time, channel overload, and high scrutiny.

Engage is designed to help leaders communicate once, in the right place, and stay visible in the flow of work without adding meetings or increasing email.

Where Engage fits in the flow of work

Leaders communicate across many channels today, including email, meetings, and the intranet. Each has a role, but not all support visibility, persistence, or two-way engagement at scale.

Engage is designed for leadership communication that benefits from reach, context, and dialogue—where updates need to travel beyond immediate teams and employees can respond, not just receive.

Read about Microsoft executive Ravi Vedula’s Viva Engage adoption journey, and chart your own course.

Choosing the right surface based on intent

Engage gives leaders two complementary avenues for communication. Each serves a different leadership intent. The choice between storyline and communities depends on the leader’s scope, audience size, and communication intent.

Storyline

Storyline enables leaders to reach both their intended audience and people across teams and hierarchies, making it well suited for visibility, alignment, and leadership presence.

Share perspectives, priorities, or decisions
Recognize people or progress publicly
Cascade or amplify important updates
Close the loop in a visible way

Communities

Communities bring together people organized around a shared variable (org, role, region, topic). They typically feature multiple voices, curated content, and ongoing discussion aligned to the purpose of the community.

Use communities when you want to:

Engage a specific group or function
Invite discussion, Q&A, or feedback
Go deeper on a topic over time
Build shared understanding within a domain

Communities are ideal when the goal is conversation rather than broadcast.

How leaders typically use both

Leaders do not choose between storyline and communities based on title or level. They choose based on audience scope and communication intent.

Storyline is typically used when the goal is broader visibility:

Sharing perspective or context that benefits cross-team awareness
Reinforcing leadership presence beyond a single org
Public recognition or commentary that should travel widely

Communities are typically used when the goal is focused dialogue:

Communicating with a defined audience (org, region, function, topic)
Hosting discussion aligned to the purpose of that group
Sustaining ongoing conversations within a curated space

In practice, leaders often use both surfaces together — for example, sharing a visible update on storyline and continuing deeper discussion within a community.

Leadership presence isn’t just posting

Leaders often pair posting with lightweight engagement—replying to comments, acknowledging questions, or reacting—to reinforce trust and dialogue.

Building blocks for effective leadership communication

To ensure clarity and reach, two things need to be in place:

Leader identification

Leaders must be identified as such in the system. This enables:

Appropriate visibility across Engage
Access to leader-level insights and analytics
A consistent experience for audiences

This ensures that leadership communication is surfaced and measured correctly.

Delegates enabled

Leaders can designate delegates to support their communication on Engage. Delegation is about support, not outsourcing leadership voice.

Delegates can:

Draft posts on behalf of the leader
Publish updates with the leader’s voice and attribution
Help manage cadence, timing, and follow-up
Help leaders stay engaged by surfacing conversations, questions, and moments worth responding to

This allows leaders to maintain an authentic presence while scaling communication – especially during busy periods or major moments.

Audiences built in (no set up required)

Engage provides built-in audiences based on organizational data, such as the reporting hierarchy, so leaders can reach the right people by default from their Storylines. Leaders and delegates can define audiences when they publish, with no setup required. Audiences provide:

A built-in followership
Confidence that messages are seen
Less reliance on follow-up email
Clear expectations for who an update is for

Core leadership use cases

Engage helps leaders put leadership behaviors into practice in a way that’s visible, consistent, and part of the flow of work.

Narrate what’s happening

Share priorities, decisions, and context at the appropriate scope so teams stay aligned.

Keep updates concise and focused on what changed, why it matters, and what’s next.

Acknowledge people and progress

Recognize wins, milestones, and contributions publicly to reinforce morale and culture.

Specific recognition lands better than generic praise. Call out teams, behaviors, or moments.

Close the loop

Reflect back what you heard, what changed, and what’s next. This is a key driver of trust.

Follow-up posts that reflect what you heard build trust and increase engagement. Even brief responses signal listening and build credibility, especially during change or uncertainty.

Host interactive leadership moments

In addition to ongoing posts and dialogue, leaders strengthen trust through live and structured interaction.

Ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions and broadcast events are powerful ways to:

Provide clarity in moments of change
Address questions transparently and at scale
Demonstrate accountability
Reinforce alignment across teams

A common pattern is to use Engage end-to-end:

Solicit questions in advance on storyline or in communities
Host the live broadcast event
Follow up with key takeaways or clarifications

Interactive moments often become anchor points in a leader’s communication strategy, complementing regular posts and dialog.

For setup guidance and event mechanics, refer to Ask me anything events in Engage.

Measuring leadership impact

Engage provides leadership analytics to help leaders understand how their communications land.

Leaders and delegates can view:

Reach: how many people saw a post
Engagement: reaction, replies, and sentiment to understand the tone and quality of responses, not just volume.
Conversation signal: whether people are responding, not just reacting
Trends over time: consistency and momentum in leadership communication

These insights are not about scoring or ranking leaders. They are designed to help leaders:

Understand what resonates
Know when follow-up is needed
Communicate with more intention over time

Leaders who consistently respond and engage tend to see stronger momentum over time, not just higher reach.

Getting started (10 minutes)

Choose the right surface:

Storyline for broad context and visibility
Communities for focused dialogue

Confirm your audience and delegates
Writing guidance:

Quality over quantity: Consistency matters more than volume. One thoughtful post a month is better than frequent updates if there isn’t something meaningful to say.
Sound human: write conversationally. Share perspectives – not corporate language.
Be timely and relevant: Address what’s top of mind for your audience right now.
Invite engagement: Ask a question or prompt reflection when appropriate.
Use visuals when possible: Images or short videos help posts stand out and travel further.
Choose the right tone: Use announcements, polls, or praise intentionally based on your goal.
Plan time to engage after posting: even a few replies can meaningfully increase trust and participation.

Example posts that leaders can model

Employees value leaders who show up, respond, and follow through — not just those who post.

Team recognition: “Proud of the team for delivering this milestone. The collaboration across groups really showed up in the final result. Thank you for the focus and persistence.”
Leadership reflection: “This month I’ve been reflecting on how we balance speed with quality. Both matter, and I’m encouraged by the conversations I’m seeing across the org.”
Amplifying an announcement: “Today’s company announcement is an important step forward. I appreciate the work behind it and encourage everyone to take a look at the full update.”
Culture and values: “One thing I consistently see here is people showing up for each other. Those moments define our culture more than any slide ever could.”
Change and transparency: “As we move through this transition, I want to acknowledge the adaptability I’m seeing across teams. I’m committed to keeping communication open as we go.”

The bigger picture

When leaders use Engage intentionally:

Important context travels faster
Teams feel more informed and connected
Reliance on broadcast email goes down
Leadership presence becomes more continuous and human

Note: Storyline announcements, targeting, the ability to identify leaders, some advanced analytics, and related capabilities described in this blog post are available with a Premium Viva Engage license (for example, Viva Employee Communications & Communities or Viva Suite).

Resources

Insights Plan Not Scheduling On a Rolling 2 Weeks

ncr333 — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:32:17 GMT

I have two Viva Insight plans enabled - focus time and catch up on messages. It was correctly blocking time on a rolling 2-week cycle until the last month or so when both plans stopped updating on my calendar. I left both plans and restarted them, it blocked two weeks on my calendar correctly, but the continuous, rolling updates have stopped again. Is this an update/patch that has caused the issue, or perhaps administrative settings?

News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 5, May 2026

amywheater — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:54:37 GMT

This month’s newsletter brings you the latest updates, insights and learnings to help you turn employee listening into action with Viva Glint & Pulse. As organizations continue to navigate AI-driven change, we’re focused on helping you measure what matters, understand impact, and sustain momentum across your employee experience strategy.

Important Note:

There is a planned maintenance window taking place in the Viva Glint platform on May 31, 2026, starting at 1:00am Pacific time (PDT) to make updates to the SFTP infrastructure used for file-based integrations.

The maintenance window is expected to last approximately 3–4 hours, during which time customers may experience limited access to both Viva Glint surveys and the platform.

For more detail on what is changing and to understand what steps your organization may need to take before and after May 31st please read this blog post and visit this recently updated Learn article.

New on your Viva Glint platform

This section highlights new capabilities and updates now available to help you strengthen security, reporting, and administrative control in Viva Glint.

Benchmark Refresh: Country and Region benchmark suites. Country and Region benchmarks have been refreshed as part of the annual benchmark update cycle. These benchmarks are labeled “Country/Region 2025 (Calendar Year)” to reflect that they are based on data collected between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2025. As part of this refresh, coverage has been updated—Costa Rica has been added, while Serbia has been removed due to insufficient data coverage—ensuring that all published benchmarks meet minimum data thresholds for reliability. We will be refreshing the Industry benchmark suite in the coming months.

Reporting Integrations: Additional controls for data flow from Insights to Glint. Now when you enable data flow from Insights to Glint, you will have the ability to exclude specific users and groups from having their metrics sent over. The control will be available in the Viva Glint section of Viva Feature Access Management in the M365 Admin Center. This is useful for tenants who operate in regions or parts of the organization where further approvals are needed to use workplace metrics data. You can exclude those users and groups from the feature until you get the approvals needed. More information can be found here.

Coming soon to Viva Glint

The following section offers an early look at capabilities coming to Glint shaping the future of continuous listening, analytics, and AI‑powered insight. Please note that public documentation (e.g., MS Learn articles) is not typically published until a feature is generally available.

Copilot-supported commenting for Viva Glint survey takers | Private preview starting May. *Update: We previously shared that this would be generally available in May; instead, we’ll start with a private preview to allow additional development and testing ahead of broader release later this year. Soon, Viva Glint survey participants will be able to use an in-survey Copilot experience to polish their written feedback (please note: this capability is not available for respondents accessing surveys via attribute-based login or personalized links). Copilot can rephrase comments so employees can communicate more clearly and with greater confidence. By helping reduce distinctive writing patterns and making it easier to provide thoughtful input, the feature can increase comfort and perceived privacy—driving higher participation, richer responses, and more candid insights that organizations can act on.

Custom data retention policy | Generally available starting June. Viva Glint admins will be able to configure a data retention policy for their Glint instance, defining how long Glint data is retained before it is deleted in accordance with organizational and compliance requirements. This feature enables admins to align Viva Glint data retention with company policies and compliance standards without relying on manual or backend-only processes.

Custom confidentiality statement | Generally available starting June. Viva Glint admins will have the option to use Glint’s default confidentiality statement in their survey programs, or they can opt to turn off the default Glint confidentiality statement and define their own organization‑specific privacy messaging. This enables clearer, context‑appropriate communication to survey participants while maintaining Viva Glint’s core confidentiality protections and trust standards. The update helps organizations meet legal, compliance, and cultural requirements without compromising employee trust.

Seamless Entra authorization for MTO organizations | Private preview starting May. This new feature will simplify sign‑in for multi‑tenant organizations by introducing automatic tenant discovery. This new Entra‑based experience reduces reliance on MTO policies, lowers admin overhead, and aligns Viva Glint access with standard Microsoft 365 sign‑in—delivering a more scalable and seamless authentication experience. For scenarios where users need to explicitly access a different tenant (for example, guest or support access), domain selection remains available to ensure flexibility and control. We are aiming to make this generally available to our MTO customers starting in June.

Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics | Private preview starting May. Improve actionability for Work-Life Balance and Collaboration focus areas by integrating Viva Insights workplace metrics into Glint reporting. This feature will help Senior Leaders in your organization access supplementary data points, in conjunction with survey responses, to better understand their team's experience and conduct more data-driven discussions on what can be improved in these areas. Between survey cycles, leaders can also enable notifications to keep track of changes in their team's workplace patterns, allowing them to keep a better pulse on behavior change commitments. Private Preview is targeted in May 2026. Future capabilities will include the ability to map Viva Insights and Copilot metrics to survey items and bring in additional data sources from M365, such as meeting metadata and content.

To express your interest, please complete the following: Private Preview: Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics.
If you are already part of the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program, request to join our Workplace Patterns & Continuous Listening EECC Teams subchannel through the main Glint EECC Teams channel so you can iterate on the future of continuous engagement with the product team in monthly calls. If you aren’t already part of the EECC, see the Connect with us section in this newsletter for more detail on how to join.

See our public roadmap for more feature updates.

Events and learning opportunities

Stay up to date with upcoming events, recent documentation updates, and highlights from EECC customer sessions—designed to help you learn, connect, and get more value from Viva Glint & Pulse.

Recent documentation enhancements:

Copilot access when using the “Log in as” experience added to FAQ
Additional guidance around attribute configuration for Alert reports
Important note added pertaining to Viva Insights data being sent to Viva Glint
Clarification about Broader Team Insights configuration
New SFTP IP exception details and current guidance for managing upcoming changes added

EECC Customer Engagement Sessions:

Upcoming sessions:

May 28th, 8am PT/4pm ET – Help Shape What’s Next for Viva Glint 360 Assessments

If you have opted in to EECC and are interested in participating in this session, please mark your calendar. Invites with registration link will soon be sent to all EECC members and an EECC Teams post with registration link will be posted soon!

Target Audience: Viva Glint 360 Admins

We’re inviting all Viva Glint 360 Assessment admins for an interactive listening session focused on the real-world experience of running 360 assessments in Viva Glint and we’d love your voice at the table.

This is an opportunity for you to directly influence what comes next for Viva Glint 360s. While 360s exist in Glint today, they haven’t evolved significantly—and your insights will help determine where we invest going forward.

What we’ll focus on:

Where the 360 process creates friction for admins, managers, and participants
Moments where workflows slow down, break, or require manual workarounds
Small, high-impact improvements that could meaningfully improve the experience

Expect a candid, discussion-driven session with peers who are actively running 360s and ready to share what’s working—and what’s not.

Previous sessions:

April 23rd - Notifications and Nudges Admin Experience in Viva Glint

In this recent EECC session, we discussed how organizations are using survey notifications and Nudges in Microsoft Glint today and explored opportunities to improve the overall experience. The forum brought Viva Glint admins together to validate early ideas, share practical approaches, and provide feedback to help shape future enhancements to notification capabilities.

The session covered current notification workflows used in survey programs, insights gathered from existing customer feedback channels, and early concepts for enhancements in the notifications and Nudges space. Participants highlighted gaps in the current admin and program-design experience and offered direct input on where the platform could better meet day-to-day needs.

Key takeaways from the discussion included:

Consensus of pain points across customer orgs and the need for foundational improvements to the notification configuration process
Current Viva Glint prioritization of notification enhancements aligns well with customer expectations/enhancement desires
Tangential enhancement opportunities exist that would support more seamless user experience around notifications (e.g., in-platform usage metrics, testing, etc.)

If you are not yet a member of the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) but would like to participate in upcoming sessions, as well as gain access to numerous other engaging and valuable Glint and Pulse customer activities, please see the sign-up information below.

New Thought Leadership

Explore the latest research and perspectives from our People Science team on leadership, AI, and the evolving employee experience.

Research Drop: The Human Conditions Behind AI Value at Work. Not all employee experience factors predict AI value equally, and across three People Science surveys, they haven't held steady either. This Research Drop maps which EX conditions are stable, which are rising, and which fluctuate with context, pointing to what organizations need to build, not just deploy, to sustain real AI value. Read it here.

Connect with us

Stay engaged with the Viva Glint & Pulse community through the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program.

What the program provides:

Product team engagement for Employee Experiences powered by Viva and M365Copilot
Forums for you to influence product direction & unlock value for your organization
Early insight into product roadmap
Private preview engagement opportunities
Connection with other enterprise customers

If you’re interested in joining, please fill out this form so we can guide you through the enrollment process and help you get started.

We look forward to partnering with you to build better products—together.

Relevance is the new reach: modern leadership communications in Viva Engage

evelynchan — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:09:58 GMT

Leadership communication has never been more important... Or more complex. Leaders want to communicate clearly and consistently, but every message comes with a risk. Broadcast it broadly, and employees tune out. Narrow it manually, and someone important gets left out.

This isn’t a leadership or strategy gap. It’s a tooling gap.

Most platforms still force you to choose between reach and relevance. But research from Viva Engage UX Researcher Paula Wellings, shared during Viva Engage Masterclass Season Two: Session 3 – Campaigns & Storytelling, confirms what corporate communicators have long suspected: Employees don't ignore leadership communication because they're disengaged. They ignore it because it doesn't apply to them.

When messages aren't tied to an employee's role, location, or reporting chain, they're not just ignored. They create active disengagement and information anxiety. That's why precision targeting is no longer optional. It's a prerequisite for engagement.

That insight is exactly why Viva Engage is investing in a next generation of capabilities designed specifically for leadership communication through Storyline.

How Storyline targeting changes the game

By enabling Leaders, and their Delegates, to define audiences directly at publish time using existing organizational attributes like reporting chain, department, or role, Storyline announcements make it easier to confidently notify the right audience without relying on static distribution lists or organization‑wide alerts. This allows leadership teams to move from volume‑based communication to relevance‑based reach — ensuring that the most important updates are delivered with precision, not noise.

Storyline announcements = Precision, not volume

Real‑world example: targeted HR updates without the overhead

Scenario: HR needs to share a benefits update that applies only to employees in the United States.

Before

Build and maintain a US-only distribution list
Or send org-wide and create confusion for EMEA/APAC teams
Rely on email, with no visibility into reach or engagement

With Storyline announcements:

Select Country = United States at publish time
2,400 relevant employees notified automatically, with optional notification channel delivery customization (Engage, e-mail, Teams)
Engagement tracked through analytics
No list management required

Targeting isn’t just about who sees a message, it’s also about how they’re notified and whether that audience can be reused. With Storyline Announcements, leaders and their delegates can customize notification channels and save audiences for reuse, making repeat communications faster and more consistent over time.

And soon with smart notifications for Storylines, Engage will send alerts to an employee’s preferred delivery channel first, helping reduce duplicate notifications across Teams, email, and Engage.

Why use Storyline announcements (instead of sending another email)?

Storyline gives Leaders a direct, measurable channel for communicating with their audiences, while still supporting dialogue and participation.

Unlike email broadcasts, Storyline posts:

Appear across Teams, Outlook, mobile, and desktop

Support engagement and feedback

Can be measured using audience analytics

Allow Delegates to manage communications on behalf of the Leader

Leaders’ Storyline posts can complement community‑based communications, and the same principle applies more broadly across corporate communications: the best tool depends on both the audience and the level of amplification a message needs.

Cascading messages with added relevance

Reinforcing organizational priorities

Sharing context and perspective

Building leadership visibility and authenticity

This makes Storyline an ideal channel for business updates, organizational changes, initiative rollouts, policy notifications, campaign reinforcement, event reminders, or action‑oriented leadership messages - all delivered to the people who actually need them.

To explore these upcoming Storyline announcement targeting capabilities, sign up for the public preview and read more about Storyline announcements.

Another way to increase reach without extra noise

Featured conversations offer another way to increase reach without adding noise.

For posts in public communities, communicators can now choose whether to feature a conversation to everyone in the network or to community members only. That makes featuring a useful option when the goal is to increase visibility without defaulting to a broad notification for every message.

Featured conversations and storyline announcements are separate capabilities in Viva Engage, but they reflect the same principle: giving communicators more control over how broadly a message is amplified. Storyline announcements remain the right fit for targeted leader communications, while featured conversations give corporate communicators another way to match reach to relevance in community-based campaigns and updates.

Learn more about featuring a conversation in Viva Engage.

How analytics help communicators measure leader reach

Analytics in Viva Engage help communicators understand whether a message reached the right audience and resonated once it got there.

Understand a post’s reach across audiences and platforms
Measure reactions, replies, and shares to understand engagement
Extract important themes and sentiment from comments

Now, the Frequent contributors leaderboard view in network analytics can help communicators understand which leaders’ posts are catching employee attention and compare engagement trends across leaders and top creators.

Note: Storyline announcements, targeting, frequent contributors, and related capabilities described in this blog post are available with a Premium Viva Engage license (for example, Viva Employee Communications & Communities or Viva Suite).

Research Drop: The Human Conditions Behind AI Value at Work

Megan_Benzing — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Research Drop in Brief:

Across three surveys, the employee experience factors most predictive of AI value (assessed via Realized Individual Value of AI scale, known as RIVA) haven't behaved uniformly, and as AI embeds deeper into work, the conditions surrounding its use increasingly determine whether it delivers value.
Psychological safety and role clarity are growing as correlates of AI value, yet most employees are navigating the human-machine boundary without organizational guidance.
The engagement-RIVA relationship proved the most volatile, mapping to the emotional arc of AI adoption: early excitement, mid-period job security concerns, and a rebound grounded in agency and mastery.

Among organizations that are integrating AI, many are still grappling with how to explain why some employees are getting real value while others are not. Our research shows that the first chapter of AI transformation has been about access: deploying tools, driving adoption, and tracking usage. The next chapter is now figuring out not just whether employees are using AI but whether that use is translating into something meaningful. Perceived value, not just adoption rate, is a metric that will determine whether AI investments hold for the long-term.

We know perceived AI value is rising. In our April Research Drop, we found a consistent climb in how employees perceive the realized value of AI in their work – a metric we call RIVA (Realized Individual Value of AI). But knowing that value is increasing is just one piece of the story, we also want to better understand why it might be increasing and what organizations can do to sustain and accelerate it.

That question requires a different lens. Rather than asking who finds AI valuable, this month we asked: what conditions make AI valuable? Specifically, we examine how seven employee experience factors relate to RIVA across our three survey snapshots, and how the strength of those relationships has shifted as AI has become more embedded in everyday work.

The story is moving from outputs to inputs, and what we’re finding is that the human conditions surrounding AI use are becoming more critical than before. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index research found that organizational climate and leadership factors contribute over twice as much to AI’s impact as individual user behavior¹. In other words, an employee’s ability to realize AI’s value hinges more on the environment their leaders create than on personal initiative alone, making these conditions essential to understand.

The EX factors behind AI value and how they’ve shifted

Humans themselves are central to AI transformation. To understand how to best evolve work processes and practices, we need to understand the human side of that transformation. Across our three panel surveys, we measured seven employee experience (EX) factors spanning three domains:

Work enablement/Culture:

Psychological Safety ("I feel free to speak my mind without fear of negative consequences")
Role Clarity ("I clearly understand what is expected of me in my role"

Productivity:

Individual Productivity ("I feel like I am productive at work")
Team Productivity ("I feel like my team is productive at work")

Engagement/Retention:

Intent to Stay ("I plan to be working at my company two years from now")
Recommend ("I would recommend my company as a great place to work")
eSat ("How happy are you working at your current company?")

We examined how each of these factors related to RIVA scores, controlling for job level and AI usage frequency. Three patterns emerge when looking across time:

Productivity items show a structurally stable relationship with RIVA across all three surveys
Work enablement/culture factors are rising in importance, as psychological safety and role clarity have grown as correlates of RIVA in the most recent snapshot
Engagement factors fluctuate, appearing to be context-sensitive rather than structurally fixed

The standardized regression coefficients above reflect the strength of each relationship. Following conventional benchmarks², values around .100 indicate a small association, .300 a moderate one, and .500 a large one. The relationships observed here range from small to moderate, meaningful in the context of real-world employee data, where large effects are rare and even modest coefficients can carry practical significance.

Productivity: A reliable, consistent correlate of AI value

The connection between AI and productivity has been central to the technology’s promise since the start³. AI is marketed as a tool to help employees perform better and faster – and as it has expanded from a personal tool to a team-level one, the expectation has grown that it will help entire teams function more effectively⁴.

It’s no surprise, then, that perceptions of both individual and team productivity have held a consistent relationship with RIVA across all three surveys. This stability is meaningful, suggesting that the productivity-value link isn’t a moment-in-time finding, but a structural feature of how employees experience AI at work, and one organizations can build on.

That said, the relationship comes with a caveat worth watching. Across our surveys, no more than 50% of employees reporting using AI daily – a reminder that AI augments productivity rather than replacing it. If the productivity-RIVA relationship becomes too strong, it may signal that employees feel their sense of contribution is becoming overly tied to AI assistance, at the expense of the creative, independent work that drives quality and innovation.

Looking ahead, an important open question is emerging: as AI agents increasingly function alongside human employees, how will the concept of “team productivity” evolve? If employees begin to mentally include agentic teammates in their perception of team performance, the construct itself may shift, and with it how we interpret this relationship.

Workplace environment: Rising in importance as AI embeds deeper

Two factors that strengthened notably as correlates of RIVA in our most recent survey were psychological safety and role clarity – both foundational to healthy, high-performing work. Their rise suggests that the conditions in which employees work are increasingly shaping whether they realize value from AI.

In our previous research, psychological safety has consistently surfaced as relevant to AI-related outcomes⁵. This makes intuitive sense: experimenting with AI, taking risks on new workflows, and pushing beyond familiar approaches all require an environment where employees feel free to try and fail. But there’s a ‘Transformation Paradox’ at play: 65% of AI users fear falling behind if they don’t adopt AI quickly, yet almost half (45%) feel it’s safer to stick with current goals rather than change how they work¹. This tension underscores why creating psychological safety is crucial, without it, employees may default to the safe road instead of the transformative one⁶.

Role clarity is facing its own inflection point. As AI agents absorb tasks once owned by employees, the boundaries of individual roles are shifting. Without a clear understanding of what to automate versus what to augment, employees face growing cognitive load – too many decisions about how to divide work between human and machine, with too little organizational guidance. This is not a niche problem as only 16% of organizations have comprehensively redesigned roles and processes to integrate AI, meaning most employees are navigating these boundaries largely on their own⁷. Our data suggests that when employees have that clarity, they’re better positioned to extract real value from AI. When they don’t, even capable tools go underutilized.

The rise of these two factors as stronger RIVA correlates reflects the broader shift in the question organizations need to ask: not just who has access to AI, but what environment are they working in when they try to use it?

Engagement: A barometer of AI value that shifts with organizational climate

The relationship between engagement and RIVA tells a different story. Unlike the consistency of productivity or the steady rise of culture factors, engagement metrics (eSat and Recommend) fluctuated substantially – dropping as correlates in July 2025 before rebounding to among the strongest in November 2025.

One hypothesis is that this pattern reflects the emotional arc of AI adoption. In the first snapshot, employees gaining AI access were energized. Excitement about new tools may have reinforced both perceived value and general engagement, the two rising together – or engaged employees may have simply been first in line, the first to seek access, raise their hand for pilots, and push their organizations toward adoption. Many articles in 2024 cited employees outpacing their organizations in AI optimism and adoption³. But by July 2025, a more complicated organizational climate had emerged, where concerns about job security and change may have decoupled the two signals. Whether someone felt good about their company became less related to whether they found value in AI, and one research article found that while AI anxiety can boost initial usage metrics/value, it eventually stalls as resistance grows⁸.

By November 2025, something shifted again – as agentic AI entered the workplace and employees began developing real agency over AI tools, a new source of engagement may have taken hold, one grounded in mastery and capability rather than just access. Almost halfway through 2026, we will need to watch for the same pattern to emerge as excitement may potentially stall.

The engagement-value relationship is not a fixed feature of AI at work. It bends with organizational context, emotional climate, and where employees are on their AI journey. And the November rebound carries a clear implication – engaged employees are positioned to get more from AI. Employees who feel connected to their work and organization are better positioned to translate AI into meaningful outcomes. When that connection is weaker, the same tools may deliver less impact, not because of the technology itself but because the conditions to fully leverage it aren’t in place for individuals.

Building the conditions for sustained AI value

The data across three surveys points to a consistent and evolving signal that AI value is not solely of function of quality or access. It is shaped by the human conditions surrounding use.

Build on the productivity-AI link deliberately. The relationship is stable and a foundation you can trust. But ensure employees retain a meaningful sense of individual contribution and creative ownership alongside AI assistance; over-reliance on AI as a productivity source is worth monitoring.
Treat psychological safety and role clarity as AI infrastructure. As AI embeds deeper into work, the quality of the environment employees operate in will increasingly determine whether AI delivers value. Cultural readiness is not a soft priority, it’s a structural one.
Track engagement as a leading indicator of AI ROI. The engagement-value relationship fluctuates with organizational context, but the pattern is clear: when employees are genuinely engaged, they extract more from AI. Organizations that treat employee experience as separate from their AI strategy are leaving measurable value unrealized.

This month’s Research Drop analyzed data from 2,331 employees across three separate panel surveys: the AI Readiness Study (n = 910, global), the Agentic Teaming & Trust Study (n = 811, global), and the AI Outcome Study (n = 610, US-only). Participants were included if they were managers or individual contributors who reported using AI at work, even if less than once a month. These samples consist of independent, point‑in‑time snapshots and do not include repeated participants; as a result, any comparisons across samples are directional only and do not imply causal effects or changes within individuals over time. Employees responded to realized AI value (RIVA) items on a 5‑point Likert scale from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”; RIVA favorability was calculated by averaging the favorability percentages (“Agree” and “Strongly agree”) across six RIVA items. In addition to descriptive comparisons, we estimated separate cross‑sectional OLS regressions predicting RIVA from each employee experience factor (one at a time), controlling for job level and AI usage frequency. The following survey items were analyzed to conduct this research, with many as composite scales that we validated through factor analysis. All items were presented on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Psychological Safety: I feel free to speak my mind without fear of negative consequences

Role Clarity: I clearly understand what is expected of me in my role

Individual Productivity: I feel like I am productive at work

Team Productivity: I feel like my team is productive at work

Intent to Stay: I plan to be working at my company two years from now

Recommend: I would recommend my company as a great place to work

eSat: "How happy are you working at your current company?

Realized Individual Value of AI (RIVA)

AI helps reduce my overall work-related stress
AI helps me be more productive at work
AI improves the quality of my work or output
AI allows me to complete tasks faster
AI helps me make better decisions
AI simplifies my complex work tasks

Note: The referent for the RIVA items changed slightly between studies. The items said “generative AI” for the AI Readiness Study and the Agentic Teaming & Trust Study, and the items said “AI” for the AI Outcomes Study.

¹Microsoft. (May 5, 2026). Agents, human agency, and the opportunity for every organization. 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report.

²Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

³Microsoft and LinkedIn. (May 8, 2024). AI at Work is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part. 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report.

⁴Dell'Acqua, F., Ayoubi, C., Lifshitz, H., Sadun, R., Mollick, E., Mollick, L., ... & Lakhani, K. (2025). The cybernetic teammate: A field experiment on generative AI reshaping teamwork and expertise (No. w33641). National Bureau of Economic Research.

⁵Benzing, M. (November 11, 2025). Research Drop: Empowering Managers for an AI-First Future. Microsoft Viva Blog.

⁶Seth, J. & Edmondson, A. C. (February 4, 2026). How to Foster Psychological Safety When AI Erodes Trust on Your Team. Harvard Business Review.

⁷Deloitte. (October 27, 2025). Work Design Essential to Realize AI Return on Investment.

⁸Eatough, E., Ferrazzi, K., Smith, W., & Waters, S. (February 17, 2026). Why AI Adoption Stalls, According to Industry Data. Harvard Business Review.

Unable to tag distribution lists (DLs) in Viva engage posts

gibhnovo123 — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:58:13 GMT

Dear All,

It would be helpful to have a feature in Viva Engage posts that allows us to tag DLs when needed. While planning a post, I noticed that cross functional teams are not part of the community for specific reasons, which I understand. Instead of reposting in their community, it would be useful if we could tag DLs so the original message reaches everyone intended.

Issue with notifications in external network

MaciejO — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:22:34 GMT

I am having problems with seeing notifications from external network (Microsoft's network to be exact).

I can see the notification count all right:

However upon clicking the bell, I get this error 90% of the time:

What is really weird, is that every now & then it works just fine - it might take 10 times trying the bell icon, or 50, but those notifications will at some point be shown to me all right.

I seem to be in tiny minority of people having this issue.

Does anyone have any guidance or troubleshooting approach? Is this a setting in my home tenant, or Microsoft tenant? Account permissions?

Does a log or telemetry exist anywhere where I could start asking the right questions how to resolve this.

If anyone has any insight, that would be greatly appreciated

Thanks,
Maciej

Planning for Communities in Teams: What Admins and Communicators Should Do Next

AllisonMichels — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:12:03 GMT

Imagine if employees could spend less time sorting through messages and more time engaging with what actually matters, whether it’s a leadership update, a company announcement, or an important change…all in one place where they can understand, react, and respond.

Communities are becoming a more visible part of Teams, making now the right time for admins and communicators to align on readiness, governance, and content. This 3-step post helps you plan your rollout:

How to get ready
How to reset All Company
How to address concerns about noise as adoption grows

You’ll also learn the key decisions admins and corporate communications teams should make to ensure Communities add clarity, not noise as adoption increases.

And in case you missed it, the Teams blog covers what’s new and why it matters. (If you haven’t read the announcement yet, start here:
Introducing communities in Teams: Unifying company communication and connection)

What’s changing... and what’s not

What’s new:

Communities are easier to discover and access in Teams
Visibility of posts and announcements increases

What’s not changing:

Governance is still in your control
Communities still follow your existing structure and purpose

The opportunity isn’t to rebuild everything, it’s to refine what already works.

Start from where you are

We recognize that not every customer is starting from the same place. For organizations already using Viva Engage, Communities in Teams is less about reinventing your strategy and more about extending it into the flow of everyday work. Communities are now easier to find and engage with inside Teams, raising the stakes for clarity, governance, and content design. As access becomes simpler and participation grows, it’s important to have your policies, onboarding, and launch plan in place.

"Bringing our Viva Engage communities into Teams was an instant win for our organization. By standardizing on a single pane of glass, inside of Teams, we've made it easier and more enjoyable for staff to communicate with other, using a trusted tool that requires no additional enablement overhead. Cognizant has over 350,000 employees - and managing communities at scale requires us to leverage Viva Engage - by now having those live inside of Teams, we get the best of both worlds: the ability to participate in communities with 30k+ employees while still maintaining the notification and organization we've come to depend upon inside of ad-hoc Teams groups and more traditional Teams channels. This further reinforced the idea that Viva Engage Communities are where work gets done - they aren't an optional location for employees - and staying on top of groups and communities together helps make us better at supporting our clients! Best of all - we like to say we "drink our own champagne" here at Cognizant - we can now go to those clients and use our story to show them how an integrated Teams/Viva environment can drive positive business outcomes and enhanced employee experiences."

Reed Wiedower, Cognizant, Innovation and Enablement Leader

If you are new to Viva Engage, or have not used it strategically in some time, start by defining a few high-value communities, setting clear governance, and giving employees simple guidance on where to go, what to expect, and how to engage.

Start by understanding where your organization is today:

What governance looks like the next 30 days:

Revisit All Company and determine if its purpose or usage should change.
Define “official communities” strategy. Start with a small set (e.g., employee news, leadership updates, IT help, communities of practice), seed them with content, and actively promote them.
Establish a naming convention to support discovery as Communities become visible in Teams.
Define governance and moderation: who creates communities, who can post announcements, and how moderation works.
Communicate these changes to community admins and encourage them to activate or refresh key communities.

Not using Viva Engage yet? Start here.

If you’re unsure where to start, start small: define the purpose, set expectations, and publish a simple guide for employees on how to follow, post, and manage notifications. With a few well-run communities in place, you’ll have the proof, and the playbook, to expand with confidence.

Once you’ve defined your starting point and aligned on governance, the next critical step is resetting how your most visible community, All Company, should be used. If you need more guidance or a starting point, check out the Communities in Teams Playbook!

Reset All Company for the Teams experience

As Communities become more visible in Teams, All Company becomes even more important. This is the moment to reset its purpose: one place for company-wide updates that matter to everyone.

For Admins (IT / Network Admins): Set the guardrails

Your role isn’t just to enable Communities, it’s to prevent noise before it starts.

Start here:

Limit who can post (e.g., Corp Comms + delegated leadership voices)
Document what qualifies as a post vs. what belongs elsewhere
Define when announcements should be used (not every post needs one)

For Corporate Comms: Reset how you use All Company

Think of All Company as your broadcast + engagement layer inside Teams.

Use it for:

Leadership narratives and context (not just links)
Major moments that need visibility and dialogue
Posts that invite reaction, questions, and discussion

Decide:

What qualifies as a new post vs. a reply
Who moderates, and when to step in
Expected cadence (not every update = an announcement)

Write for Teams behavior:

Lead with “what this means” (not just “what’s new”)
Keep posts scannable (short, clear, structured)
Use announcements sparingly—overuse reduces trust

Once All Company is clearly defined, look for follow-on communities (like Copilot Adoption Community) where more targeted conversations can happen.

Address concerns about noise early

As Communities expand in Teams, one concern comes up quickly: Will this create more noise? Done right, the answer is no. Start with this mindset: more posts ≠ more value. Engagement doesn’t mean more content. It means more relevant content, in the right place. If everything is posted everywhere, or if everything is an announcement employees will tune out.

Admins: Control where content shows up

Next Steps:

Ensure communities are purpose-driven (not duplicates of the same topic)
Guide teams to use the right community for the right audience
Review the Governance of the network and Watch session: Mastering admin and governance in Viva Engage for community management, moderation capabilities and more.
Review moderation and theme moderation in Viva Engage

Corporate Comms: Be intentional with reach

More visibility is powerful, but only when used carefully. Clarity reduces noise more than volume control ever will.

Reminders:

Use announcements for high-signal moments only
Reserve broad reach for content that applies to most employees
Let smaller or targeted communities carry more specific conversations

The goal is trust, not volume

As Communities become easier to access in Teams, the priority is making them feel useful, intentional, and worth employees’ attention. Done well, Communities don’t add noise, they make important communication easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to trust.

Continue the journey

PS. Want access now? Communities in Teams is available now for Engage customers who opt into public preview, with no migration required. All existing community content, permissions, and governance settings carry over automatically.

Review the network and tenant requirements to ensure your network meets the criteria.
Make sure the engage experiences in Teams toggle is on for your tenant.
Opt-in to the public preview through Teams.
Learn more about the full experience for communities in Teams.

Planned Maintenance May 31, 2026: Updates to Viva Glint SFTP Connectivity

amywheater — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:24:14 GMT

To support ongoing security and infrastructure improvements, Viva Glint will perform planned maintenance on May 31, 2026 starting at 1:00am Pacific time (PDT). During this window, the platform will be temporarily unavailable.

The maintenance window is expected to last approximately 3–4 hours, during which time customers may experience limited access to both Viva Glint surveys and the platform.

What’s changing

As part of this update, we are simplifying and strengthening SFTP connectivity used for file transfers:

Moving to a single SFTP endpoint and IPv4 address per environment
Introducing IPv6 support for improved network compatibility and future readiness
Updating DNS behavior so that secondary SFTP records (sftp2) become aliases of the primary endpoint

These changes are designed to enhance reliability, simplify configuration, and align with modern network standards.

What this means for your organization

Most customers will not need to take any action.

However, if your organization:

uses SFTP integrations with Viva Glint, and
restricts access using firewall rules or IP allowlists,

you may need to update your configuration to ensure uninterrupted connectivity following the release.

In particular:

If your infrastructure supports IPv6, ensure that the new IPv6 addresses are included in your allowlists, as network traffic may prioritize IPv6 when available.
If your configuration currently references multiple IPs per environment, note that this will be consolidated to a single endpoint and IP address moving forward.

As a best practice, Viva Glint recommends allowing access at the domain level where possible, rather than relying on specific IP addresses.

Next steps

To avoid disruption to SFTP integrations, customers must maintain their existing IP allowlist entries until the May 31, 2026 maintenance window is complete.

You may add the new IP addresses in advance of the release, but existing IP addresses should not be removed until after the maintenance window has concluded.

Removing existing IP addresses too early may result in connectivity issues before the change takes effect, while failing to add the new IP addresses in time may cause disruptions after the update.

For the most up to date allowlist guidance, including domains, ports, and connectivity requirements, please refer to: Allowed List

Thank you

We recognize that maintenance windows can cause disruption and appreciate your understanding as we continue to improve the reliability, security, and performance of Viva Glint.

Microsoft Teams - Auto Transcription

manchesterBazza — Tue, 05 May 2026 10:36:03 GMT

All our users currently have Microsoft Teams Premium Licences

We want to automatically start recording and transcription for new Microsoft teams meetings

We can set the variable 'AutoRecording' for teams with no issue, however there doesn't seem to be one for Auto Transcription and looks like they never has or will be.

We do not want users to rely on choosing the meeting templates

The aim was to start auto record and transcript for all new meetings, the user is free to manually stop them if not deemed necessary

this is to make use of the AI summaries

Barrie

Viva Engage for recognition feels limited, what are you all using?

HarryP — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:51:45 GMT

We rolled out Viva Engage hoping the praise feature would help build a recognition culture but honestly its kinda buried and most employees forget its there. Our managers want something where giving recognition is part of the daily flow, like right inside a Teams chat or after a meeting. Are you running into difficulties with praise? Any best practices you can recommend so we can use it better? Or are you using something else?

News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 4, April 2026

amywheater — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:53:39 GMT

This month’s newsletter brings you the latest updates, insights, and learnings to help you turn employee listening into action with Viva Glint & Pulse. As organizations continue to navigate AI-driven change, we’re focused on helping you measure what matters, understand impact, and sustain momentum across your employee experience strategy—with practical updates to support you every step of the way.

New on your Viva Glint platform

This section highlights new capabilities and updates now available to help you strengthen security, reporting, and administrative control in Viva Glint.

Copilot reporting: Copilot Highlights. Copilot Highlights, now generally available, generates AI-powered summaries of employee survey results directly within Team Summary and Executive Summary reports, surfacing key insights like strengths, opportunities, score changes, and benchmark comparisons so managers and leaders can move from data to action faster. This release also brings multilingual support, with summaries generated in each user's configured Viva Glint language. Unlike Copilot comment summarization, which requires a higher number of survey respondents, Copilot Highlights works wherever managers already have access to dashboard data, making Copilot in Viva Glint valuable for a broader set of leaders across your organization. The feature is automatically available for anyone with Copilot in Viva Glint turned on. Learn more about the feature here and to get started or expand access to more users, see Manage Viva Glint Copilot access in Microsoft 365 admin center.

Copilot reporting: Copilot control migration to Microsoft 365 admin center. On April 30th, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center will become the single point of control for Viva Glint Copilot, consistent with other Microsoft Copilot experiences. As part of this change, the existing admin toggles for Copilot access in Viva Glint will be removed, and Copilot will default to ON at the Viva Glint platform level. Customers can transition to this new control model before April 30th by completing setup in Microsoft 365 admin center using Viva Feature Access Management (VFAM) to configure Copilot access for Viva Glint. For more information, please visit Manage Copilot access in Viva Glint, Manage Viva Glint Copilot access in Microsoft 365 admin center, and Data, privacy, and security for Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Glint.

Reporting: Direct link to the default report from the dashboard. A new 'Filter in reports' button lets users open the dashboard’s default report view directly, making it faster and easier to navigate and analyze results.

Survey: New Copilot measurement items. We’ve added seven new Copilot measurement questions to Viva Glint. Monitor and accelerate your Copilot transformation with the Glint Copilot Impact template now featuring 21 validated survey questions designed to measure and get valuable feedback on how well employees are adapting to and experiencing Copilot value in their work. You have the flexibility to use any number of these Copilot items when, where, and how it makes most sense at important moments in your Copilot journey, whether it’s a standalone Copilot survey, integrated into your Engagement survey, or deployed in Viva Pulse surveys for more targeted insights. Find more information here.

Advanced Analytics: Viva Glint R and Python packages. A new R package (vivaglint) and Python package (vivaglint_py), designed to make it easier to work with your Viva Glint raw data export for analysis and visualization, are now available. These packages offer functions for generating full correlation tables, conducting attrition linkage analysis, factor analysis, and more based on your raw survey data exports. Learn more here.

Coming soon to Viva Glint

The following section offers an early look at capabilities coming to Glint shaping the future of continuous listening, analytics, and AI‑powered insight.

Copilot-supported commenting for Viva Glint survey takers | Private preview starts May. Viva Glint survey takers will soon be able to use a streamlined Microsoft Copilot experience directly within surveys to help refine their written feedback (please note: this capability is not available for respondents accessing surveys via attribute-based login or personalized links). Copilot can help rephrase comments, making it easier for employees to express their thoughts clearly and confidently. By reducing identifiable writing patterns and simplifying the process of providing thoughtful feedback, this feature helps foster a greater sense of privacy and ease. This, in turn, can encourage higher participation, more detailed responses, and more candid insights—ultimately helping organizations gain a richer, more actionable understanding from their surveys.

Additional controls for data flow from Insights to Glint | Generally Available in May. Starting in May, when you enable data flow from Insights to Glint, you will have the ability to exclude specific users and groups from having their metrics sent over. The control will be available in the Viva Glint section of Viva Feature Access Management in the M365 Admin Center. This is useful for tenants who operate in regions or parts of the organization where further approvals are needed to use workplace metrics data. You can exclude those users and groups from the feature until you get the approvals needed.

Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics | Preview. Improve actionability for Work-Life Balance and Collaboration focus areas by integrating Viva Insights workplace metrics into Glint reporting. This feature will help Senior Leaders in your organization access supplementary data points, in conjunction with survey responses, to better understand their team's experience and conduct more data-driven discussions on what can be improved in these areas. Private Preview is targeted in May 2026. Future capabilities will include notifications between survey cycles to keep team health top of mind for leaders, including notable metric differences in the Glint Copilot Results Summary and the ability to map additional Viva Insights and Copilot metrics to survey items including custom questions.

To express your interest, please complete the following: Private Preview: Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics.

If you are already part of the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program, request to join our Workplace Patterns & Continuous Listening EECC Teams subchannel through the main Glint EECC Teams channel so you can iterate on the future of continuous engagement with the product team in monthly calls. If you aren’t already part of the EECC, see the Connect with us section in this newsletter for more details on how to join.

Employee Feedback Agent | Preview. Enhance your Employee Listen program with The Employee Feedback Agent a dynamic, AI-powered conversation, where employees can share what matters most through natural, chat-like interactions, whether prompted or always-on, enabling real-time feedback and deeper insights into the drivers behind their experiences. By combining Copilot intelligence and People Science principles, the agent streamlines feedback collection and reduces administrative overhead for HR and leaders. Unlike traditional Copilot tools that simply summarize information, the Employee Feedback Agent collects experiential data through probing questions and back and forth dialogue with employees. Future capabilities will expand impact with an actionable insights reporting experience, accelerating the “feedback-to-action” cycle. The initial private preview cohort is closed but please stay tuned for more information about when this experience will be generally available.

Raw Data Export API Egress | Preview. Unlock seamless, automated access to raw survey data—no more manual downloads. Built on Microsoft Graph, these APIs make integrations easier and help admins move faster with greater efficiency. Express your interest here.

See our public roadmap for more feature updates.

Events and learning opportunities

Stay up to date with upcoming events, recent documentation updates, customer engagement opportunities and highlights from EECC customer sessions—designed to help you learn, connect, and get more value from Viva Glint & Pulse.

Recent documentation enhancements:

Have technical questions about Viva Glint? Microsoft Learn is your best source for clear, current guidance. We continue to expand and refine our documentation to add detail on new capabilities, address frequent questions, and strengthen the topics customers rely on most. These updates improve clarity and consistency, making it easier to use Viva Glint with confidence. Below are a few of the most impactful updates now live on Microsoft Learn:

eNPS details and setup steps and translations clarification added to question setup guidelines

Improved guidance around user role set up

Cascading Focus Area instructions added to Focus Area creation overview

Clarification to PPT export details

Survey distribution setup clarification for Lifecycle surveys

Updates to setting up a unique 360 admin role & a rater group note added to the subject experience

Greater detail provided around attribute selection for Alerts report

Additional guidance added around setting up role access to survey results

Important notes added around attribute naming and date attributes in attribute fundamentals

Customer Engagement Opportunities:

Call for Input | Help shape the future of the Glint admin experience. We’re looking to partner with Viva Glint admins to better understand where the admin experience can be improved—and where AI can make a meaningful difference.

1) Share your feedback. We’d love your quick input on areas that feel unclear, slow, or harder than they should be across the admin experience. Your feedback will help us identify common friction points and uncover gaps we may be missing. Take the survey here.

2) Collaborate with us. If you’re interested in going deeper, we’re also looking for admins to partner with the Glint Admin Agent team. We’re exploring how AI can help streamline key admin tasks—reducing manual effort and simplifying complex workflows. You’ll have the opportunity to share specific scenarios, co-create solutions, and help shape early concepts. Please sign up here.

If you’re open to providing feedback or partnering with us, we’d really value your perspective!

Upcoming EECC Customer Engagement Sessions:

April 23rd-Notifications and Nudges Admin Experience in Viva Glint

If you are a member of the EECC program, register here to take part.

Join us for an upcoming EECC session focused on understanding how organizations are leveraging survey notifications and Nudges within Microsoft Glint today, and where there may be opportunities to enhance the experience moving forward. This session is designed to facilitate open discussion with Viva Glint admins to validate early ideas and gather feedback that can help inform future improvements to notification capabilities.

During this interactive forum, we will explore current notification workflows used in survey programs, share initial insights gathered through existing customer feedback channels, and introduce early concepts related to enhancements in the notifications and Nudges space. Attendees will have the opportunity to provide direct input on areas where the platform may not fully meet their needs today, particularly from an administrative and program design perspective.

By attending, you can expect to:

Share feedback on existing notification and Nudge functionality to help influence future platform direction

Learn how other organizations are approaching survey communications within their programs

Engage in discussion around potential improvements and enhancements to notification experiences

Provide input on early-stage concepts aimed at increasing adoption and effectiveness of Nudges

If you are not yet a member of the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC-formerly VCCP) but would like to participate in upcoming sessions, as well as gain access to numerous other engaging and valuable Glint and Pulse customer activities, please see the sign-up information below.

New Thought Leadership

Explore the latest research and perspectives from our People Science team on leadership, AI, and the evolving employee experience.

Research Drop: Tracking the Rise of Perceived AI Value at Work. AI adoption is rising, but usage alone doesn’t tell us whether work is actually getting better. Our latest research shows that employees’ perceived value of AI has increased over time, with RIVA favorability rising 9 points across three cross‑industry studies, signaling a shift from experimentation to more integrated, value‑generating use. But that value isn’t evenly distributed. Industry, organization size, job level, and function all shape who benefits and how quickly. As employees build fluency and apply AI to more complex work, value tends to compound, but only when organizations create the right conditions. Enabling repeatable, meaningful integration into everyday work is key to continued momentum. Read it here.

Connect with us

Stay engaged with the Viva Glint & Pulse community through the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program.

The Viva Customer Connection Program (VCCP) is now the Employee Experience Customer Connection (EECC) program — a name that reflects the expanded scope and value of this community as employee experiences continue to evolve with Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

What’s changing

Viva Customer Connection Program is now the Employee Experience Customer Connection program
Our shared mission: “Employee experiences powered by M365 Copilot and Viva.”
Invites & communication will be from Employee Experience Customer Connection

What’s staying the same

Continued expansion of product team engagement for Employee Experiences powered by Viva and M365Copilot
Forums for you to influence product direction & unlock value for your organization
Early insight into product roadmap
Private preview engagement opportunities
Connection with other enterprise customers

If you’re interested in joining, please fill out this form so we can guide you through the enrollment process and help you get started.

We look forward to partnering with you to build better products—together.

Effective, engaging events in communities and storylines

tricialybrook — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:03:56 GMT

Whether you’re running a company-wide broadcast, a training session, a Reddit-style “ask me anything” (AMA) or an in-person gathering, Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams help you host and manage more effective and engaging events.

Events have always been central to employee communications. Viva Engage and events play a critical role in building trust, encouraging authenticity, and listening at scale. From highly produced hybrid all-hands to asynchronous AMAs, the new Viva Engage features are helping our leaders connect with employees, address what matters most, and build trust—all in one platform.

- John Cirone, Senior Director of Global Employee and Executive Communications

We are upgrading existing community live events and storyline AMA features with a simple model: three event types—broadcast, meeting, async—from any community or storyline, super-powered with a long list of event features you have asked for. The result: improved experiences for organizers, presenters and attendees both before, during and after the event. This blog post will detail what this means for you!

These new events features start rolling out April 27^th. And guess what? All of these new features will be available to all Microsoft 365 commercial customers with access to Engage and Teams—no “premium” license will be required for events up to 10,000 attendees.

New features: the highlights

The new capabilities of Engage events—particularly the moderated feed with support for anonymous questions and upvotes—has transformed the way we empower our leaders to listen and respond to questions from employees.

- Alexander Bradley, Senior Director of Executive Communications

With that in mind, let’s start by exploring the new features for every event in every community and storyline:

Events listing: Each community and storyline has a calendar of upcoming and past events—a destination for people to register for future events and catch up with events they missed.
Event page: The home for your event is a branded landing page with a custom cover photo (coming soon), the event details and description. This is the “micro site” for your event to which you drive attendees. They can learn about the event, engage with it, join the live session, and catch up with the event if they missed it.
Event feed: A new event feed enables you to share updates, solicit questions, ideas and feedback, and support engagement between attendees and presenters. The new event feed introduces support for optional anonymous posting and moderation which allows organizers to approve posts before they are made visible to attendees. The feed allows you to tune the event experience for the engagement you want to encourage and support; you can enable or disable questions, comments, reactions, and upvoting; and you can change the settings at any time. The event feed is available before, during and after the event, showing up on the event landing page in Engage and in the “Q&A” panel of Teams.
Event recording: After the event, the recording is available on the event page, so attendees can review both the recording and the feed. You can now update the recording link, allowing you to make edits to the video.

Calendaring options: Events in Engage support two models to support your efforts to drive demand and attendance. First, you can invite attendees directly from Outlook, putting an invitation directly in their calendar. This model supports scenarios where their attendance is expected. Or, you can drive attendees to the event page where they can add to calendar, supporting an “opt-in” model that gives attendees control of what is on their calendar. Or you can mix and match, inviting those attendees who really need to have it on their calendar and letting others opt in.
Event analytics: You’ll have access to analytics throughout the lifecycle of your event. You’ll be able to see how many people attended, how they engaged in the event feed, and how people consumed the recording after the event. For broadcasts, you can also access Teams insights.

Mobile app choice: Attendees can join events from either the Teams or Engage mobile apps, across both iOS and Android.

Integration with enterprise search and Copilot: Content from public events serves as grounding for Microsoft 365 Copilot and enterprise search, amplifying the reach and impact of the knowledge and information you share in your event.

Event types

Now, let’s explore the three event types and what is different.

BROADCAST is best for company-wide or large-scale events, launches, keynotes and organizational “town hall” or “all hands” events. Key characteristics:

Deliver a high‑quality live stream that scales to large audiences
Organizers control what appears on screen
Attendees watch the event and participate using Q&A and reactions

This experience is an upgrade to the legacy “live event” broadcast, with an advanced feed and a rich suite of production features.

MEETING is best for collaborative sessions, presentations, training workshops, expert panels, and all of the regular “rhythm of business” events your team or department conducts. Key characteristics:

Share camera, microphone, and screen in real time
Organizers can control who can present and share
Up to 1,000 people can participate in the live event

A collaborative event can feel exactly like a Teams meeting, where anyone can share. Or it can be like a presentation or webinar, where only presenters can share. Or anything in between.

ASYNC is best for soliciting questions, collecting feedback, and crowdsourcing ideas from employees.

Conduct an offline, asynchronous event with no live presentation or video stream
Host an "ask-me-anything" (AMA) during which leaders or experts answer questions
Enhance an in-person event by engaging your audience before and after

This experience features an event page and event feed, but no real-time video experience powered by Teams. You can gather questions, ideas and feedback before an in-person event, or host a text-only (asynchronous) event like a Reddit-style AMA that can connect people with experts even over longer periods of time.

Why host events in a community instead of creating them from your calendar?

Until now, you’ve had one way to create events: From your Teams or Outlook calendar, you can create a Teams meeting, a Teams webinar, or a Teams Town Hall. Why would you want to change where you create and host events?

An event isn’t just a calendar entry; its impact continues outside of the event confines. New event features help employees who missed the live event catch up quickly, help moderators engage attendees, and help leaders close the loop by responding to remaining questions. The result is a richer, more durable record of the event, so your organization benefits from the information and knowledge long after the event ends.

Here’s the short list of what you can do better when you create your event from a community:

Provide a calendar of upcoming and past events.
Communicate effectively to drive awareness and attendance.
Engage your audience before, during and after the event.
Leverage event analytics to measure and improve effectiveness.
Amplify information and knowledge shared at the event, after the event.
Integration with community objectives and experiences.

If you have experience with Microsoft 365 and events, think of it this way: By creating an event in a community, you’re taking a Teams event and wrapping it with the superpowers of Engage to reach and engage your audience at scale, before, during and after your event.

And remember communities are not just for Engage anymore! Communities (powered by Engage) will be available in Teams Chat, alongside your chats, channels, and meetings; so, your events and their content will be seamlessly integrated into the flow of work in Teams.

Preview customers have used these new event capabilities at scale, for company-wide “all hands” events, departmental rhythm-of-business meetings, and an extraordinary number of internal AI learning events. We look forward to celebrating your successful events as you apply these features to share news and information, train people, and engage employees.

Resources

Research Drop: Tracking the Rise of Perceived AI Value at Work

Megan_Benzing — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:02:50 GMT

Research Drop in Brief:

Most AI measurements focus on adoption, but adoption alone doesn't tell us whether AI is actually changing how work feels and functions. RIVA (Realized Individual Value of AI) captures what usage metrics miss: whether AI is meaningfully improving employees' work quality, speed, decision-making, and stress at the individual level.
Across three cross-industry panel surveys spanning two years, RIVA favorability rose 9-percentage points among AI-using managers and ICs – directional evidence that employees are moving from experimentation toward integrated, value-generating use.
But this rise isn't uniform. Industry context, organization size, job level, and department all shape who benefits, and in some cases, those gaps are actively widening.

Tracking AI access and usage has become relatively straightforward for most organizations. What’s harder to measure – and far less often tracked – is whether employees are actually experiencing value from the AI they use. Adoption without perceived value is a fragile foundation for transformation.

Metrics vary across the adoption and impact phase, and longitudinal employee-reported value data is rare. Where trend data does exist, it often tracks usage or infers value from productivity or sentiment proxies. Without understanding whether employees feel value from AI, organizations risk scaling tools that are technically adopted but experientially underwhelming.

The People Science team has conducted three cross-industry panel surveys on AI over the past two years (April 2024, July 2025, and November 2025), enabling us to look for signals of AI value trends over time. Though these are not repeated samples of employees in each time point, comparing these separate samples sheds directional insight on how perceived value of AI has shifted for employees that use AI at work.

The high-level takeaway? In our snapshots of AI-using managers and individual contributors, perceived value of AI has consistently risen across the three time periods, which is directional evidence that perceived value is rising as organizations move from experimentation toward more routine, integrated use.

But the nuance is that this pattern is not a one-size-fits-all for different groups of employees. This month’s Research Drop explores trend differences between various categories of employees: AI usage level, job level, organization size, industry, and department.

Rising employee perceptions of realized individual value of AI

Among the many signals organizations can track, employee perception offers something uniquely valuable: a direct window into whether AI is changing how work feels and functions at the individual level. These employee voices are the closest to the day-to-day reality of integration and keeping them front-and-center ensures that the transformation is happening with people, not just to them.

People Science measures perceived AI value at the individual employee level with our RIVA scale (Realized Individual Value of AI). This scale consists of six survey items related to individual benefits one might see from using AI at work (see note at the end of the blog for how we calculate RIVA favorability):

AI improves the quality of my work or output
AI allows me to complete tasks faster
AI simplifies my complex work tasks
AI helps me be more productive at work
AI helps me make better decisions
AI helps reduce my overall work-related stress

Over the three points, RIVA favorability rose 9-percentage points (pp) for managers and individual contributors who use AI.

The more employees are exposed to, gaining familiarity with, and using AI at work, the more likely they are to perceive value of AI at an individual level. The concepts captured with RIVA (time saved, reduced complexity, improved decision) are benefits that can increase with skill and workflow integration – signaling that employees are maturing in their AI use.

This maturation mirrors what we see in other skill development contexts, where value tends to compound as familiarity deepens. Early AI use is often exploratory and focused on simple task offloading. As employees build fluency, they begin applying AI to more complex, higher‑stakes work, where perceived returns and value grow accordingly.

It’s worth noting that RIVA captures the individual experience of AI, and a rising score doesn’t tell the whole story of organizational transformation. Even as individual value perceptions climb, some research suggests that true transformative business impact is still stalling at many organizations¹. But individual value is a meaningful piece of the puzzle, and employee experience often precedes and enables broader organizational impact.

So, what’s driving individual value perceptions up? One clear pattern is usage itself.

The intertwined nature of AI usage and value perception

Employees who use AI more frequently are also more likely to report higher RIVA favorability – a relationship that is likely reinforcing, not causal. People who perceive value from AI may be more motivated to use it more often and for more complex tasks, which in turn deepens that value perception. The dynamic likely flows both ways.

But what’s encouraging isn’t just the correlation, it’s the trajectory. Across time, the perceived value for each usage group remained relatively stable, but more employees are moving into higher frequency categories than before. The relationship between usage and value is holding, and the population experiencing it is growing.

For transformation leaders, this reframes the challenge: it’s less about getting employees access to AI and more about building the conditions for repeatable workflow integration that sustains and deepens that cycle.

Job level shapes the pace of AI value realization

For comparing these time points, we focused solely on managers and individual contributors – excluding leaders (VP/Director+). We have consistently found in our research that leaders report the highest level of favorability when it comes to perceptions of AI readiness, adoption, and impact, and that a gap exists between leaders, managers, and individual contributors within this transformation.

Though leaders are generally the most positive, we also typically find that managers report higher levels of perceived value than individual contributors. We found this to be true most of the time, except in July 2025, this value gap seemed to have closed momentarily.

By late 2025, managers reported a 9-percentage point (pp) lift in RIVA favorability compared to 2024 and an average of 13pp higher RIVA favorability than individual contributors. One plausible interpretation is that AI value may be surfacing faster in managerial work, where coordination-heavy tasks such as scheduling, review, and orchestration create frequent opportunities for AI to improve how work gets done².

Individual contributors, by contrast, saw their gains earlier (+15pp), with little additional movement across 2025. Rather than signaling a hard ceiling on IC value, this pattern may indicate that the next wave of AI impact is becoming more workflow- and team-dependent³. If so, the leadership implication is important: organizations may need to move beyond individual enablement to invest more intentionally in shared team practices, not just personal productivity (See our 2025 Agentic Teaming & Trust Research Report for early team-level insights).

Organizational agility may support faster employee value realization

Two employees with the same AI tools and the same enthusiasm can have vastly different experiences of AI value, simply based on where they work. Organization size is one of the most significant structural factors shaping that gap. That means the same investment in AI can produce very different returns for employees, depending on the organization they’re in.

We found that employees in midsize organizations (1,000 to 4,999 employees) consistently report more perceived value than those in large (5,000 to 14,999 employees) or enterprise (15,000+ employees) organizations.

Midsize employees have also continuously seen jumps in their perceived value (74% > 77% > 85%), while large and enterprise employees, though still increasing in perceived value, have generally more subtle changes in RIVA favorability.

The size of midsize organizations may work to their advantage in that they can translate AI access into day-to-day workflow integration faster than enterprises, which often face friction when scaling. Enterprise organizations will inherently have more siloed and disparate governance and permissioning models, which will involve more moving pieces to work through when deploying and scaling AI and AI agents. Regardless of size, it’s not an easy feat to fully integrate AI, and only 8% of companies have truly scaled AI across their entire enterprise⁴.

It’s important for organizations to keep transformation momentum so their employees don’t feel the lag in their personal AI experience as the company itself tries to push through the friction. Focusing on experimentation and continuous learning opportunities can help employees stay invested in the change even in specific roll-out milestones take longer than employees’ desire.

Industry context shapes how AI becomes valuable to employees

Just as organization size shapes the pace of AI integration, industry context shapes its direction. Different industries are turning to AI to solve fundamentally different problems, such as streamlining administrative burden in healthcare to managing compliance workflows in financial services. And layered on top of those distinct use cases are equally distinct policy and regulatory environments that govern how AI can be used, by whom, and under what conditions.

Industry context shapes not just how much value employees report from AI, but how quickly that value is felt and under what conditions. In our latest snapshot from late 2025, employees in the technology industry realized the highest AI value at 86% favorability. However, other industries weren’t too far off, signaling that technology isn’t overly dominant in value perception. Given the sample sizes within each industry, these patterns are best read as directional signals.

Different sectors are applying AI to different kinds of work, and they operate under different regulatory, operational, and cultural constraints. As a result, the path the value is unlikely to look the same across industries.

Across these directional snapshots, the clearest signal is not which industry is "winning," but that industries appear to be moving along different paths to value. Some, like healthcare, seem to be gaining momentum as AI becomes more workable in day-to-day workflows. Others, like financial and professional services, appear to face more friction in translating access into clear employee benefit. This may reflect differences in how directly AI is reshaping the core work of each industry, rather than a uniform difference in adoption or capability.

The leadership implication is that AI transformation is unlikely to succeed with a one-size-fits-all playbook. Industry conditions shape the use cases employees can trust, adopt, and benefit from. Organizations that align enablement, governance, and workflow design to the realities of their industry are more likely to turn AI access into meaningful value.

AI value may appear first for the functions closest to the transformation

An employee’s department at work will also influence their AI experience. Within any given organization, not all employees are experiencing AI transformation from the same vantage point. Where you sit and what your team is responsible for fundamentally shapes your proximity to AI decisions, your access to pilot groups, and ultimately how much value you’re able to extract from AI.

Across time points, IT employees have consistently reported the highest RIVA favorability scores. However, a big jump for HR employees brings their favorability almost on par with employees in IT.

Employees in IT and HR are not just users of AI – they are often owners and enablers of AI transformation across their organization. That position gives them earlier access, deeper experimentation opportunities, and clearer value understanding. These employees will likely continue to be at the top of value perception as they are “in the room” when AI transformation decisions are being made, increasing their dedication to AI’s success and deepening their knowledge of impactful AI use cases.

For HR, there was a 13-percentage point (pp) lift between the July 2025 and November 2025 samples. Employees HR teams navigate some of the most stringent privacy and security guardrails at work, given the sensitivity of employee data. But sustained investment in AI-enabled HR technology has helped bridge that gap. Research on the future of HR points to AI increasingly taking on the high-volume administrative work that has long defined the function (e.g., recruitment, onboarding, performance management, and workforce analytics) freeing HR professionals to focus on more strategic, people-centered work⁵. The 13pp lift in RIVA favorability for HR employees may reflect exactly that shift.

One department with consistent growth is research & development (R&D)/engineering, with a 7pp lift across each time point. Engineering is often discussed as an “at-risk” role due to AI’s ability to write code, and these employees are often more exposed to AI than other employees due to the direct nature of AI’s impact to their work. AI can increase up to 26% in developer productivity, and less experienced developers have higher adoption rates and greater productivity gains⁶. R&D/Engineering employees are on the frontlines of seeing their work transformed by AI and the data suggests they are finding genuine value in that transformation. But its worth acknowledging that being on the frontlines of AI’s impact isn’t without anxiety. When AI can write code, the question of what that means for one’s role and identity at work is real and valid.

Rising value perception and professional uncertainty can, and often do, coexist. Organizations can support these employees by framing AI as a skill amplifier rather than a replacement and investing in job crafting opportunities that help them evolve their roles alongside the technology.

Overall, employees are realizing the value of AI in their day-to-day work more than ever before. What’s changing now is where that value shows up. As agentic AI evolves, the impact will extend beyond individual productivity into how work gets coordinated, decisions get made, and teams operate.

But this shift will not happen evenly by default. Experiences still vary across roles, functions, and levels of access. Without intentional design, the benefits of AI risk concentrating among those already closest to it. As we move beyond scaling technology to truly reshaping work, organizations that focus on embedding AI into real workflows, building trust through clear guardrails, and enabling employees to develop new ways of working will be the ones that see lasting impact.

The question is no longer whether AI creates value. It is how intentionally that value is distributed, adopted, and sustained across the workforce.

Stay tuned for our May Research Drop to keep up with what the Microsoft People Science team is learning! 

This month’s Research Drop analyzed data from 2,331 employees across three separate panel surveys: AI Readiness Study (n = 910, global representation), Agentic Teaming & Trust Study (n = 811, global representation), and AI Outcome Study (n = 610, US-only representation). Participants were only included in the analysis if they were a manager or an individual contributor. Included participants had to be AI users, even if less than once a month. These samples do not represent repeated participants and are point-in-time snapshots. Any trend data is directional only and does not imply causation or changes of employees within each isolated sample. Employees respond to RIVA items on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from ‘Strongly Disagree’ to ‘Strongly Agree’, and we compare differences in favorability (‘Agree’, ‘Strongly Agree’ responses) across samples and between groups. RIVA favorability is calculated by averaging the favorability percentage of the six individual RIVA items.

¹MIT Sloan Management Review. (January 27, 2026). AI Use is Rising at Work but Productivity Gains Lag.

²Harvard Business Review. (July-August 2025). How AI is Redefining Managerial Roles.

³Dell'Acqua, F., Ayoubi, C., Lifshitz, H., Sadun, R., Mollick, E., Mollick, L., ... & Lakhani, K. (2025). The cybernetic teammate: A field experiment on generative AI reshaping teamwork and expertise (No. w33641). National Bureau of Economic Research.

⁴McKinsey. (November 5, 2025). The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation.

⁵Gibbard, K., (September 16, 2025). Rethinking HR’s purpose alongside AI. SAP.

⁶Cui, Z., Demirer, M., Jaffe, S., Musolff, L., & Salz, T. (June 2025). The Effects of Generative AI on High-Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers. Microsoft Research.

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