rss.livelink.threads-in-node

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, 22 Apr 2026 17:47:58 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 | Generally Available in 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. 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.

Viva Engage Explained: Search

RamyaRajasekhar — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:53:46 GMT

Every person's search results are different. Just like the home feed, Engage search is personalized. When you search, we don't just look at the words you typed - we consider who you work with, which communities you're active in, and what content is most likely to be useful to you specifically.

So how does search work? What happens when you type a query and press Enter? And how can you search more effectively? Let's take a closer look.

The search experience

Search in Viva Engage has two stages: suggestions as you type and full search results. Each is designed to help you find what you need as quickly as possible.

Stage 1: Instant suggestions

Even before you start typing anything, when you click on the search bar, you are presented with suggestions based on your previous searches. As soon as you start typing in the search box, Engage shows you instant suggestions before you even press Enter. These suggestions are organized by type:

Query suggestions - popular and related search terms that help you refine your query
Ask Copilot - an option to have Copilot answer your question directly using knowledge from Engage
Communities - matching communities you can navigate to directly
People - matching users so you can jump straight to their profile
Campaigns - campaigns that match your search terms

As you type "copilot," Engage instantly shows related query suggestions, matching communities like "Microsoft Global Hackathon 2025," and relevant people - all before you press Enter.

These suggestions are designed to save you time. If you see the community, person, or campaign you're looking for, you can click it directly - no need to go to the full search results page.

When to use Ask Copilot

You'll notice that the autosuggestions include an "Ask Copilot" option at the top. This is especially powerful when your search goes beyond simple keywords and becomes a full question or request.

Here's a good rule of thumb: if you're typing more than a couple of keywords, consider using Ask Copilot. When your query looks more like a sentence or question than a keyword search, Copilot is often the faster path to an answer.

What you're typing	Best approach
"hackathon"	🔍 Regular search - a simple keyword, great for browsing posts
"hackathon winners 2025"	🔍 Regular search - specific keywords will surface the right threads
"who won the hackathon last year"	🤖 Ask Copilot - this is a question; Copilot can synthesize the answer from multiple posts
"how do I set up a community in Engage"	🤖 Ask Copilot - a how-to question; Copilot can assemble step-by-step guidance
"what was discussed in the last leadership town hall"	🤖 Ask Copilot - a summarization request; Copilot can pull together key points from recap threads
"what are the latest AI tools people are using"	🤖 Ask Copilot - an exploratory question; Copilot can aggregate insights from across the network

How it works: When you click "Ask Copilot," your query is sent to Microsoft 365 Copilot, which searches across conversations in your Engage network and generates a natural-language answer with citations. You'll see a summarized response with links to the source threads - so you can always verify and dig deeper.

License requirement: Ask Copilot is available only to users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you don't have a Copilot license, the "Ask Copilot" option will not appear in the search suggestions. All other search features - keyword matching, meaning matching, personalized ranking, and filtering - are available to all Viva Engage users.

Think of it this way: regular search helps you browse and discover. It's ideal when you want to see a list of posts and scan through them yourself. Ask Copilot helps you get answers. It's ideal when you have a specific question and want a synthesized response instead of scrolling through dozens of results.

Both options are available in the same search box - start typing and choose the path that matches your intent.

Stage 2: Full search results

When you press Enter (or click the search icon), you land on the full search results page. Results are organized into tabs so you can focus on exactly what you're looking for:

Tab	What it shows
Conversations	Thread results with full post previews, author info, community name, and highlighted matching terms
Answers	Questions and answers that match your query
Communities	Communities with matching names or descriptions
People	Users matching by name, job title, or email
Campaigns	Active and past campaigns matching your query
Files	Documents and files shared in Engage posts
Topics	Topics used across the network

The full search results page for " copilot" - notice how the matching keywords are highlighted in the post preview, and results show the community name, author, date, and reply count.

You can further narrow your results using the filter bar at the top of the results page. Filters include Date, Posted by (a specific person), Posted in (a specific community), and an All filters option for advanced filtering.

How search finds your results

When you search in Viva Engage, a lot happens behind the scenes - all in less than a second. Here's a simplified view of what happens:

Keyword matching + meaning matching

Viva Engage uses hybrid search - two fundamentally different approaches that run at the same time and complement each other:

Keyword matching finds posts that contain the exact words you typed. This uses a proven information retrieval technique that considers not just whether your keywords appear, but how often they appear and how distinctive they are. A rare, specific word like "hackathon" carries more weight than a common word like "team." This is great for specific terms like project names, acronyms, or someone's name. If you search for "FY26 Q3 OKRs," keyword matching finds posts that use those exact terms.

Keyword matching also draws from two pools of content: exploration results (discovery-focused, across all content you can access) and affinity results (personalized, weighted toward people and communities you interact with most). These two pools are merged to give you both breadth and personalization right from the start.

Meaning matching uses AI to understand the intent behind your query. Your query text is converted into a mathematical representation of its meaning (called an "embedding"), and then compared against embeddings for all threads in the network. Posts with similar meaning are surfaced - even if they use completely different words. For example, if you search for "team morale ideas," meaning matching can surface a post titled "Fun Activities to Boost Team Engagement" - there's no word overlap, but the meaning is the same. Only results that meet a minimum similarity threshold are included, ensuring quality.

Why both? Keyword matching is precise and predictable. Meaning matching helps you discover content you might have missed. Together, they cast a wide net - typically evaluating hundreds of candidate posts - before narrowing down to the most relevant results for you.

Privacy and permissions

Engage applies strict permission checks. You will only ever see content you have access to. Posts from private communities you haven't joined, or threads that have been deleted, are never shown. Note that content from communities you've muted will still appear in search results - muting affects your feed, not search.

Personalized ranking

After finding all the potentially relevant posts, Engage uses a machine learning model to re-rank results specifically for you. The model evaluates each candidate post across over 100 different signals, organized into several categories:

Text relevance - how well the post content matches your query, measured through multiple dimensions including term frequency, term importance, match density, and which part of the post the match appears in (title, body, or replies)
People affinity - how much you interact with the person who wrote the post, across Engage, Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 tools. The system computes a personalized affinity score between you and every author in the result set
Community affinity - how active you are in the community where the post was shared, based on your visits, replies, and engagement history with that community
Semantic similarity - three separate AI-computed similarity scores: how close your query meaning is to the post content, to the post author, and to the community where it was posted
Recency and time signals - when the post was created, how much time has elapsed, and time-decay factors that naturally boost newer content
Engagement signals - view counts, reply counts, reactions, and the user's own search and click history help predict what they'll find valuable
Highlight quality - where in the post the matches appear, how concentrated they are, and how prominent the matching sections are

This is why two people searching for the same thing may see different results. If you work closely with someone in the engineering team and they posted about "hackathon," their post will naturally rank higher for you than for someone who has never interacted with them.

Speed and performance

All of this - hybrid candidate generation, feature computation across 100+ signals, machine learning ranking, and permission filtering - happens in under a second. Several techniques make this possible:

Parallelism - keyword and meaning matching run simultaneously, not one after the other, so the total time is the duration of the slower search, not the sum of both
Smart caching - when you view the first page of results, Engage pre-fetches and caches the next page in the background. This means pagination feels instant - clicking to page 2 or 3 serves cached results with no delay
Batch processing - signals like engagement history and community metadata are fetched and computed in optimized batches rather than one at a time

The result is a search experience that feels instant while doing sophisticated work behind the scenes.

Searching for people

Viva Engage search isn't just for conversations - it's also a powerful way to find people across your organization. When you search for a person, Engage matches against:

Display name - first name, last name, or both (e.g., "Rajesh Jha")
Job title - search by role (e.g., "engineering manager" or "principal PM")
Email or alias - search by email address or alias prefix

People results appear in both the instant suggestions dropdown and the People tab on the search results page. Each result shows the person's name, profile picture, job title, and email - so you can quickly identify the right person even when there are multiple matches.

Tip: If you know someone's email alias, searching for it (e.g., "chrzeng") is often the fastest way to find them. Searching by job title (e.g., "product manager Engage") helps you discover people you may not know by name.

Searching for communities

Looking for a community to join? Search matches against community names and descriptions. This means you can search by topic (e.g., "accessibility," "onboarding," "women leadership") and find relevant communities even if the exact word isn't in the community name.

Community results also appear in the instant suggestions as you type, making it easy to navigate directly to a community without visiting the full results page.

A few examples of how community search works:

You search for...	You'll find communities like...
"accessibility"	Engage Accessibility, Accessibility Connected Community, Accessibility Leadership Community
"women leadership"	SME&C Women in Leadership, Women's Leadership Community (WLC), Technical Women at Microsoft
"Azure DevOps"	Azure DevOps / 1ES, and related Azure engineering communities
"onboarding"	Onboarding, Alchemy Onboarding, New Employee Onboarding

Keyword highlighting

When you land on the search results page, you'll notice that your search terms are highlighted in the post previews. This helps you quickly scan results and understand why each post was returned.

Highlighting appears in:

The thread title (if the post has one)
The body text preview - Engage shows the most relevant snippet of the post with your keywords highlighted
Replies - if a reply matches your query, it's shown with highlights below the original post

For example, searching for "AI tools and copilot" highlights each matching word in the results, making it easy to see how the post relates to your query at a glance.

A note on highlighting: We’re aware that keyword highlighting may not appear consistently across all result types. For instance, topic names and community names are indexed and searchable but are not currently highlighted in the search results. We’re actively working to improve highlighting consistency across the search experience.

Search on mobile - the same engine, designed for your pocket

Search in Viva Engage works the same way whether you're at your desk or on the go. The mobile apps (iOS and Android) use the same search engine, ranking, and personalization as the web experience - so the results you see on your phone are the same quality you'd get on the web.

On mobile, the search results page is optimized for touch and smaller screens: result cards are streamlined, tabs let you tap between Conversations, People, Communities, and more, and tapping any result takes you straight into the full thread. Use search on mobile to stay connected with your organization's conversations on the go - catch up on town hall recaps, hackathon updates, or announcements from anywhere.

Feature	Web	Mobile
Search engine & ranking	✅ Full hybrid search with personalization	✅ Same engine and ranking
Search tabs	✅ Conversations, Answers, Communities, People, Files, Topics	✅ Same tabs
Autosuggest	✅ Communities, People, Campaigns, Ask Copilot as you type	— Not available
Filters	✅ Date, Posted by, Posted in	— Not available
Keyword highlighting	✅ Yellow highlights on matching keywords	✅ Same highlighting
Result cards	Rich cards with hero images, inline replies	Streamlined cards optimized for smaller screens
Search operators	✅ AND, OR, NOT, "exact phrase", wildcards	✅ Same operators

What impacts your search results?

Your search experience improves over time as Engage learns from your activity. These actions directly influence the quality and personalization of your results:

Join communities. Joining relevant communities and leaving ones you're not interested in helps search understand what topics matter to you. Results from communities you've joined receive increased weight.
Interact with posts. Liking, replying to, and viewing posts tells search which content and authors are relevant to you. The more you engage, the better your people and community affinity scores become.
Follow people. Following leaders and colleagues is one of the strongest signals for search personalization. Posts from people you follow get a natural ranking boost.
Join relevant communities. Being a member of communities helps search understand your interests and can surface more relevant content from those communities.

Good to know: Engage uses the same affinity signals as the home feed. If you've been improving your feed experience by following people and joining communities, your search results are benefiting too.

Tips for more effective searching

Engage search learns from the signals you provide. Here are some ways to get better results:

Be specific

Instead of “strategy,” try “FY26 company strategy.”
Adding context like dates, team names, or product names helps search find exactly what you need.

Use the tabs

If you’re looking for a person, click the People tab.
If you’re looking for a community, click Communities to focus results on the right content type.

Filter by date

Use the Date filter to narrow results to a specific time period.
Especially useful if you roughly remember when something was posted.

Filter by author

Use the Posted by filter if you remember who posted it.
Helps narrow results to a specific person’s posts.

Filter by community

Use Posted in to limit results to a specific community.
Helpful when you know where the conversation happened.

Ask Copilot

When you see Ask Copilot in the suggestions dropdown, click it.
You’ll get an AI-generated answer drawn from Engage conversations.

Use search operators

Use AND to require all terms e.g., safety AND store
Use OR to broaden results e.g., hackathon OR innovation
Use NOT to exclude terms e.g., hackathon NOT 2026
Use quotes for exact phrases.
Operators can be combined e.g., (hackathon OR innovation) AND 2025

Search by hashtag

If you know the topic or campaign tag (e.g., #CopilotStories), search for it directly.
The Topics tab shows all matching hashtags and their associated threads.

We're always improving

The Viva Engage search team is continuously improving the search experience. As you use search, you're helping it get smarter. Your interactions - the results you click, the posts you engage with, and the communities you join - all contribute to a better experience for everyone.

Have feedback on search? Send an email to rarajase@microsoft.com - we're listening.

Copilot in Viva Glint user role control change (from April 30)

Rieko — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:51:10 GMT

Hi team, hope you are doing well. I read this article about Copilot in Viva Glint user role control change, beginning April 30. What will bring this impact on customers for example, who turns on only for HR user role? Thank you for your support in advance!

Sensitivity Labels Are Coming to Viva Engage Communities Here's What You Need to Know

audreyhosford — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:06:54 GMT

If you've seen MC1250283 in your Message Center and have questions, you're not alone. In the past few weeks we've heard from customers across industries — financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, government — all asking variations of the same questions. This post is our attempt to answer them all in one place. You can find out more via this article Sensitivity labels in Viva Engage. | Microsoft Learn

What's changing

Starting March 31, 2026 sensitivity labels will be available in Viva Engage community creation. When someone creates a new community, they'll see a sensitivity label picker, the same kind of label selector that already exists in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.

This is Engage joining the rest of Microsoft 365. Sensitivity labels for groups and sites have been supported in Teams, SharePoint, and M365 Groups for years. Engage communities, which are built on top of M365 Groups and SharePoint sites, are now part of that ecosystem.

How it works

Labels come from Purview, not Engage. There is no new admin setting in the Viva Engage admin center to turn this on or off. Your sensitivity labels are configured and published in Microsoft Purview, and those settings now apply to Engage communities the same way they apply to Teams and SharePoint.

Labels are synced across all three surfaces. An Engage community's sensitivity label is shared with its linked M365 Group and SharePoint site. When a label is applied to one, it synchronizes across all three. This means your label governance is consistent — not fragmented.

Existing communities are not automatically labeled. Communities created before this rollout will remain in an unlabeled state. They won't have a label auto-assigned. Admins can apply labels to existing communities in bulk using existing PowerShell scripts against the linked M365 Groups or SharePoint sites, no new tooling is needed. Applying a label via those surfaces will trigger the sync to Engage.

Labeling can be mandatory or optional. Whether users must pick a label when creating a community is controlled by your Purview label policy. In the label policy publishing flow, under "Groups and sites > Settings," there's a checkbox to make site labeling mandatory. If you check it, users will be required to select a label when creating a community. If you don't, the label picker appears but community creation is still allowed without a selection.

Default labels are set in Purview. If mandatory labeling is enabled and a user hasn't picked a label, the creation flow pre-populates a default. That default is determined by your label policy settings in Purview — Purview suggests the lowest-priority label with the right scope, but you can configure a different one. On Day 1, before an Engage-specific default is configured, the existing site default label (if set) will pre-populate.

Community admins and owners can change labels after creation. This isn't locked to tenant admins. Community admins and owners will be able to update the label via community settings in Viva Engage or through the M365 admin center group listings.

Sensitivity labels can be managed via community settings.

Programmatic community creation still works. If you create communities via the Graph API's /community endpoint, the label won't be set through that call — there's no Graph API support for setting labels directly on communities in this release. However, after creation, you can apply the label via PowerShell targeting the linked M365 Group or SharePoint site, which will sync to Engage. Your existing automation flows won't break; they just need a label-setting step added if you need one.

The governance tension we've heard

The most substantive concern we've received, and it's a legitimate one, comes from organizations that have configured their Purview label policies to enforce private-only labels for groups and sites. These organizations allowed public Engage communities precisely because Engage wasn't subject to sensitivity label governance. When Engage joins that ecosystem, their Purview policy will apply — and if their policy only permits private-supporting labels, new Engage communities will only be creatable as private communities.

We want to be direct about this: Purview sensitivity label policies are tenant-wide and can't be scoped to individual workloads. There is no way to say "apply this policy to Teams and SharePoint but not Engage." Engage communities are built on M365 Groups and SharePoint sites, and they share the same label scope in order to stay in sync.

If your organization has strict private-only governance and you need to continue creating public Engage communities, the practical path is:

Create a public-supporting sensitivity label (e.g., "General - Internal Communications")
Publish it to admins only — not your entire user base — so it doesn't accidentally appear in Teams or SharePoint creation flows for end users
Apply this label to Engage communities via the admin center or PowerShell scripts
Optionally, publish the label to your entire user base and use automated scripts to monitor Groups and Sites for misuse of that public label and correct them

This is a workaround, not an ideal solution. We've heard the feedback clearly: Engage's use case — broad internal communication and knowledge sharing, is fundamentally different from SharePoint or Teams collaboration, and a one-size-fits-all label scope creates real tension. We're tracking this as a design consideration and have raised it with the Purview team. If you want to formally register this feedback, submit a Design Change Request (DCR) with your Microsoft Account team asking for per-workload label scoping support.

What sensitivity labels do NOT change

Community discoverability. All Engage communities remain discoverable to all users regardless of sensitivity label. Labels don't create "hidden" communities. A private community is visible in search — users just can't read the content without being a member.
What users can see in search. Search results are governed by access control lists (ACLs), not sensitivity labels. Users will only see content they have permission to access.
Your custom label taxonomy. Labels like "Confidential" or "Highly Confidential" are defined by your organization in Purview. There's no universal label structure — your configuration is yours.

Frequently asked questions

Can I test this in a staging tenant before it hits production? This rolls out to production tenants starting March 31. There isn't a separate staging path for this feature. We recommend using this window before rollout to review your Purview label policies, identify any communities where label assignment may create issues, and prepare admin and end user documentation.

What happens if we have no sensitivity labels configured in Purview at all? If you don't use sensitivity labels for groups and sites, this change will have no impact. Community creation will support the privacy picker as it always has.

Will this affect Copilot? Yes, and this is worth thinking through. Verified answers and content in private communities are scoped to members of that community. If your governance pushes more communities to private, that content becomes less accessible to Copilot for org-wide knowledge retrieval. If broad knowledge sharing is a goal, this is a factor to weigh in your label policy decisions.

Will there be any visual change for end users? Users creating communities will see a sensitivity label dropdown in the creation flow. If your organization has labels published to users, they'll be able to select from those labels. If mandatory labeling is not enabled, they can leave it blank. If a community has a label, it will be visible in the community header.

Once a community has a sensitivity label applied, end users will see it in the lower right of the community header.

What to do before March 31

Review your Purview label policies. Specifically check whether you have mandatory labeling enabled for groups and sites, and what default label is configured. This will determine what your users see in community creation.
Check for existing communities with label mismatches. If your linked Groups or SharePoint sites already have labels applied, confirm that those labels are ones that make sense for public community use.
Prepare your community admins. Let them know the label picker is coming and what they should (or shouldn't) select.
Prepare end user guidance if needed. For most organizations this will be low-friction. But if you have a complex label taxonomy or strict governance, proactive communication helps.

News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 3, March 2026

amywheater — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:06:00 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.

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.

User access: Roles and permission enhancements. In our March release, we’re introducing updates that improve security and provide more flexible, least-privilege access for enterprise organizations. Learn more here.

New role: Survey Designer

The Survey Designer role helps organizations assign access specifically for creating and deploying Viva Glint surveys—without granting broader administrative permissions. This targeted role is useful for programs such as AI transformation, hybrid work, and other change-management employee listening initiatives.

New permissions:

We’re introducing more granular permissions for Advanced Configuration, Question Library, Service Configuration (settings), Nudges, and Viva integrations. Existing Company Admins will be granted Advanced Configuration access by default.
Company Admin is now renamed Viva Glint Service Admin.
Assignment of new service admins will be restricted to the Microsoft 365 admin center for tighter governance and streamlined administration.

Copilot reporting: Copilot control migration to Microsoft 365 admin center. Starting in March 2026, Viva Glint will use the Microsoft 365 admin center as the single control plane for Copilot access—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 between March and April 2026 after 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: Privacy safeguard for live response rate reporting. For Live surveys, the Add section side pane in reporting is now limited to response-rate visuals only: Response rate history and Response rate by demographic. All score and results visuals have been removed to reinforce privacy safeguards and ensure response rate reporting remains aligned to intended use by restricting users with access to the response rate report during survey live to view response rate information only. Learn more here.

Reporting: Dashboard default tag on Reports landing page. On the Reports screen, report tiles that sit behind a dashboard experience now include a Dashboard default tag—making it easy to see, at a glance, which report is connected to a dashboard.

Reporting: Benchmark refresh schedule and opt-in reminder. Global benchmarks, including High‑Performing Global benchmarks (Top 25% and Top 10%), have been refreshed and include data collected from January 2025 through December 2025. Industry, Country, and Region benchmarks are currently scheduled to be refreshed and released in July.

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.

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.

Copilot Highlights | General Availability in April. Copilot Highlights, currently in preview, moves to general availability in April 2026. This feature 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. General availability 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. To get started or expand access to more users, see Manage Viva Glint Copilot access in Microsoft 365 admin center.

Additional controls for data flow from Viva Insights to Viva Glint | GA in May. When you enable data flow from Viva Insights to Viva Glint, you will now 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.

Advanced Analysis: vivaglint R package | Interest form. We’re working on vivaglint, a new R package designed to make it easier to work with your Viva Glint raw data export for analysis and visualization. This package will offer functions for generating full correlation tables, conducting attrition linkage analysis, factor analysis, and more. If you’d like early access and a chance to shape what we add next, please complete this interest form so we can follow up with details.

Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics | Preview. 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 | Preview. Enhance your employee listening 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. Our preview cohort is currently full but watch this space as we may look to add participants in future phases of the preview before GA planned for later this year.

Integrating with Organization Data | Preview. Viva Glint is bringing integration with Organizational Data in Microsoft 365 to help you connect people data across Viva experiences with enterprise-grade governance. This preview creates a consistent, trusted data foundation—so you can unlock richer insights today and be ready for what’s next with Copilot experiences, backed by Microsoft 365–level controls and management. Join the preview to see what’s possible, share feedback, and help shape the future of organization data integration in Viva Glint. 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.

Join us at SIOP: Viva Glint & Pulse Customer Happy Hour 🍸

We’re excited to invite Viva Glint & Pulse customers attending SIOP to a relaxed, in‑person happy hour reception on the opening day of the conference. This is a great opportunity to connect with fellow practitioners, swap perspectives, and spend some informal time with the Viva Glint & Pulse team.

📅 Date: April 29
⏰ Time: 5:00–7:00 PM (approx.)
📍 Location: New Orleans (venue TBD, close to the SIOP conference site)
🍹 Format: Drinks and hors d’oeuvres, happy‑hour style
👥 Capacity: Limited to 30 attendees

What to expect

5:00–6:00 – Networking & refreshments
6:00–6:20 – Short featured talk
6:20–7:00 – More networking and conversation

Space is limited and expected to fill quickly. Register your interest using the link below to reserve your spot. We’ll share venue details with confirmed attendees closer to the event.

👉 Register to save your spot

We hope you’ll join us for an easy, social way to kick off SIOP in New Orleans.

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 updates now live on Microsoft Learn:

Importing employee data & adding new attributes: new guidance for reviewing employee data and how to introduce new employee attributes without disrupting your existing configuration.

Retroactive updates: options & requirements: we've clarified how to make employee data updates to closed surveys, with scenarios that help admins choose the right approach.

Bulk Custom Access: now featuring a single source-of-truth for guidance on making updates to users’ custom access in bulk.

Survey deactivation timing & time‑zone behavior: new specifics on how scheduled survey deactivation works when enabling notifications in user time zone.

Nudge setup & eligibility clarification: expanded detail on how nudges are triggered, eligibility rules, and common setup questions.

Focus Areas: now includes common FAQs when creating focus areas and using the Focus Area Overview Report.

Previous EECC Customer Engagement Sessions:

March 5th – Viva Glint Admin Experience

In this session, members from our product team walked customers through upcoming enhancements to the Viva Glint product for survey admins and fielded a variety of questions and considerations from customers tied to those changes. If you or members of your team oversee the Viva Glint survey administration for your organization and are part of EECC, please visit the Teams channel to access the recording.

March 12th – How to Drive AI Transformation at Your Org - Becoming a Frontier Firm

This session was designed for HR teams to explore how AI, Copilot, and agentic workflows can accelerate AI transformation across their organization and to walk away with an understanding of where their orgs are currently on their AI transformation journey, ideas on how to further embed AI into key workflows, and a connection to Microsoft experts to support their efforts. During this session, our Copilot Growth colleagues walked through Frontier Firm Playbook, Frontier Playbook Assessment and Functional & Workforce Transformation Scenarios with the aim of empowering our customer contacts to understand how to drive AI transformation. If you are part of EECC, please visit the Teams channel to access the recording and deck.

As a compliment to this session, we also published a new blog Spotlight on... AI Transformation & the Frontier Firm Playbook that highlights how Viva Glint and Viva Pulse and other tools can support becoming Frontier‑ready and sustaining value from AI investments.

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 Viva 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: Evolving Transformational Leadership in the Age of AI. AI is changing how work gets done, but it hasn’t changed what employees need most from their leaders. Our latest research shows that employees who feel supported to integrate agentic AI are 1.8x more likely to use it daily, yet a 28‑point gap separates how supported leaders feel versus how supported employees feel. How leadership behaviors show up in practice can make a big impact: When leaders model thoughtful AI use, personalize support beyond what technology can deliver, and share how AI is shaping their own work, employees show higher meta‑cognition, trust, and realized value. Transformational leadership still works, but in the AI era, it has to evolve. Read it here.

Customer Success Stories

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

Culture + Viva Glint + AI = A Scalable Model for Growth

Ipsen, a global biopharmaceutical company with 5,500 employees, is transforming its culture to fuel an ambitious growth strategy—and using Microsoft Viva Glint, Copilot, and Copilot Studio AI agents to make the shift measurable, actionable, and scalable.

Driving a Culture Shift with Measurement at the Core

Ipsen launched a Culture Manifesto with 18 behavioral attributes aligned to strategy. These are measured annually through Viva Glint, using a transparent traffic‑light system that cascades results to every manager. This has created clear accountability and reinforced the company’s philosophy that culture is shaped through daily leadership choices.

Accelerating Insight with Copilot

Copilot is now used to speed the analysis of Viva Glint results—reducing time spent interpreting employee feedback and helping leaders focus on targeted, high‑impact actions.

AI Agents Boost Consistency and Reduce Support Workload

To further scale productivity, Ipsen introduced Copilot Studio–built AI agents in Microsoft Teams for HR, Legal, Business Ethics, and Finance (Ariba). Employees can ask natural‑language questions and get grounded, source‑linked answers, reducing repetitive requests and smoothing peak workloads.

Measurable Results

📈 Engagement scores rose three points above benchmark
🟢 Culture attributes rated “green” increased from 10 to 12
🤖 AI agents are reducing routine support demand and improving consistency
🎯 Ipsen now attracts ~90,000 spontaneous applications per year, reinforcing its position as a talent‑magnet in mid‑pharma

Why This Matters

Ipsen shows how culture, leadership, and AI‑enabled productivity can work together. By combining Viva Glint’s measurement rigor with Copilot and function‑specific AI agents, Ipsen has created a sustainable, data‑driven model for growth—anchored in empowerment, inclusion, and modern ways of working.

Connect with us

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

We’re excited to share an important evolution of our VCCP community.

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.

Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 4 Designing Events Employees Remember

AllisonMichels — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:50:16 GMT

Great events don’t just deliver information — they create moments people remember, return to, and build on.

In Week 4 of the Viva Engage Monday Masterclass Season 2, we wrapped up the series by focusing on how to design events that drive participation, trust, and momentum before, during, and after the moment. This session brought together product insights, customer examples, and practical guidance to help communicators and community leaders turn events into ongoing engagement engines.

If you’ve ever hosted an event that felt successful in the moment — but fizzled right after —or if you had questions on how to drive engagement beyond the event... this session was for you.

Why host events in Viva Engage?

Instead of treating events as one-off calendar invites, hosting them in Viva Engage creates a single, continuous experience. When you host events within a community, you target the audience for the event and discovery happens across your network.

Before the event:
Build awareness and anticipation with announcements, pinned posts, and seeded questions.

During the event:
Centralize participation through questions, discussions, reactions, and upvotes — all in one place.

After the event:
Keep the conversation alive with recordings, recaps, followups, and searchable knowledge people can return to.

This approach helps events support broader goals like leadership visibility, culture building, learning, and community connection — not just attendance.

Event formats that fit your goals

The session walked through how different event formats support different outcomes, including:

Broadcasts
Ideal for large, one-to-many moments like town halls or major announcements.

Meetings
Better suited for learning sessions, office hours, and interactive discussions.

Inperson or textonly events
Flexible options that still keep the conversation anchored in Engage.

Choosing the right format isn’t about feature checklists — it’s about optimizing for the experience you want attendees to have.

Before, during, after: designing the full event lifecycle

The session emphasized thinking about events as a connected journey, not a single time slot.

Before the event

Promote early with clear value and calls to action

Share teaser posts tied to key themes

Seed conversation with openended questions

During the event

Guide participation clearly

Use moderation and upvotes intentionally

Keep conversation focused in the event feed

After the event

Share recordings and highlights

Publish a recap that’s skimmable and actionable

Continue answering questions and extending the discussion

This is where events shift from “done” to durable.

Customer spotlight: turning events into learning rhythms

We also highlighted how customers are using Viva Engage events to create repeatable learning moments, not just onetime sessions — from biweekly Copilot learning hours to office hours that build steady adoption momentum.

The common thread:
Events work best when they’re part of a rhythm, not a reaction.

Keep learning with the Viva Engage Masterclass

This session capped off Season 2 of the Viva Engage Monday Masterclass, which covered:

Week 1: Beyond the basics – roles, moderation, and community configuration
https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/customer-hub/monday-masterclass-your-guide-to-the-viva-engage-essentials/session-7/

Week 2: AI-powered engagement in Viva Engage
https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/customer-hub/monday-masterclass-your-guide-to-the-viva-engage-essentials/session-8/

Week 3: Campaigns and storytelling
https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/customer-hub/monday-masterclass-your-guide-to-the-viva-engage-essentials/session-9/

Week 4: Designing events employees remember

All session slides and recordings can be found here

Broadcast and meetings require Microsoft Teams, available as part of the suite or as a standalone. Learn more: Licensing updates extend access to advanced capabilities in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Places | Microsoft Community Hub"

Viva Insights - How can I replace the Organization field data without any data loss?

365Learner — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:00:09 GMT

Viva Insights - org upload transition from Viva Insights to admin.microsoft.com

Since the last time I performed a manual organizational data upload, the organizational data upload process has moved from Viva insights to admin.microsoft.com.

At this moment in time the manual CSV import is my selected choice.
I am hoping to find an explanation of the field mappings from the old CSV upload template (DataUpload_template.csv) compared to the new CSV upload template (OrgDataTemplate - with skills.xlsx) -- Microsoft's help articles do not appear to include these details -- it does not appear I'm able to attach the templates here

My goal is to perform a new manual upload and replace the organization field with a new set of data for all employees without losing any other existing data.

I must understand how the new upload template maps to the data fields that I've been uploading
I'll then need to understand what steps I must take to replace the organization field without losing any data

Scaling Copilot adoption with the Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage

SowmyaGogineni — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:40:31 GMT

Organizations everywhere are embracing AI, but getting value takes more than turning on a tool. It takes shared learning, practical examples, and a place where people can build confidence over time.

The Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage is an out-of-the-box template that helps people learn and use Copilot together, whether they are using Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Chat.

The best way for employees to learn to use AI is by seeing coworkers like them try it, talk about what worked (and what didn’t), and make it feel safe to jump in. The Copilot Adoption Community brings those everyday moments into one place, so learning stays visible and people can easily see, try, and share what’s helping them do real work.

Our data reveals that users who engaged with the Copilot Adoption Community show +30% more active days on Microsoft 365 Copilot compared to users in the same network who didn’t interact with the Copilot Adoption Community (Internal Microsoft study over a 12-month period, June 2024–July 2025).

You also don’t have to start from scratch. Microsoft provides weekly suggested content, like #PromptOfTheWeek, short how-to resources, and product updates, that you can edit to match your company’s voice.

Getting Started with Copilot Adoption Community

The Copilot Adoption Community can be activated in a few clicks, creating a single place to learn, experiment, and share what works with Copilot. It’s available to all tenants with Viva Engage enabled and requires no additional Copilot or Viva Suite licensing.

Who it’s for: admins enable and set up the community; comms and adoption leads run content, campaigns, and champion engagement.

It’s a single hub for:

AI announcements
Training plans
Success stories
“What’s new” updates
Ask me anything (AMA) events, office hours, and leadership messages

Step 1: Create your community

Viva Engage admins will see a banner in the home feed and in the Engage Admin Center with options to learn more and create the community.

Already have an AI or Copilot community? You can apply the Copilot Adoption Community features to an existing community. This adds the setup checklist, suggested members, and suggested content—without changing your current posts or customizations.

Step 2: Customize your community

Your new community includes a customizable cover photo and description, is marked as an official community, and comes with the onboarding checklist below.

Pin resources to make key links easy to find (for example: training, policies, or FAQs).
Review suggested content from a Microsoft-curated library that refreshes weekly. Everything is editable before you publish.
Add a community expert by selecting members as experts. You can add more experts at any time.
Add members with dynamic suggestions as Copilot licenses roll out, or add members manually.
Create a post to get things moving. Pro tip: use Suggested Content for your first post, or start with a warm welcome.

Step 3: Make your community the place to go for Copilot news and learning

Once your community is live, encourage champions and Copilot enthusiasts to participate. Tiffany Terry-Hughes, Senior Manager of IT Communications at Micron, told us:

Our Copilot Adoption Community has been a great place for people to share their prompts and use cases, short videos on how to perform Copilot actions within applications, and essentially grow not just the community and user base, but everyone’s ability to become experts and influencers. There are people who are not on my team, who I’ve never met before, who are sharing their use cases—and I’m choosing to mark them as experts in this community.

Terry-Hughes and her team keep Copilot adoption practical with frequent communications and regular training. “We showcase specific use cases that we know our employees could benefit from,” she said.

Learn more about how the communications team at Micron are advancing Copilot Adoption with Viva Engage.

As you plan content for your Copilot Adoption Community, use these best practices to keep posts relevant, engaging, and easy to try:

Focus on Copilot scenarios people encounter in their daily work.
Highlight real examples from employees, not just official guidance.
Encourage visible participation from leaders or champions.
Maintain a consistent cadence, and use short series when a topic needs reinforcement (and mix formats like tips, polls, questions, and short videos).

Start by reviewing Microsoft’s suggested content each week and sharing what fits your employees. Suggested content now shows a Posted status and timestamp so you can track what you’ve shared. Viva Engage admins with the Copilot Adoption Community enabled get an email when new suggested content is published.

Spotlight On... AI Transformation & the Frontier Firm Playbook

amywheater — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:02:46 GMT

Introduction

AI transformation is not a single launch – it’s a multi‑phase journey that blends strategy, change management, and measurable business outcomes. The Frontier Firm Playbook captures how leading organizations move from AI pilots to pervasive impact by aligning use cases to business value, scaling responsibly, and building momentum with the right metrics. This article shares how to apply that playbook in practice – and how Viva Glint and Viva Pulse together serve as the employee listening and insights backbone of the transformation, capturing signals of readiness, trust, adoption, and impact that usage telemetry alone cannot reveal. Pulse enables rapid, scenario‑specific feedback early and often, while Glint provides the enterprise‑grade analytics, benchmarking, and trend analysis required to govern and scale AI transformation.

Why Follow the Frontier Firm Playbook?

Frontier Firms are those that consistently turn AI’s potential into a durable competitive advantage. What sets them apart is how they manage the transformation:

Intentional sequencing: They sequence initiatives from foundational readiness to pilot-scenario quick wins, to scaled adoption.

Measuring what matters: They go beyond raw deployment counts – tracking usage, behavior change, and business outcomes together.

Building trust & capability: They invest in upskilling, clear communication, and responsible AI guardrails to foster confidence and competence.

Continuous feedback loops: They continuously listen to employees (and customers), using feedback to refine the program as it evolves.

Crucially, Frontier Firms treat AI adoption as an organization-wide people transformation, not just a tech rollout.

HR: Co-Owner of the Journey

In successful AI transformations, HR is a named co‑owner of the Frontier Firm journey alongside IT and business leadership. That’s because lasting AI-powered change depends on new behaviors, skills, and cultural shifts at scale – domains where HR excels:

Workforce transformation: AI adoption reshapes roles, skills, incentives, manager routines, and culture. HR functions as the strategic enabler for these workforce changes, ensuring people are prepared and supported.

Skills and enablement: HR drives role-based training, upskilling, and change communications, so employees feel confident and know why and how to use AI.

Employee listening & trust: HR uses Viva Glint and Pulse to gauge sentiment, trust, and pain points, giving leaders evidence to steer the change effectively.

Bottom line: AI transformation is as much about people as technology. Empowering HR to co-lead – backed by robust employee insights – greatly increases the odds of success.

Viva Glint & Pulse: A Layered Listening Model

Frontier Firms use a layered listening approach. Viva Pulse captures fast, situational feedback during early rollout and experimentation, while Viva Glint consolidates sentiment, comments, and outcomes into a durable insight layer that leaders use to steer, govern, and scale AI adoption.

Different data sets answer different questions:

Telemetry (e.g., Copilot usage stats and license dispersion) shows what is happening – who is using AI, how often, in which apps.

Business outcomes (KPIs like productivity or quality metrics) show what changed as a result of AI.

Glint and Pulse measure why those results are happening in a way to guide direct action to address the feedback – revealing human factors like confidence, trust, friction points, and enablement gaps.

Simply put, Glint and Pulse track workforce sentiment and adoption motivators throughout the AI journey, allowing organizations to continuously check in with employees and to leverage advanced analytics to uncover key insights. This real-time input highlights challenges or wins that metrics alone can't provide—such as identifying whether low usage stems from inadequate training, apprehension about AI, or workflow mismatch.

By using Glint and Pulse, HR and leaders gain a trusted, central gauge of organizational readiness and sentiment. This allows them to address issues (e.g., low confidence or ethical concerns) proactively and to celebrate successes (e.g., improved productivity and morale) with credible data.

The Frontier Firm Phases & What to Measure

Successful AI transformation follows a deliberate, phased path. Frontier Firms progress through three stages: Foundation, Expansion, and Frontier. Across all phases, Frontier Firms follow a consistent measurement journey: early readiness feedback (Pulse), deep sentiment and trend analysis (Glint), and usage/outcome correlation (Viva Insights + Copilot reports).

Phase 1: Foundation

Goal: Ensure the organization is prepared — strategically and culturally — to adopt AI.

Frontier Firms start by aligning AI scenarios to business priorities and establishing clear guardrails. Just as importantly, they assess whether employees understand why AI matters and feel confident using it.

What to measure:

Employee confidence and trust in AI

Enterprise cultural readiness

Awareness of priority AI scenarios and enablement coverage

Awareness of strategic mission aligned to AI investments

Early signals of hesitation, risk, or uneven preparedness

HR’s role: HR co‑owns this phase by shaping the change narrative, segmenting the workforce for targeted enablement, and ensuring managers are equipped to lead adoption.

Phase 2: Expansion

Goal: Prove value quickly in a small number of high‑impact scenarios.

In this phase, Frontier Firms focus on 2–4 pilot scenarios that demonstrate tangible benefits and build confidence across the organization.

What to measure:

Copilot usage depth and repeat use in pilot groups

Self‑reported time savings and quality improvements

Employee feedback on usefulness, accuracy, and friction

HR’s role: HR partners with business leaders to reinforce new habits through role‑based learning, manager routines, and peer sharing.

Phase 3: Frontier

Goal: Embed AI into everyday work and sustain momentum responsibly.

Once value is proven, Frontier Firms scale adoption with consistent enablement, governance, and continuous listening.

What to measure:

Adoption patterns by role, team, and region

Links between AI usage, employee experience, and strategic business outcomes

Ongoing trust, confidence, and enablement effectiveness

HR’s role: HR helps embed AI into role expectations, capability models, and performance conversations, ensuring adoption is sustainable and inclusive.

Why this matters

Across all three phases, telemetry shows what's happening — but employee sentiment explains why. By pairing usage and outcome data with workforce sentiment, Frontier Firms reduce transformation risk, accelerate value realization, and scale AI with confidence.

Your AI Transformation Measurement Stack

To manage an AI transformation, you will draw on multiple sources of data and insights. Viva Glint and Pulse sit at the center of this measurement strategy, complemented by usage analytics and workplace analytics across Viva. The table below summarizes how each tool or signal contributes:

Measurement Tool / Signal	Role in AI Transformation (What It Captures)
Viva Glint and Pulse – Copilot Survey Templates	Employee sentiment and readiness. Pulse is typically used for early and recurring checks tied to specific Copilot/AI Transformation moments, while Glint is used to aggregate, analyze, and correlate sentiment with usage and outcomes over time. Purpose-built surveys templates for Readiness, Adoption, Impact can be deployed in Viva Glint or Pulse designed to capture baseline and ongoing sentiment on AI: e.g., awareness, confidence, trust, perceived usefulness, and enablement effectiveness. Reveals why people are or are not adopting.
M365 Copilot usage & adoption analytics	Usage telemetry. Dashboard and admin reports showing who is using Copilot, how often, and in which scenarios (when available). Key metrics include active users, active days per user, and usage trends by team or role. Shows what AI usage looks like across the org.
Viva Glint + Insights – Workplace Patterns report	Work pattern changes. Analyzes how work habits are shifting as AI is adopted: meeting hours, focus time, after-hours workload, cross-collaboration patterns, etc. Compare teams using Copilot vs. those not using it to see if work is getting streamlined (e.g., fewer meetings, more focus time).
Viva Glint + Copilot – Employee Experience Outcomes report	Experience vs. adoption link. Combines the above data to see if higher AI adoption correlates with improved employee experience. For example, do people who use Copilot feel they “can do my best work” more often? Is workload perception changing? Understanding sentiment with Copilot also helps us uncover: -high adoption but low satisfaction signaling, e.g., the need for more enablement -low usage/low satisfaction signaling, e.g., the need to explore deeper barriers and root causes
Viva Glint + Engage - Ambient Signals report (in development)	Integrated telemetry + outcomes + sentiment. In development: advanced analytics to link behavioral data with outcomes and sentiment in real time. This can pinpoint moments that matter – e.g., correlating a spike in AI usage with a boost in productivity or identifying where low trust feedback coincides with low adoption.
Viva Glint - Employee Feedback agent (in development)	Continuous listening at scale. In development: an on-demand, conversational feedback tool enabling quick pulse checks on specific topics. For instance, a manager could ask their team about a new Copilot feature, and an AI-driven summary of responses would feed into the program's next steps.

Together, these tools provide a 360° view of your AI initiative. But it is the voice of your employees, the qualitative “why” layer as measured by Glint and Pulse, that gives context to the quantitative numbers. It ensures you do not misinterpret raw data and helps HR and leaders make informed adjustments (whether that's more training, tweaking a use case, or communicating success stories to build confidence).

Example 90‑Day Plan

To illustrate how all these pieces come together, here is an example of a 90-day rollout plan that can be piloted with a subset of the employee population before rolling out function –specific or enterprise-wide initiatives for kicking off the Frontier Firm journey:

Weeks 0–4: Awareness & Readiness

Deploy short readiness and expectation surveys using Viva Pulse to capture early sentiment on AI confidence, trust, and perceived value.

Use Viva Insights to establish baseline Copilot usage and adoption patterns.

Segment early adopters to inform a targeted pilot rollout strategy.

Set clear adoption and experience success metrics and develop enablement materials.

Weeks 5-8: Pilot, Learn, and Adjust

Launch pilots with defined scenarios and success criteria.

Continue Pulse check‑ins to monitor usefulness, friction, and enablement gaps.

Analyze sentiment heatmaps and early resistance signals to refine the pilot approach.

Begin correlating early sentiment with usage using Copilot Employee Experience Outcomes data where available.

Weeks 9-12: Scale with Confidence

Conduct Viva Glint engagement or Copilot Impact surveys to measure sustained confidence, trust, and enablement.

Correlate Glint sentiment insights with usage and Workplace Patterns data to identify what is driving (or blocking) adoption.

Identify success stories and positive adoption signals to amplify across the organization.

Establish a recurring measurement rhythm using Glint and Pulse as the systems of record for ongoing governance.

Throughout these 90 days, the insights from Glint, Pulse and other analytics are crucial – they ensure you’re not just checking technical metrics but truly understanding how employees are experiencing the change. Early feedback helps you iterate the program for greater success in subsequent waves.

“What Good Looks Like”: Key Success Signals

How will you know if your AI transformation is on track? Here are some leading indicators that Frontier Firms watch for:

Adoption: ~60–70% of target users actively using AI at least weekly by the second month, with the average frequency of use per user rising steadily. This shows not only broad uptake but deeper habitual use.

Employee Experience: Improvement in employee survey ratings on items like “I can do my best work” or “I have the tools and support I need,” indicating that people feel more effective and supported with AI.

Productivity Gains: Measurable time savings in key workflows – for example, a 10–20% reduction in routine meeting time for pilot teams, faster completion of tasks like document preparation or case notes, etc.

Quality Improvements: Signs of higher quality output in pilot areas, such as fewer revision cycles required or fewer escalations and errors in AI-assisted processes.

Confidence & Trust: Increasing user-reported accuracy ratings and confidence in AI recommendations over time, reflecting growing trust as the technology proves its value.

Sustainability: A growing and active community of champions, an expanding library of shared best-practice prompts, and a visible improvement backlog for the AI program. These all indicate that the initiative is building self-sustaining momentum beyond the initial push.

These metrics should be interpreted in combination. For instance, a jump in usage is encouraging – but if experience or trust scores drop, it flags a risk (perhaps people feel pressure to use AI without support). That's why Glint’s qualitative insights are so vital to pair with quantitative metrics. Frontier Firms watch both, ensuring increased AI adoption also means employees feel more effective and empowered, not frustrated or threatened.

Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

Even with a solid plan, there are missteps to guard against. Here are a few common pitfalls in AI transformation – and how Frontier Firms avoid them:

Staying vigilant about these pitfalls will help ensure your AI initiative delivers sustained results. In particular, never underestimate the people side – unaddressed fears or lack of support can derail even the best technology. By measuring and responding to the human signals, you mitigate transformation risks (e.g., catching early signs of fatigue or compliance concerns) and strengthen your case for scaling AI responsibly.

Resources

Embarking on the Frontier Firm journey requires both strategic vision and tactical execution. Here are some resources to help you move forward:

Frontier Firm Playbook – Detailed guidance on AI transformation patterns, example scenarios, and maturity stages (Microsoft’s playbook)

Frontier Firm Scenarios – A library of industry-specific AI use cases to spark ideas

By following the Frontier Firm Playbook – and leveraging Glint and Pulse to keep a finger on the pulse of your organization – you can turn AI from a promising experiment into a sustainable, enterprise-wide capability. The result is not just successful AI adoption, but a more engaged, empowered workforce ready to innovate continuously.

Good luck on your journey to becoming a Frontier Firm!

Research Drop: Evolving Transformational Leadership in the Age of AI

Megan_Benzing — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Research Drop in Brief:

Employees who feel supported to integrate agentic AI are 1.8x as likely to be high-frequency AI users (use AI at least daily), yet there is a 28-percentage point gap in perceived support between leaders and ICs, a potential sign that substantive elements of support are getting lost in the rush to adopt AI.
Transformational leadership remains a strong foundation, but effective AI leadership requires evolving how these behaviors show up in practice.
When leaders encourage experimentation, offer personalized support, articulate a compelling vision, and model AI use – the four dimensions of transformational leadership – the effects are measurable: from nearly doubling employees' meta-cognition around AI to a 30-percentage point boost in trust in agentic AI.

AI is changing how work gets done, but it hasn’t changed what employees need most from their leaders. As organizations accelerate AI transformation, employees are looking for stability, clarity, and guidance to help them navigate what’s new, uncertain, and rapidly evolving. Technology may automate tasks and augment decision-making, but leadership remains the critical human force that shapes how change is experienced. Employees who feel supported by their leaders to integrate agentic AI into their work are 1.8x as likely to be high frequency AI users than those who do not feel that support.

This points to an important reality: in the AI era, the “what” of effective leadership hasn’t changed, but the “how” has. While many management processes are being automated or augmented, employees still need the personal, human side of leadership. The behaviors that help employees think critically, stay motivated, and grow through change are more important than ever.

To understand how leadership must evolve without losing its foundation, this month’s Research Drop revisits one of the most widely studied frameworks in organizational psychology: transformational leadership. By examining how its core dimensions show up in the context of AI, we can better understand what leaders must double down on – and what they must adapt – to support successful, human-centered AI transformation.

A Leadership Framework for Times of Change

Transformational leadership is a well-established leadership approach focused on inspiring followers to perform beyond expectations by shaping how they think, feel, and act¹. It provides a framework for us to guide our thinking on the changing responsibilities of leadership. Transformational leadership has four core behavioral dimensions that are empirically grounded anchors to leader and manager effectiveness:

Intellectual Stimulation	Encouraging critical thinking and novel problem-solving
Individualized Consideration	Personalizing coaching and developmental support
Inspirational Motivation	Communicating a compelling vision and organizational direction
Idealized Influence	Modeling values and taking principled positions

These dimensions describe what great leaders do to inspire strong productivity and outputs from their employees. Research debates how to measure these behaviors, but the underlying logic is robust – that leaders who challenge thinking, develop individuals, communicate purpose, and model values produce high engagement and performance². As AI reshapes how work gets done, these four dimensions offer a useful structure for understanding how leadership behaviors must adapt, rather than disappear.

Expanding Transformational Leadership in the Era of AI

As employees undergo change, they often look to their leaders to guide their own behavior. Employees may interpret their leaders’ actions and attitudes as signals of organizational expectations. There are early empirical signals that transformational leadership and perceived organizational support positively predict AI adoption³, further suggesting that leadership plays a critical role not only in encouraging AI use, but in shaping how employees experiment with, trust, and ultimately derive value from AI tools. Yet how this leadership style shows up in practice in the AI-era is shifting, and each dimension of transformation leadership offers a distinct lens on what this looks like in practice.

Intellectual Stimulation: Teaching Teams How to Think With AI

When leaders encourage critical thinking, questioning assumptions, and novel problem-solving, it helps employees be creative and innovative at work. The intellectual stimulation dimension relies on leaders showcasing strong judgment and curiosity. The leadership task is no longer to provide answers, but to model how to question them.

This approach is critical when using AI at work, as employees need to build their skills on questioning AI outputs and getting creative with AI agents. Research continues to show the potential negative impact that AI can have on human judgment, such as the concept of AI surrender⁴, where users accept AI outputs with limited scrutiny, bypassing their own judgment entirely. We found that 60% of employees skip accuracy checks when using AI and 56% of employees close AI tools if they feel the response is inaccurate, rather than adjusting their prompt. This places leaders at the center of developing disciplined, thoughtful AI use – where curiosity and skepticism coexist.

Leaders are a guidepost for thinking critically about AI, teaching followers how to evaluate AI-generated answers. Developing meta-cognition skills around AI has become a critical capability for employees at all levels. Meta-cognition around AI – the practice of both knowing how to use AI effectively and actively regulating how you execute those tasks – helps employees shift from passive AI users to deliberate cognitive partners. This can make the difference of whether AI usage consists of solely copy-pasting prompts and outputs, or intentionally questioning the use case, inputs, and desired outcome. Leaders have a strong role to play in helping their employees grow their meta-cognition. When leaders set clear expectations about how to use AI at work, employees nearly double their self-reported meta-cognition around AI – how they assess their own knowledge of AI methods and their habits of regulating AI use in practice.

Meta-cognition around AI increases when leaders share their expectations and provide examples and scenarios to guide their employees. This can look like:

Defining what “good” AI use looks like for the team (e.g., specifying that AI should inform and draft rather than finalize, keeping human review a non-negotiable step)
Naming the moments where human judgment should override AI (e.g., when the stakes of error are high, when outputs are plausible but unverified)
Asking reflective questions that build habit over time (e.g., “what would you have concluded without AI?”, “what did you have to correct or reframe in this output?”)

These leadership behaviors demonstrate not only the what behind adoption but also the how, encouraging a culture where critical thinking and human judgment remain the centerpiece of the workplace.

Individualized Consideration: Personalizing Support Beyond AI

Employees look to their leaders and managers for support across their career. Individualized consideration includes coaching, developmental attention, and attending to individual needs – where leaders take a personalized approach to supporting their employees.

With the emergence of AI technology at work, many AI tools enable personalized delivery at scale, so the “human touch” of consideration must shift to what AI cannot replicate. Leaders can leverage AI to surface trainings, suggest readings, and recap meetings, but the unique value of leaders lies in having the context to connect those resources to their followers’ broader goals and needs, the ability to address the genuine human concerns that AI transformation can surface, and the capability to help followers make sense of where to focus their attention in the midst of AI uncertainty. Employees are concerned about job security, the pressure to learn new ways of working, and more, which are exactly the kinds of concerns that AI can surface but not sit with – they require a leader who can acknowledge fear directly, contextualize change honestly, and adapt support to where each person actually is.

AI personalization does not replace individualized consideration and direct managerial support. Few things beat your manager sponsoring you for a project that perfectly aligns with your skills or sharing an AI use case that resonated directly with a problem you have been grappling with. This level of support can ingrain you into your team and your work, feeling understood and cared for. However, AI-specific support from human leaders is uneven. When we look on the surface, we found that 65% of all levels of employees report that they have the support to integrate agentic AI. However, a deeper look reveals a 28-percentage point gap: 78% of leaders feel they have the support they need to integrate agentic AI, compared to just 50% of individual contributors. This gap suggests that substantive elements of support may be getting lost in the rush to adopt AI – and the behavior we see clearly shows that: only 19% of managers have provided 1:1 coaching or mentoring on AI use. What leaders believe is sufficient is not always what employees experience in practice.

As the role of the manager changes with the introduction of AI, coaching, development, and mentoring from leaders becomes more important⁵. Yet only half of individual contributors feel supported to integrate agentic AI, individualized, human-led guidance on AI remains largely out of reach for the people who need it most.

While AI can tailor content, leaders can personalize meaning and support throughout AI transformation. For example, leaders can provide structure to vibe coding experimentation sessions by helping followers channel their upskilling into something that will contribute to their personal growth or a direct value add to the business to help them shine. As AI automates personalization at scale, leaders must focus their attention on the individualized support only humans can provide.

Inspirational Motivation: Creating Purpose During AI Transformation

A main responsibility of leaders is to set and communicate the strategy of the organization. Inspirational motivation includes articulating a compelling vision, conveying optimism, and expressing confidence in followers to motivate them to act and provide purpose to their work. Employees who are aligned with leadership are 78% more motivated than those who feel unaligned and employees who are highly optimistic about the future of their role are 101% more motivated than those who are not optimistic⁶.

Inspiration doesn’t come from more AI messages; it comes from leaders sharing how AI is changing their own work. Employees may feel overwhelmed and inundated with AI-related changes and rollouts without a clear understanding of the vision. When messaging is “lip service,” employees can see through it. They are craving tangible modeling experiences, where leaders are transparently showing the what, when, why, and how of their own AI use. The more leaders can present an authentic perspective on how AI will change the workplace, the greater the trust and buy-in from the employees. Inspirational motivation in the AI era is less about the frequency of communication and more about sharing their personal goals for AI.

This could include leaders sharing their own AI use, their own AI uncertainty, and their own moments of discovery with AI. Leaders’ openness and authenticity can communicate compelling vision of what AI makes possible for their team and their organization – cascading motivation from leader to employee. While 85% of leaders are motivated to integrate agentic AI into their work, only 56% of individual contributors feel the same, a 29-percentage point gap that mirrors the divide in perceived support. Leaders may have better access and understanding of the vision of AI for the organization, but the limited support and vision sharing can leave employees lacking the drive to adopt AI and sustain that adoption.

When employees are motivated by their leaders, it can instill a level of optimism that is a catalyst for AI adoption. Employees with high agentic AI readiness (e.g., skills, opportunity) report high levels of AI optimism – an average of 83% favorability. This drops to 47% for neutral readiness employees, and 13% for low readiness employees.

With low optimism and readiness for AI integration, employees are not set up effectively to adopt and perceive value from using AI. Leaders can try to mitigate against these downstream impacts by focusing on communicating a compelling vision for what AI makes possible and how it can elevate employees’ work, rather than replace it.

Idealized Influence: Leading by Example in Human‑AI Collaboration

Influence during change is a core mechanism for failure or success of the initiative. Idealized influence consists of displaying conviction, modeling core values, and taking principled positions on important decisions.

Throughout AI transformation, employees are watching leaders closely and their AI adoption actions will mirror their leaders’ approach. Leaders need to model what credible human-AI leadership looks like: whether and when they use it, when they override it, how they acknowledge its limits, and how they openly share when it falls short. A leader who openly says “I ran this through AI, it missed the nuance, here’s how I caught it” likely does more to normalize critical AI use than any policy or training could. This can look like a leader walking through their prompting process in a team meeting, acknowledging in a 1:1 that they're still figuring out where AI fits in their own workflow, or openly crediting AI for a first draft while explaining what they changed and why. Leaders who model thoughtful, intentional AI use create the conditions for their teams to experiment with confidence, adopt AI critically rather than passively, and ultimately realize the full value of human-AI collaboration.

Leadership role modeling directly shapes how much value employees realize from AI – employees who agree their leaders role model effective AI use report a 17-percentage point uplift in realized value from agentic AI. When leaders engage with AI intentionally, it creates conditions for their teams to do the same. Role modeling has always mattered and in an AI-first workplace, it's the difference between a team that experiments and one that waits.

AI transformation is not just a technological shift; it is a leadership one. The four dimensions of transformational leadership offer a powerful lens for understanding how leaders can shape not only AI adoption, but also trust, optimism, and long-term value creation. As AI becomes embedded in everyday work, leaders who intentionally model thoughtful AI use, personalize support beyond what technology can deliver, communicate purpose with authenticity, and guide employees through uncertainty will define what successful human-AI collaboration looks like.

Transformational leadership remains a strong foundation, but effective AI leadership requires evolving how these behaviors show up in practice. Employees are already watching how their leaders engage with AI. The question is whether what they see encourages critical thinking, confidence, and growth, or hesitation and disengagement.

As organizations continue to navigate AI-driven change, leaders who focus not just on adoption, but on how people experience and make sense of that change, will be best positioned to unlock meaningful and lasting impact.

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

This month’s Research Drop analyzed 1,800 global employees from the Microsoft People Science Agentic Teaming & Trust Survey from July 2025.

¹Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. Free Press.

²Wang, G., Oh, I.-S., Courtright, S. H., & Colbert, A. E. (2011). Transformational leadership and performance across criteria and levels: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of research. Group & Organization Management, 36(2), 223–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601111401017

³Wang, X., Liu, Y., & Ao, M. (2025). Transformational leadership and employee AI usage: The role of perceived organizational support and competitive workplace climate. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, Article 1581337. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1581337

⁴Shaw, S. D. & Nave, G. (2026). Thinking – Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender. Available at SSRN 6097646. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6097646

⁵Deloitte. (May 9, 2025). Reinventing the manager’s role for the future of work with AI and human collaboration. 2025 Global Human Capital Trends.

⁶PwC. (November 12, 2025). Rewiring the future of work. PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025.

Viva Engage masterclass season 2—Session 3: Campaigns and storytelling

sarahLundy — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:20:39 GMT

When communication is intentional, it doesn’t just inform. It creates clarity and connection. In Session 3 of the Viva Engage Masterclass (season 2), we covered practical ways to build that impact with Storylines, Campaigns, and series-based storytelling.

Below is a recap of the key takeaways you can apply right away.

Why storytelling matters right now

Work is full of constant signals: email, chat, posts, meetings, and in-person interruptions. Microsoft Work Trend Index research describes this as the “infinite workday,” where employee attention is limited and company communications are easy to miss.

What helps is narrative coherence over time: messages that connect into a story employees can recognize, follow, and act on. The goal is to build understanding and momentum.

Use Storylines to build leadership presence

If leaders want to build trust and ongoing connection, their Storyline is an important place for them to show up in Viva Engage. A simple way to think about it:

Email is delivery
Meetings are moments
Storyline is presence

In Viva Engage, Storyline gives leaders a consistent way to share updates, add context, and invite conversation in one place. What Storylines provide:

Intelligence and targeting: reach defined audiences with the right message.
Multi-way dialogue: make communication two-way, so people can respond, ask questions, and build on the message.
Measurable impact: understand what landed through engagement and analytics.

To set a leader up for success with Storyline, start by making sure they’re identified as a leader in the product, assigning delegates who can help draft and publish posts, and defining the audience they want to reach. Then confirm they have the right profile details and a short “about” that matches their role.

Agree on a simple cadence (for example, one post a week), draft the first few posts together, and keep a short list of topics they can pull from.

Strong posts are clear about what they’re trying to do. The session shared a simple way to pressure-test drafts before posting following the 3C model:

Context: What’s happening?
Clarity: Why does it matter?
Connection: What do I want people to do?

One more reminder that came through clearly: engagement doesn’t happen by accident—ask for it. End with a question or prompt that makes it easy to respond.

Used well, Storyline becomes a reliable place for employees to hear directly from leaders and respond in the moment. It helps leaders show up consistently, keep updates connected over time, and build trust through two-way conversation.

Run social campaigns that invite participation

Campaigns help the organization rally around a shared theme through repetition and participation. In the session, we discussed how campaigns can support different goals, such as:

Driving business initiatives
Crowdsourcing ideas and experiences
Creating belonging through employee stories

We also covered the difference between:

Official (global) campaigns that roll up content across Storylines and communities
Community campaigns that stay within a specific community (lighter-weight, designed for local participation)

A key takeaway: campaigns work best when they’re designed so employees can join the story—not just read it.

Here are a few campaign examples we shared in the session that translate well to Viva Engage:

Win. Win. Win. Invite people to share weekly wins, shout-outs, or lessons learned—and encourage others to add their own.
Product launch or roll out. Announce a new tool or change, then keep everything in one place: tips, FAQs, help resources, and Q&A.
30 days of ____. Pick a theme and post a prompt each day (or each week) to keep the story moving and make it easy to join in.
Leadership series. Have leaders take turns sharing what they’re learning, reading, or trying, then ask employees to share their own.
Recognition and gratitude. Spotlight individuals and teams who are making an impact and invite peers to add praise.

A simple recipe for success: be clear on the goal, make it easy to participate, and keep a steady posting rhythm.

Even though it’s quick to create a campaign, the work is in the planning. The session shared a straightforward timeline:

Two+ weeks before: define the theme, align stakeholders
One week before: define success (KPIs), finalize messaging
Days before: prep content and resources, remind contributors
Kickoff: publish the Campaign and start the rhythm

Bring it together with a simple plan: set a clear goal, give people an easy way to participate, and keep the Campaign active with a steady rhythm. Track what’s landing as you go, and close the loop by sharing progress and outcomes.

Think series, not a post

One of the clearest themes from the session: if you want adoption or behavior change, one message won’t do it.

We talked about the “rule of 7” concept. People often need repeated exposure before they act. The practical takeaway is to build a series with:

A consistent theme
A recognizable visual style
A predictable rhythm

When employees “watch for the next drop,” your #campaign has started to stick.

The session also introduced “trend-jacking”: using safe, current memes and social trends to make internal communications feel more creative and fun.

Why this works: relevance, clarity, and connection

We closed with research on how communications cut through the noise—especially for younger employees who have learned to filter fast.

The three elements of communication that cut through the noise are:

Relevant: tailored to an employee’s context (not just “for everyone”). Start with what the update means for people’s day-to-day work. Make the “why it matters to me” clear up front.
Clear: easy to scan and understand quickly, with optional depth. If you need to include detail, put the most important point first and add the rest below, so people can read more when they have time. Clarity also means being specific, not vague, about dates, owners, and decisions.
Connected: designed for dialogue, not “do not reply” broadcasting. End posts with a question that’s easy to answer, or a prompt that invites examples. Respond to early comments so people see that engagement is welcome and valued. Over time, this builds trust and helps employees feel like they’re part of the story, not just receiving updates.

One important point: it’s not that people can’t focus—it’s that they’ve built faster filters. If content doesn’t signal value quickly, it won’t land.

What’s next

The Masterclass continues with Session 4: Designing events employees remember. You’ve got live events coming up soon at your company, this next session will help you plan moments that drive real participation—and follow-through.

You can register for upcoming sessions and explore the full schedule at:

👉 https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Masterclass

Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 2: AI Powered Engagement in Viva Engage

AllisonMichels — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:58:29 GMT

AI has officially moved from an interesting add‑on to a core part of how modern organizations communicate and connect. In Week 2 of the Viva Engage Masterclass – AI‑Powered Engagement, we explored what that shift really means for employees, leaders, and communicators—and how Viva Engage is becoming the place where human connection and AI scale together.

Week 1 covered how the system works. Week 2 focused on how to amplify your impact with it. Below is a recap of the key themes and practical takeaways you can apply.

1. Communities Are the Engine of AI‑Powered Engagement

Every organization is on a journey toward becoming what Microsoft calls a Frontier Firm—where humans and AI work side by side. Communities play a critical role in enabling that shift.

Why? Because the most valuable knowledge in organizations is often informal, unwritten, and distributed across people. Viva Engage communities:

Enable peer‑to‑peer learning across roles, teams, and geographies
Make it easier to connect with experts and surface trusted answers
Provide the signal AI needs to deliver relevant, contextual insights at scale

AI doesn’t replace these conversations; it learns from them and scales their impact.

2. The Four Pillars of Connected Communications

Throughout the session, we grounded AI‑powered engagement in a simple but powerful framework: the Four Pillars of Connected Communications.

Relevance – This matters to my role, context, or priorities
Effort – I can tell that real thought and care went into creating this
Signal – I understand the core message and action
Safety – Engagement feels safe, respectful, and without professional and personal risk

AI can help improve all four, when guided with clear human intent.

3. Copilot Adoption Community

Support doc link Champions and the Copilot Adoption Community

AI‑powered engagement doesn’t scale on its own—it scales through people. That’s where Champions and a dedicated Copilot Adoption Community play a critical role.

Champions act as trusted guides inside the organization. They help:

Model effective Copilot usage in real‑world scenarios
Encourage experimentation and peer learning
Answer common questions and escalate feedback
Reinforce best practices around tone, trust, and effort

A Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage provides a shared space to:

Ask questions and learn from early adopters
Share prompts, tips, and success stories
Surface patterns and feedback for continuous improvement
Connect employees to Champions and experts at scale

Together, Champions and the Copilot community turn AI from a tool into a habit.

Copilot Champions

Learn about driving Copilot adoption with champion communities at our April First Friday webinar: aka.ms/FirstFridaysApril

Copilot in Viva Engage: Practical Scenarios

We explored how Microsoft 365 Copilot supports engagement throughout the day by helping you:

Catch up faster with AI‑generated summaries of community activity
Write better posts with contextual drafting and tone suggestions
Spot trends and sentiment without reading every reply
Create leadership‑ready recaps from long discussions

For employees, Copilot removes friction. For communicators and leaders, it creates space to focus on connection rather than mechanics.

4. Scaling Knowledge With the community Agent

A major highlight of Week 2 was the community agent—an AI-powered expert designed to scale answers while preserving trust.‑

Key capabilities include:

Drafting grounded, contextual responses using community conversations and SharePoint files
Expert and admin review with Verified answers
Faster time‑to‑answer for common questions
Clear transparency into sources and review workflows

When paired with Community Experts, agents become a force multiplier—not a replacement.

Set up and manage agents in Viva Engage communities | Microsoft Learn

5. A Simple 3‑Week Path to Get Started

To make this real, we closed with a practical adoption path:

Week 1 – Get Started

Week 2 – Set Up & Experiment

Week 3 – Expand & Optimize

Invite more members
Curate trusted sources
Measure impact and refine

Small steps, taken consistently, create momentum.

What’s Next

Next up in the Masterclass series: Campaigns and Storytelling. We’ll dive into how to run campaigns, amplify leader voices, and create narratives that resonate—using both human creativity and AI support.

You can register for upcoming sessions and explore the full schedule at:

👉 https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Masterclass

AI changes how we work, but connection is still what makes it matter.

What's new in Viva Insights

zachminers — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:53:21 GMT

As we move further into 2026, we’re excited to announce a variety of new powerful tools and reporting capabilities for Viva Insights that make it easier to understand how your organization's adoption and use of Microsoft 365 Copilot compares to other uses of it both within and outside your company. You can also now learn more about the adoption and impact of agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio, and there are new functionalities to share and customize reports more broadly across your organization. Let's dive in.

Agent Dashboard

We’re thrilled to announce the initial rollout of the Agent Dashboard, a powerful new functionality for the Viva Insights web app that provides leaders and analysts with actionable insights into agent adoption. With this new dashboard, users can dive into Copilot Credit usage – which measures how agents are used – and identify opportunities to optimize and track agent adoption over time.

To start, the dashboard covers adoption metrics aggregated at the user level for agents used within Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Read more about the Agent Dashboard here on the Microsoft 365 Copilot blog.

The Agent Dashboard is currently rolling out to public preview customers only. When you’re ready to start using it, learn how using our guide on MS Learn.

Benchmarks in Copilot Dashboard

The Copilot Dashboard has been focused on providing actionable insights into Copilot readiness, adoption, and impact trends for specific groups within the organization. Now, with benchmarks in the Copilot Dashboard, users can also see how their adoption compares to others, either within their organization, or with other companies.

Benchmarks in the Copilot Dashboard provide context around Copilot adoption trends, so users can compare usage across internal cohorts, or see how their adoption of Copilot compares to similar organizations.

Read more about benchmarks in the Copilot Dashboard here on the Microsoft 365 Copilot blog.

Export Copilot metrics from the Copilot Dashboard

We’re excited to introduce the initial public preview rollout of Copilot metrics export from the Copilot Dashboard. This new capability gives organizations greater flexibility to analyze the usage of both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat beyond the dashboard across the past six months at the de-identified user level, with user identifiers removed.

With this export tool, leaders and analysts with access to the global scope dashboard can download the data directly to support Copilot initiatives, such as tracking adoption and usage trends over time, or combining it with other data sources for custom analysis and reporting.

Learn more about how to use the export feature on MS Learn.

Launch of Copilot Studio agents report

In an exciting expansion of our reporting tools measuring the adoption and impact of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Copilot Studio agents report is now broadly available. This powerful new Power BI template allows users to learn more about the impact of agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio, and how their deployed across channels in the organization.

This report can help users answer questions like:

What are the top agents being used?

What are top agents' high-level KPI-like sessions, satisfaction scores, and success rates?

What is the impact of individual agents (conversational and autonomous), such as the split of engaged sessions and topics against actions and triggers distribution, as well as maker-led inputs?

The report provides insights about agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio that are deployed across a variety of channels, including Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, Facebook, mobile apps, and custom and demo websites.

To learn more about the report and how to run it, refer to our guide on MS Learn.

New ability to customize out-of-the-box Power BI reports

Existing tools for Power BI template reports in the Viva Insights web app allow users to customize their reports for their organization's needs, through their selection of filters, metrics, and organizational attributes. Now, an expanded toolkit allows Viva Insights analysts to further customize out-of-the-box Power BI reports to make them even more relevant to their organization.

With these new tools, analysts can, for example:

Add new visualizations, text boxes, and graphics

Change the report's filters

Add, rename, and rearrange report pages

Save and delete your customized reports

Users can now customize pre-built Power BI reports such as the Copilot Studio agents or Copilot for Sales adoption reports, but not custom queries such as Person queries or Meeting queries. Users can also customize any queries that they or other analysts in their organization have previously run.

To learn how to customize out-of-the-box reports, please see our guide on MS Learn.

Multi-level response options for a single Likert-scale item

HereIam — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:24:45 GMT

I would like to explore whether Glint allows configuring a single survey statement with multiple sub-responses at different organizational levels, each using the same Likert scale.

For example:

Statement:

“In my experience, collaboration is effective.”

Response requested at multiple levels:

At the organization level (1–5 Likert scale)

At the division/department level (1–5 Likert scale)

At the team level (1–5 Likert scale)

In other words, instead of creating three separate items, is it possible to structure one statement with sub-questions (or nested response options) tied to different organizational levels, all using the same agreement scale?

Multi-level response options for a single Likert-scale item

HereIam — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:24:19 GMT

I would like to explore whether Glint allows configuring a single survey statement with multiple sub-responses at different organizational levels, each using the same Likert scale.

For example:

Statement:

“In my experience, collaboration is effective.”

Response requested at multiple levels:

At the organization level (1–5 Likert scale)

At the division/department level (1–5 Likert scale)

At the team level (1–5 Likert scale)

Error msg "you can't access this content thru viva learning. please contact your administrator"

Pat1 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:22:59 GMT

Hi All,

Need seeks for help. User are not able to open the customized learning module content with error msg as below. (Permission has been added to the user in Viva Learning)

What are the possible rootcause and how to fix it? Thanks

News to Know – Volume 3, Edition 2, February 2026

amywheater — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:10:25 GMT

Each month, we share practical updates and insights to help you strengthen your employee listening strategy with Viva Glint & Pulse and support you on your AI transformation journey. In this edition, you’ll find the latest product enhancements, thought leadership, and customer learnings—designed to help you stay informed, plan ahead, and continue driving meaningful engagement and change across your organization.

New on your Viva Glint platform

Survey Communications: Teams Notification Localization. Viva Glint Teams bot notifications are now delivered in each user’s preferred language, improving accessibility, engagement, and the experience for global, non‑English‑speaking audiences. This update aligns Teams bot notifications with existing Viva Glint email and platform localization capabilities. Learn about Viva Glint supported languages here.

User Data Management: Audit Activity Log Enhancements. We are improving our audit activity logs to provide richer visibility into automated data imports, making it easier for admins to reconcile data across systems, quickly understand what happened during an import, diagnose issues more efficiently, and act with greater confidence. Starting this month, in addition to failed uploads, admins can now access advisory files for partial ingestions, where only some records from an import were processed successfully. Later this year, for supported automated imports (including SFTP and Organizational Data in Microsoft 365), audit logs will include downloadable details that summarize which records were added, updated, skipped, or moved to inactive status. Learn more about audit activity logs here.

Reporting: Custom PPT Template Support. The Export to PowerPoint feature now applies the custom PowerPoint template selected in General settings to the exported PowerPoint file for all reports that support the new export i.e. Team summary report, Executive summary report.

How to test

Open the Team Summary or Executive Summary report.
Select Export & Share > Export report to PPT.
Confirm the exported editable PowerPoint includes the custom template from Admin settings appended to the content slides.

Prerequisite
Upload a custom PowerPoint template in Viva Glint Admin settings before testing, Instructions for doing so can be found here.

Reporting: Navigation improvements. Viva Glint Reporting users can now retrace their navigation flow—drilling down and drilling up in reports—without losing context.

Key changes

Replaces the “Go Back” action to the Reporting home page with an alternative clickable experience.
Enables users to return to the last Reporting page they were in, supporting improved back navigation within Reporting.

Reporting: Enabling Benchmarks. Enabling external benchmarks gives you and your leaders valuable context—showing how your results compare to global and industry peers and complementing the insights you gain from internal comparisons.

With a single opt‑in step, Viva Glint unlocks a rich set of benchmark suites (Global, Industry, Country/Region, High‑Performing, and more). Your data remains fully anonymized and aggregated, ensuring privacy and compliance. Customers who opt in consistently report that benchmarks strengthen storytelling, deepen insight quality, and accelerate action planning. We recommend turning on this feature so your teams can get the full value of Viva Glint reporting. Without enabling this feature, customers will not be able to see any external benchmark comparisons and will only have access to internal comparators. By enabling it, organizations agree to allow their survey data to be included in the anonymized benchmark pool, which is required for benchmark visibility.

Coming soon to Viva Glint

User Access: Upcoming Role Enhancements. In our March release, we’ll be making some changes to roles and permissions in Viva Glint to increase security and flexibility for enterprise organizations.

Survey Designer Role

The Survey Designer Role in Viva Glint will empower organizations to assign users only the access they need to create and deploy Glint surveys, without granting broader administrative permissions. This targeted role is especially valuable for initiatives like AI transformation, hybrid work, and other change management employee listening programs.

New Permissions in Viva Glint

o We are introducing permissions for Advanced Configuration, Question Library, Service Configuration (settings), Nudges, and Viva Integrations, offering more granular control over platform access and management. All existing Company Admins will be granted Advanced Configuration access by default.

o Company Admin is now renamed to Viva Glint Service Admin.

o Assignment of new service admins will now be restricted exclusively to the Microsoft Admin Centre (MAC), ensuring tighter governance and streamlined administration.

Copilot Reporting: Copilot will default to ON and move to VFAM as the single control. Starting in March 2026, Copilot in Viva Glint will default to ON for all customers, and the existing Glint admin toggles for Copilot access will be removed. From that point forward, Copilot access will be managed exclusively through Viva Feature Access Management (VFAM), providing a single, streamlined control consistent with other Microsoft Copilot experiences. This change reduces admin workload and ensures a more consistent governance experience. Please review your VFAM settings to prepare for this update. Should you have any questions about managing Copilot access through VFAM, please use this form to reach out to us. If you are part of EECC (formerly VCCP), find the registration link to join the upcoming session where we will cover this feature in detail in the ‘Upcoming events and learning opportunities’ section.

Copilot Reporting: Dynamic Topics with Copilot. In March, we will kick off the Dynamic Topics private preview with a small group of customers. 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. While the initial private preview cohort is full, we may expand preview access as the program progresses so please stay tuned. General availability for Dynamic Topics is targeted for later this spring.

Sign Up for Copilot Highlights | Preview. The private preview of Copilot Highlights—a dashboard feature that instantly summarizes survey results, highlighting team strengths, opportunities, and engagement trends—is now live, with customer access being enabled in phases. This feature helps managers and leaders quickly assess team status, pinpoint focus areas, and celebrate achievements. Customers can continue to express interest in joining by signing up here.

Sign Up for Continuous Employee Engagement with Workplace Metrics | Preview. Improve actionability for focus areas like “Work-life balance” and “Collaboration” by bringing in workplace metrics from Viva Insights. This feature will help Senior Leaders in your organization look at supplementary data points to understand survey responses and have a more data-driven discussion with their organizations on what can be improved in these areas. Between survey cycles, this continuous data will also help you keep your teams on track. Private Preview is targeted for March 2026, but earlier builds are available starting in January, with the opportunity to give feedback. You must enable data flow from Insights to Glint on your tenant to use this feature. Express your interest here.

Sign Up for 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 conversations with employees. Future capabilities will expand impact with an actionable insights reporting experience, accelerating the “feedback-to-action” cycle. Be among the first to experience a new era of continuous engagement and actionable feedback with the Employee Feedback Agent. To express your interest in joining please complete the following: Private Preview: Glint Employee Feedback Agent – Fill out form

Integrating with Organization Data | Preview. Viva Glint is introducing integration with Organizational Data in Microsoft 365, providing an enterprise‑grade approach to connecting people data across Viva experiences. This preview establishes a consistent, governed data foundation that supports trusted insights today and prepares organizations for future Copilot experiences—aligned with Microsoft 365–level controls and management. Join the preview to explore what’s possible, share feedback, and help shape the future of organization data integration in Viva Glint. Express your interest here.

See our public roadmap for more feature updates.

Events and learning opportunities

Viva Glint & Pulse EECC (formerly VCCP) customer engagement sessions

Previous sessions:

February 5^th – Copilot Highlights in Viva Glint

In this session, we shared an overview of the Copilot Highlights capabilities that are currently in private preview as well as plans for upcoming feature enhancements and facilitated an open discussion to gather feedback with the goal of better understanding the features and improvements that matter most to you as early adopters. If you are a member of EECC and in the Viva Glint Teams channel, you can access the session recording here.

Upcoming sessions (please note you must be opted-in to EECC in order to attend upcoming sessions):

February 12^th – Copilot Default ON and VFAM Controls

Register here

In this session, we’ll walk through an upcoming update where Copilot will default to ON in Viva Glint, and Viva Feature Access Management (VFAM) becomes the single, consistent control for managing Copilot access—aligned with the broader Microsoft 365 Copilot experience. As part of this change, the existing Glint service‑level Copilot toggles within the user roles will be removed, simplifying administration. Copilot access in Viva Glint will be governed centrally through VFAM, which is typically managed by your Microsoft 365 Global Admin.

February 26^th – Journey to Becoming a Frontier Firm

Register here

This session is designed for organizations exploring how AI, Copilot, and agentic workflows can accelerate AI transformation across your business. Members of our Copilot Growth team will be discussing the newly developed Frontier Transformation playbook which is designed to help organizations understand critical steps towards becoming a frontier firm using agents to modify how work gets done. We’ll also provide specific use-cases for AI adoption tied to key functions within your organization and leave you with an understanding of where your organization currently stands in becoming frontier-ready.

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 in the ‘Connect with us’ section.

New Thought Leadership

Research Drop: Fighting AI Slop with Meta-Cognition Around AI. Organizations are racing to adopt AI, but 60% of employees skip accuracy checks, leading to "workslop" – rushed, low-quality output that erodes trust. Our latest research shows the difference between employees who get real value from AI and those who don't isn't how often they use it; it's how thoughtfully they use it. And building better habits doesn't require technical training. When leaders openly share how they use AI and teams feel safe discussing what's working, employees become far more intentional. By focusing on the quality of AI use, not just the quantity, leaders can turn adoption into lasting impact. Read it here.

Customer Success Stories

Our very first Viva Glint Partner Story—featuring HRIZONS—is now officially live! HRIZONS EX partnered with a global skin care company to transform its employee listening program from a traditional high‑engagement survey model into a continuous engine for manager enablement, organizational alignment, and workforce effectiveness. By shifting from survey “deployment” to “action activation,” HRIZONS EX co‑created tailored tools and enablement for managers and HRBPs—including guides, content, and rollout support—to strengthen accountability and ensure employee feedback consistently turned into meaningful action. The program moved from periodic measurement to continuous improvement, embedded self‑sustaining capabilities across survey cycles, and unlocked efficiencies through early use of Microsoft 365 Copilot with Viva Glint. The result: greater clarity, scalability, and manager ownership of employee experience outcomes. You can read the full story here.

For more information about partner services, you can check out this blog post and for general partner queries, please reach out to our partner success team (vivaglintpartners@microsoft.com).

Connect with us

We’re excited to share an important evolution of our VCCP community.

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.