Viva Goals Blog articles

“Copilot, help set my New Year’s goals”: Using Viva Goals + Microsoft Copilot to make goals in 2024

Katie_Anderson — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 16:00:00 GMT

The start of a new year is often seen as a time to reflect on the past, plan for the future, and set New Year’s resolutions for ourselves. It is also a key time for business leaders to set goals to help their organizations and teams accomplish more in the new year, whether those goals are a new product release, business growth, or workplace culture improvement.

Furthermore, we know that simply writing down your goals is often not enough to achieve them! You also need to communicate your goals with key stakeholders, track your progress, and measure your results. This can be challenging, especially if your organization has multiple goals, competing priorities, or cross-team dependencies.

This is where Viva Goals and Microsoft Copilot can help.

Viva Goals is Microsoft’s solution for creating, managing, and tracking organizational goals. It is founded on the Objective and Key Result (OKR) framework, yet can be customized to meet other goal-setting strategies. To learn more about changing your goal terms from “Objectives and Key Results” to other frameworks or labels, visit our page on customizing terminology in Viva Goals.

With the content generation and summarization capabilities in Copilot in Viva Goals, creating and tracking your goals is becoming even easier.

Quickly create your goals with Copilot in Viva Goals

One challenge we frequently hear from customers is uncertainty about getting started with writing actionable, outcome-driven goals. Setting appropriate and ambitious goals can be daunting, but using Copilot can make the process easier.

From a quick click of the “Copilot” button in the Viva Goals app (available on Microsoft Teams or in your browser), Copilot is ready to help you generate new goals or OKRs:

Copilot in Viva Goals can be accessed from the tool bar or the Copilot icon within Viva Goals.

Copilot in Viva Goals can help you generate goals in two different ways:

Generating new goals based on context you provide (ex: industry, roles, business mission)

Clicking “Help me generate new OKRs” means Copilot will help you in crafting OKRs, using the conversational interface and its repository of sample OKRs.

Copilot in Viva Goals will generate goals based on prompts or information you provide in the chat.

By asking Copilot to “Write an OKR for this year's plans to roll out Microsoft Copilot to employees across my organization,” you may get a result like:

Objective: Roll out Microsoft Copilot to employees across the organization
Key Result (KR): Train 60% of our employees on the basics of taking the “Copilot for Microsoft 365” training in Viva Learning
KR: Set up all required infrastructure and hardware to support Microsoft Copilot for these employees
KR: Ensure 60% all newly hired employees have used Microsoft Copilot in their first month of onboarding

Note that this content is AI-generated and will change based on inputs / sample data.

Using the Copilot interface, you can ask Copilot to regenerate these OKRs, refine them (“be more conservative,” “increase the adoption rate,” etc.), or publish them to your Viva Goals instance.

Generating goals from a document you provide (ex: business plan, strategy paper)

Oftentimes, business leaders will already have strategy or business planning documents they have been circulating with their leadership teams. This can be a great place to get started: by uploading these strategy documents to Viva Goals , Copilot can then identify potential goals from the document and format into actionable OKRs. This capability is currently available for local .docx files, and will be expanding file types and file sources in the coming months.

Copilot in Viva Goals can use content from your existing documents to suggest outcome-based goals.

One thing to remember: using Copilot means that you, as the user, are always in control of what gets saved, published, and shared.

Copilot in Microsoft 365 can also be helpful in writing goals

For users that are not currently using Viva Goals, or are looking for suggestions on annual goals elsewhere, Copilot in M365 can be a great place to get started. Copilot in Word or in the Microsoft Copilot web experience can be great resources for creating the right goals for you and your organization. You can use prompts like “Write 3 OKRs for building a new (product/service) in the new year” or “Provide some goal suggestions for boosting employee morale” and work with Microsoft Copilot to refine these goals.

Furthermore, at Ignite last November (2023), we also announced that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be enhanced with Viva in early 2024. This means users will have access to Viva functionality within the Copilot for Microsoft 365 experience, including a chat experience that works across Viva data and apps to support employees, managers, and leaders. To learn more, check out the announcement from our blog in November, New ways Microsoft Copilot and Viva are transforming the employee experience.

Just make sure that after creating your goals, you are communicating these goals to your stakeholders and tracking your progress!

Summarizing your goals with Copilot

With Copilot, it is even easier to summarize and share your goal progress. Copilot uses context from your goal status updates and check-ins to generate summaries of your progress, making it even easier to share your current status with other teams and leadership.

Copilot in Viva Goals will quickly summarize your goals for easy sharing.

You can work with Copilot to tailor the update messages to your audience by asking the conversational AI to make the summary content more succinct, detailed, or professional. Looking to quickly share these updates with your teams, audiences or stakeholders? Use functionality within Viva Goals to broadcast your updates to email via Outlook or to post on Viva Engage with just a few clicks.

With the Viva Goals integration into Viva Engage, it’s easier than ever to share your team goals with your community.

It has never been easier to get started with setting and tracking your goals with Microsoft and Viva Goals, especially with the power of AI. Always make sure to review Copilot’s responses to make sure the suggestions and content it presents are relevant to your organization and your goals.

Set your 2024 Goals with Copilot today

Copilot in Viva Goals is available to Viva suite customers in public preview since December 2023 and will be Generally Available in early 2024. NOTE: Customers with Viva suite licenses interested in using Copilot in Viva Goals should work with their IT Admins to enable public preview of Copilot for users from their Microsoft Admin Center. To learn more about enabling Copilot in Viva Goals, please visit our Copilot in Viva Goals documentation.

Microsoft will also be hosting a webinar session on January 31^st, 8am US-PT, for those interested in a live demo and to hear how Copilot in Viva Goals is helping address goal-setting and tracking challenges. More details available at Microsoft Virtual Event "Discovering the Power of Copilot in Viva Goals".

Have feedback about Copilot in Viva Goals? Use the feedback tool in Viva Goals to let us know your thoughts.

From the Microsoft Viva Goals team to yours, we wish you success in achieving your goals in the new year!

Finding Harmony: KPIs, OKRs and Lessons from Iced Tea

Mariavermeer — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 18:59:42 GMT

As Program Managers on our organization ’s monthly leadership OKR review, we often receive questions from stakeholders along the lines of: “What is the difference between our Key Performance Indicators and Objectives and Key Results? Why do we need both?” These questions are more common than you might expect and have led to interesting chats with colleagues on why we track and review both KPIs and OKRs with our leadership team.

When I joined our organization’s monthly OKR review process, I brought a grounding from years in Sales Consulting, in the value of KPIs as a gauge of business health and success.

KPIs felt familiar, like a compass, faithfully orienting us to the state of the business. I know I am not alone in this grounding. Historically, many executive leaders have utilized KPIs to measure impact and results. OKRs landed on my radar when I joined the IDEAS team here at Microsoft two years ago. Among other things, the IDEAS team are facilitators and drivers of Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices (E+D) OKRs. I quickly began to see the motivation and value in this program, designed to align thousands of colleagues across teams to a single set of shared organizational OKRs.

My experience has given me visibility into the effectiveness of OKRs at the leadership level, and the importance of having both KPIs and OKRs in a business health ecosystem.

I assure you that KPIs and OKRs can do more than simply co-exist. They can and should bolster each other, and work in harmony to drive progress towards a team’s goals.

How does this happen? Where can the harmony be found? Let’s start with some definitions and understandings.

“KPI” is the acronym for Key Performance Indicators.

KPIs are a readout on performance, are informative, and can be measured anytime. KPIs should be completely aligned to your company strategy and are often (but not always) financial metrics.

“OKR” is the acronym for Objectives and Key Results.

Objectives are aspirational, brief in nature (like a slogan), are not measurable, provide purpose and direction, and can take a year or more to achieve. When written well, they should stretch your thinking.

Key Results are measurable outcomes nested under Objectives. They describe success criteria, are actionable, necessary, and essential to fulfill the Objective. Both Objectives and Key Results can change year over year (or even quarterly depending on the organization).

Applying these understandings, let’s look at a few creative examples of how KPI and OKR relationships can live in harmony using some scenarios from my promising (and highly fictional) Rain Town Iced Tea business.

2024 OKRs for my fictional Rain Town Tea business

Note that both my Objectives and Key results are aspirational in nature and focus on specific actions to take to drive the business forward.

2024 KPIs for my fictional Rain Town Tea business

You will notice my KPIs are an “always there” roadside guardrail to assess the health of my business. They act as a readout- not an action to take, and I am not actively working to improve them.

KPIs just “are.” They are consistent, steady, measurable, non- subjective. They are neutral compasses, telling me simply what is or is not occurring within my business.

Objectives and Key Results behave differently. They state specific goals and steps to take, (did you notice that my OKRs included verbs?) with a longer, full year view (vs right now). Whereas OKRs bias towards input metrics and measurements, KPIs bias to output metrics.

As my sales year progresses, perhaps it will become apparent that I need to reset my Objectives and Key Results. Should I set higher stretch goals? Did I run into a bump in the road and need to scale my aspirations back? Measuring progress towards goals are a main function of OKRs, while the measurements from KPIs provide the know-how to make sound business decisions.

Moving back to our E+D OKR program here at Microsoft. Believe it or not, our team actually kicks off our monthly OKR leadership review meeting with a KPI readout before diving into the health of our Objectives and Key Results.

Sure, the bulk of the meeting focuses on OKRs and we earmark time for a deeper spotlight review of a handful of Key Results and products monthly. But, by starting with a KPI run through, we lay the framework for a productive executive OKR review.

A component of our OKR program’s successful is the grounding that the KPI and OKR relationship brings to the table, right from the start of each meeting.

You aren’t going to find a better example for both the worthiness of OKR adoption, and the harmony between KPIs and OKRs than the value our organizational leadership places on this program, and the alignment it brings to all 50,000 of us in the broader organization.

In summary, you may currently have more experience with the concept of KPIs, like I did. You may be questioning the value of layering OKRs to your teams’ goals, or trying to work out how they can live harmoniously with your team’s existing KPIs. KPIs are an excellent start to an OKR program, as they serve as the building blocks to an actionable strategy to drive change…otherwise known as OKRs. Once your OKRs are established your KPIs will still be there, your faithful readout on the health of your program and business.

I encourage you to consider bringing an OKR program to your team this year to bring specific goals and actions to your Key Performance Indicators. KPIs will always be your faithful compass, that won’t change. But OKRs will bring the action (see: verbs!), the plan, the transparency and accountability to your organization. They encourage group goal-setting and aspirational thinking. They move teams from measuring what simply is to what’s next. The existence of both is where the harmony can be found.

In my next post I will discuss a few best practices from a PM perspective to keep your new OKR program running smoothly.

But, in the meantime, I have some tea to sell…

Drive Team Performance and Results with Viva Goals: Insights From Microsoft Partner McChrystal Group

BrittHarper90 — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 16:00:00 GMT

Note: This blog post was cowritten by Copilot in Microsoft Teams

In a recent webinar, we explored how McChrystal Group’s team is leveraging Viva Goals both within their organizations and with the clients they work with, as well as discussing the strategies that yield success—and those that fall short.

The conversation featured Jeff Kotz, Director of the Microsoft Channel Alliance at McChrystal Group, and Kevin Cole, Implementation Program Manager at McChrystal Group; the McChrystal Group is also a partner of Microsoft. In this blog, we distill the extensive knowledge they shared into the top 3 key insights to empower your team in driving performance and achieving remarkable results with Viva Goals.

1. Igniting In-depth Conversations: Aligning Team and Business Strategies Through Goal Tracking and Reporting

Implementing Viva Goals transforms the landscape of organizational conversations, offering a profound shift in focus. By streamlining the reporting, tracking, and sharing of strategies, Viva Goals allows teams to explore more of what they want to prioritize and the “Art of the possible”. This evolution redirects discussions from the retrospective "what's happened" to a more proactive exploration of "what needs updating" and "what needs to be accomplished." It facilitates a dynamic dialogue about progress and challenges, fostering an environment where decisions are made collaboratively. Viva Goals serves as a transparent framework for defining organizational success, ensuring that decisions, even at tactical levels, align with a shared vision of success. This cohesion enables cross-functional collaboration, breaking down silos and fostering a level of teamwork that may not have been possible otherwise.

"The biggest benefit of Viva Goals is how it removes the friction and the mind share that goes into reporting, tracking, and sharing of strategy and creates space for teams to start to think about how they're communicating."

-Kevin Cole

2. Cultivating a Dynamic Operating Rhythm for Team Success: Accountability, Feedback, Goal Iteration, and Alignment

Embracing a transformative approach to business operations through technology, such as Viva Goals, signals a commitment to reshaping communication and transparency within an organization. Establishing a robust operating rhythm lays the groundwork for enhanced team performance, especially with setting clear meeting and communication cadences, providing employees with reliable insights into progress and performance, and leveraging lessons learned to inform future business cycles.

Instituting a formal feedback process is a crucial driver of high-performing teams. Building trust, the linchpin of an effective feedback system, requires consistent, transparent, and reliable communication across teams and leadership. Individuals can feel more secure in offering feedback when there is a culture of openness and clarity.

Accountability is central to team success, which can be strengthened by having specific individuals own goals or initiatives within Viva Goals. Giving these individuals the opportunity to report in regularly on their progress, whether on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly cadence, is essential for senior leadership to identify and eliminate blockers, fostering an environment conducive to ongoing success. As Kotz emphasizes, accountability revolves around understanding why past goals weren't successful and outlining the necessary steps for future success—a process easily supported by Viva Goals.

"Accountability is about somebody being able to say, ‘this is why this goal/initiative wasn't successful’ and ‘what I need in order to be successful going forward is X’ and when you implement [Viva Goals] correctly you are constantly asking and answering that question."

-Jeff Kotz

Whether deploying objectives and key results (OKRs) or another goal framework, the strategic outcomes defined by the organization must be a recurring focus in every meeting. Repetition is key, as it reinforces alignment and ensures that critical strategic concepts penetrate deep into the organization. With its structured approach, Viva Goals becomes a catalyst for this process, empowering teams to consistently articulate, discuss, clarify, and communicate the organization's mission in simple and concise terms.

3. Revolutionizing the Conversation on the ROI of Productivity Technology

The conventional interpretation of return on investment (ROI) hinges on a monetary assessment of an investment against its costs. ROI can go even further as a measure of success by translating broader goals into tangible outcomes. According to Kotz, the ROI for organizations utilizing tools like Viva Goals transcends mere revenue figures: the true ROI emerges when organizations can successfully unpack and understand the intricacies of their business operations. This shift in perspective signifies progress, emphasizing that measuring ROI isn't solely about financial metrics but also about gaining a comprehensive understanding of what drives success within the business. Viva Goals can help in delivering transparency on operational processes, giving teams and leaders the opportunity to refine and improve. As each process improves incrementally, aligned with accurately defined success metrics, the organization collectively advances.

4. Here are some additional practical and tactical tips from Jeff Kotz and Kevin Cole to enhance alignment and performance when utilizing Viva Goals:

Kotz suggests ensuring that every employee's work is meaningful, serving as a litmus test for the completeness of the implementation. Without transparency and clarity on the significance of how their work helps achieve organizational goals, employee engagement and performance may suffer.

Additionally, once goals, alignment, and processes are established in Viva Goals, Jeff advises against prematurely removing items that may not yield success in the short term. Seeing processes through to completion is vital for learning and growth as a company.

Cole emphasizes that perfection can impede progress. He encourages teams to dive into using Viva Goals, focusing on the critical aspects of their organization rather than aiming for perfection. During retrospectives, Kevin suggests treating the processes as a learning journey, identifying opportunities for improvement and adjustments to enhance organizational performance.

Key Resources:

• McChrystal Group and Microsoft Viva
• Driving Success Through OKRs: Empowering Leaders to Foster a Culture of Achievement
• Weekly Whiteboard: Using Microsoft's Viva Insights to Measure Team Collaboration

Strategic goal planning and management are no longer a linear journey

Tamara72 — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 16:00:00 GMT

In past roles, I spent hundreds of hours with colleagues developing our annual strategic plan. We created committees, subcommittees, and teams to identify priorities and initiatives grounded to the organization’s mission and vision. We would ambitiously set our goals for the year and even identify success metrics. While intentions were good, our strategic outcomes always fell short.

Why? This conventional approach took too long, lacked accountability and the rigid planning cycle inhibited our ability to adapt to changing organization needs and shifting priorities. We got stuck in the “set and forget” cycle of setting goals at the beginning of the year and never knowing if our everyday activities at the individual contributor and team levels even rolled up to those institutional goals.

At Microsoft we recognize a defined set of corporate goals not only instills a sense of purpose, accountability, and agility but also helps companies mitigate uncertainty.

How do we escape the organizational goal-setting rut?

In today’s environment when organizations are required to operate faster and more efficiently, having an adaptable goal planning and management processes are essential. Microsoft Viva Goals is a goal management solution that helps ease goal planning and management. Viva Goals helps companies escape the goal-setting rut with capabilities to communicate goals across the organization, measure progress, and realign priorities as needed.

CAI, a global consulting firm, shared how Microsoft Viva Goals helped boost their business agility and enable operational alignment by streamlining its goal planning and management processes. Historically CAI relied on disparate Excel spreadsheets, making it difficult to align strategies across the company. Viva Goals provided them with one centrally managed solution that readily supported an adaptable goal setting strategy. With Viva Goals, CAI was able to move away from Excel spreadsheets and a conventional, linear approach.

"We don't create a traditional business plan now. We use Viva Goals with our customer-facing project teams to manage progress, align strategy, and create accountability to high-level objectives."

- Richard Tree: Chief Operating Officer, CAI

Today they are successfully setting business goals, objectives and key results (OKRs) and aligning teams to organizational priorities while at the same time delivering consistent and high-quality services to their customers. They are able to stay agile and responsive to their customers’ needs by modernizing their approach to goal setting.

Read more about CAI’s Viva Goals journey to learn how they were able to boost business agility and operational alignment by adoption an OKR framework.

Bridging the gap between goal setting strategy and execution

Another issue companies face in their goal setting journey is a disconnect between strategy and execution. Commonly, corporate goals are set at the leadership level and not communicated to business units and teams within a company. This makes it hard for individuals to know if their work is impacting the company’s bottom line.

To bridge this gap and help break the “set and forget” cycle, Viva Goals enables leaders to send regular updates across the organization, teams, and even individual views. With better transparency, internal teams are able to align priorities so they can achieve results together.

Microsoft customer, OC Tanner, discussed their journey from goal setting strategy to successful execution with Viva Goals. Regarded as a manufacturing leader and pioneer of the employee recognition industry, they realized that to maintain their leadership position, they needed clear and concise goals communicated across the organization. They chose Viva Goals to help them focus on the most critical priorities.

"Viva Goals helps us keep OKRs established and aligned for the appropriate planning periods and creates visibility across the entire team."

- Jason Andersen: Vice President of Product, O.C. Tanner

Today OC Tanner incorporates OKRs into all planning and collaborative processes. Viva Goals also plays a key role in their semiannual and quarterly planning processes, which have helped to align everyone on their tasks and ensure their work is laddering up to the big picture. In short, OC Tanner successfully bridged the gap between strategy and execution with Viva Goals.

Read more about how OC Tanner was able to create “unity in focus” with
Viva Goals.

Adapting a continuous goal-management framework

Consistent with my own planning experience described in the introduction, many organizations find goal setting arduous. To help better understand the goal setting challenges, Microsoft commissioned a study by Forrester Consulting, 2023 State Of Goal Setting Report.

One of the findings Forrester reported was that although goal setting provides structure and a common vision, the lack of organization wide visibility to corporate goals can hinder teams from meeting their goals. In addition, Forrester also reported that company leaders who regularly revisit and set goals to align with the rhythm of business, were not doing so at other levels of the organization. This also results in employees feeling disconnected and unmotivated with the goal setting process.

At Microsoft, we believe a continuous goal-setting planning lifecycle is an important component to success. The continuous planning cycle involves shorter planning cycles, ability to measure and report progress, analyze performance using scenario-based models, adjust priorities as needed, and repeat for the next evaluation cycle. This approach allows companies to make necessary adjustments to meet their corporate goals and help keep everyone focused on the right work.

Viva Goals provides companies with the tools to define agile processes and framework for planning, measuring, analyzing and adjusting priorities as needed. With the ability to connect to the project management and data tools employees use regularly, such as Azure Dev Ops, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Planner and Power BI, Viva Goals can provide visibility into how progress on daily work is impacting goals.

Using next generation AI from Copilot, Viva Goals helps power organizations to streamline the entire goal management process from start to finish. Whether it be quarterly or monthly planning cycles, Viva Goals enables companies to readily measure, analyze and adjust goals on a regular basis. For more information on how Viva Goals supports continuous planning lifecycle, watch Viva Goals video.

Aligning OKRs across the organization leads to stronger engagement and motivation

In July 2023 we hosted a Viva Goals webinar, "Where are we going?": How to chart your Viva Goals journey, where we asked more than 100 participants what their biggest goal setting challenge was. Not surprisingly, alignment was the top answer.

Sample responses from participants in our July 2023 webinar

In our experience it’s not just getting alignment at the onset of the goal setting process, it’s also maintaining alignment across the organization. Microsoft customer, Svea Solar, relies on Viva Goals to help employees connect to the company’s founding purpose from the moment they are hired.

"We use Viva Goals to demystify what's important for each function and get people up to speed faster."

- Wilhelm Kugelberg: Strategy & Business Development Manager, Svea Solar

Sharing corporate goals provides new hires understand with what they need to do and, more importantly, why their work is important. Svea Solar quickly noticed that aligning employees on OKRs from the moment they are hired, led to stronger engagement and motivation to focus on the right things.

Consistent with Svea Solar’s experience, at Microsoft we also recommend a top-down alignment for stronger impact. Just as important is cross-functional alignment within and across groups to help reduce redundancies as well as leverage the power of meaningful collaboration to achieve operational excellence.

Read more about how Viva Goals helped Svea Solar achieve more and drive efficiency by defining distinct goals.

Viva Goals empowers teams

Effective goal setting not only can lead to stronger alignment, but also empowers teams to work together for greater impact. Goal setting requires commitment, communication, and top-down alignment. In addition, it also requires communication and transparency so employees at all levels understand their contributions and impact. Viva Goals provides companies with the capabilities to be successful in their goal setting journey.

For successful adoption across your organization here are some best practices we have learned in our own journey:

Get executive buy-in to the process and commitment to provide clarity on vision and overall objectives.
Identify OKR champions to scale to and coach individual teams for consistent quality standard. At Microsoft, our OKR champions helped ensure a reasonable number of OKRs are selected for each team which fostered teams to focus on a few items for stronger impact.
Develop and manage organizational OKRs as an outcome of continuous strategic planning cycles and not as a separate, distinct activity. At Microsoft, our OKR champions meet monthly to share best practices and ensure teams are creating clear OKRs on high-level objectives.
Adjust OKRs and priorities on a regular basis with dynamic goal-management practices.
Provide visibility at all levels so leadership team can see progress towards objectives and individual contributors have visibility into how their work contributes to objectives.

To better support your goal setting journey, technology plays a key role in helping to ease the process. Viva Goals provides visibility into organization objectives, enables transparency for both leaders and individual contributors, offers a dashboard to readily measure progress, and integrates with Microsoft ecosystem tools such as Teams, Outlook, PowerBI, Excel and PowerPoint, for easier communication, reporting, and integration.

For questions on Viva Goals, leave us a comment or question below. We are happy to answer your questions on Viva Goals.

For more information on Viva Goals, check out these resources

Looking for Viva Goals product overview, pricing or the latest case studies? Check out our website at Set Team and Company Goals – Business Goal Setting | Microsoft Viva.
Want to learn more about Viva Goals? Visit Introduction to Microsoft Viva Goals | Microsoft Learn.
Interested in a Viva Goals trial? Go to Start a trial overview | Microsoft Learn.
Currently a customer and want to stay engaged and informed? Visit the Microsoft Viva Goals Community page at Goal setting & management - Microsoft Community Hub.
Interested in attending a Viva Goals event?

Attend a Viva Goals Office Hours session, an interactive discussion to get your questions answered, or watch past sessions at Viva Goals Office Hours Resources – Microsoft Adoption
Find a list of upcoming events, go to Viva Goals - Microsoft Community Hub. Scroll to the bottom and select ‘Events’ on right side of the page.

3 Essential Tools for 2024 Planning: Copilot in Viva Goals, Goals in Viva Engage and Planner Updates

Lucy_Hitz — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:00:00 GMT

As we move towards the new year, it’s time to reflect back and begin goal planning for 2024. A great goal is…

• Ambitious and inspiring
• Tied to measurable outcomes
• Regularly updated to understand progress
• Tied to the daily work of your employees

Today at Ignite, Microsoft Viva Goals is announcing three ways we’re making all of these pieces of the goal-setting and management process more efficient and impactful for you in 2024.

1. Don’t know where to start? Copilot can help.

Today we are announcing a public preview for Copilot in Viva Goals starting in December 2023, just in time for 2024 goal planning season. Current Viva Goals customers will find Copilot live in their instance of Viva Goals. Organization admins will have the ability to turn Copilot in Viva Goals off for users if needed.

Copilot in Viva Goals will be generally available for all Viva suite customers in Q1 CY2024.

Copilot in Viva Goals uses next-gen AI to improve your goal planning and management in three key ways:

• Helping you create and refine ambitious goals that inspire your team, tied to measurable outcomes and the daily work of employees in less time. For instance, you can ask Copilot in Viva Goals “Help me generate OKRs for my Product team” and work with Copilot to refine them until they make sense for your business. Then simply save your goals to Viva Goals and share with your team. This is also a great way to get team members involved in the goal planning process, creating a collaborative goal-setting process more likely to achieve buy-in and results.

• Translating strategy and vision documents that leadership has been crafting into goals your teams feel prepared to tackle and accountable for. For instance, load a strategy document from leaders or even meeting notes into Copilot in Viva Goals. Copilot will come up with goals tailor-made for your team and business.

• Making it easier and more efficient to share progress updates across teams, from crafting updates for you based on check-ins to refining your updates to sound more professional or more succinct with conversational AI. For instance, when it’s time to report on outcomes, ask Copilot in Viva Goals for goal updates and what quarter-over-quarter progress looks like. Then refine your results to sound shorter or more professional so you can ensure you’re reflecting the work and impact of your team clearly and accurately.

Want to learn more about Copilot in Viva Goals? Watch the recording—including an interactive live demo of Copilot in action—of our recent Viva Goals Office Hours webinar 3 Ways to Improve Your Goal Management Process with Copilot in Viva Goals.

PLUS: Viva Goals comes to Copilot for M365 in private preview starting in Q1 CY2024: Copilot for M365 will be enhanced by the Viva suite, including Viva Goals, starting in private preview in Q1 CY2024 with chat that works across Viva data and apps to support employees, managers and leaders.

Learn more here.

2. Engage with your employee community by bringing goals into the conversation

According to our Forrester 2023 State of Goal-Setting Report, the majority of employees at enterprise organizations (61%) do not know what their company-level goals are. If employees aren’t aware of the goals that matter most to your business or progress being made—the top ask from employees when it comes to the goal management process is more frequent progress updates—it’s impossible to know if they are being productive in the right direction.

How can you keep employees focused on the right goals and metrics that matter most to your business—not just at company-wide meetings but in the conversations and communities they are a part of every day?

In our latest feature release to keep goals and goal progress top-of-mind for every employee, Viva Goals and Viva Engage are announcing the first phase of our cross-suite integration.

The Viva Goals/Viva Engage integration brings mission, alignment and results into communities and conversation by helping customers build communities around goals, view goal progress from Viva Goals directly in Viva Engage, and create business communities within Viva Engage designed to help leaders better communicate top-down interactions and initiatives, including delivering praise based on goal progress and achievement.

This integration will be generally available in H1 2024.

Want to learn about all the cross-Viva suite integrations that Microsoft Viva is announcing at Ignite 2023? Check out this blog post.

3. Make tracking goal progress even more precise as a master Planner

With the latest enhancements to the Viva Goals integration with Microsoft Planner, Viva Goals users can now filter Planner tasks by buckets and labels, integrate key results or projects directly with specific tasks, and track progress using checklist items.

Within Microsoft Planner, the tasks in a given plan often cater to multiple projects. Viva Goals users are now able to select which specific tasks they would like to use for progress calculation for their initiative or key result.

This functionality enables more efficient portfolio management and greater flexibility in how organizations connect their planning and processes to business goals, helping better align productivity to business impact in 2024.

As we move forwards into 2024, which product developments and integrations do you want to see on the Viva Goals roadmap to improve your goal planning and management process? Let us know in the comments below.

Everything You Need to Know About the Viva Goals Integration with ADO

Lucy_Hitz — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 20:38:51 GMT

If you are a product team leader or a member, you know the challenges of managing and tracking your team goals, especially when they involve cross-team collaboration and alignment with the wider organizational strategy.

"From a leadership perspective, we always start with our annual planning including our top focus areas from our CISO and his direct reports. The coolest part about the Viva Goals connective tissue is that we can run all those alignments up and see how our teams are going to deliver on his key objectives, including seeing status automatically funneled up on a regular basis."

-Mark Myers - Senior Program Manager, Digital Security & Resilience, Microsoft

You may be using Azure Devops (ADO) to plan and execute your engineering work, but struggle with communicating business impact, progress, and dependencies of your work to your stakeholders and leaders. You may also have to deal with different tools, formats, and permissions to share your status and metrics, which can be time-consuming and inconsistent.

In our recent YouTube Live AMA "How to Improve Collaboration and Results on Your Product Team with Viva Goals and ADO," Mark Myers, Senior Program Manager in the Engineering Excellence team in Digital Security & Resilience (DSR) at Microsoft, and Johnny Jones Jr., Security Technical Program Manager in the Endpoint Protection Services team at Microsoft, shared their experiences using Viva Goals and ADO to solve these problems and drive success on their product teams.

ADO vs. Viva Goals?

ADO is a great tool for tracking individual contributions and showcasing granular work items on Product and Engineering teams, but it doesn't provide a holistic view of all work committed, and how that work aligns to the business goals of the organization.

Viva Goals, on the other hand, tracks work at the portfolio level, allowing users to see the overall progress towards the goals that matter most to your business. Viva Goals is meant to showcase the big picture, elevating conversations with leadership to the Objective and Key Results level, allowing teams to stay out of the weeds and stay focused during strategic conversations.

Both ADO and Viva Goals are critical tools for understanding if your Product and Engineering team is headed in the right direction.

Slow Is Smooth, and Smooth Is Fast

One of my favorite moments during our livestream was when Johnny talked about the prep necessary for successful ADO x Viva Goals rollout. He said it better than I ever could, so I will include the full quote here:

"Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Getting leadership team adoption, ensuring everyone understands the “why,” the adoption date, and providing a lot of information and communication is key. That’s why we created the playbook, provided Office Hours and Q&A periods. But one of the most important things we did was having points of contact or Champions as we call them, on each team. You can’t have 1800 people asking you questions. By training up your Champions, you can then pass updates to your Champions and they can pass that information along to their teams so everyone stays aligned."

-Johnny Jones Jr. - Senior Technical Program Manager, Microsoft Security Response Center

To successfully deploy Viva Goals, it's important to establish a pilot group and build a Viva Goals playbook from organizational principles. Keep stakeholders engaged throughout the pilot. Once the pilot is complete, host training sessions and office hours to ensure the organization knows how to use the tool. Finally, get leadership buy-in before going live, and require training to reduce support impact.

Connecting Product Work to the Metrics Which Drive Business Forward

One of the latest enhancements to the Viva Goals integration with Viva Goals is the ability to create custom metrics and data sources for your key results. This means that you can track any metric that is relevant to your goal, whether it is financial, operational, customer satisfaction, or anything else. You can also connect your key results to data sources such as Power BI, Excel, SharePoint, or custom APIs, and have them update automatically in Viva Goals.

This feature was very useful for the DSR team, as they were able to showcase metrics that were not available in ADO, such as budget savings, risk reduction, and compliance scores. By connecting their key results to Power BI dashboards, they were able to provide real-time updates to leadership and stakeholders and demonstrate the business impact of their work.

Providing Context for Progress and Results

Another enhancement that we recently announced is the ability to add comments and attachments to your key results in Viva Goals. This allows users to provide more context and information about progress, challenges, and achievements, eliminating the need for meetings with multiple stakeholders and enhancing productivity across teams. Users can attach documents, images, videos, and links to support key results.

This feature was very helpful for the DSR team, as they were able to add comments and attachments to their key results during their check-ins. They could explain the status of their key results, share feedback, ask questions, and celebrate wins. They could also attach reports, presentations, screenshots, or videos to show their work in action. This made their check-ins more interactive and engaging, and enabled better communication and collaboration across teams.

ADO and Viva Goals, Better Together

Viva Goals and ADO are powerful tools that can help teams track their goals, improve collaboration, and showcase their impact on the company. By following the tips and best practices outlined in this blog post, teams can successfully deploy Viva Goals and drive success on their product teams. To get started, check out the key resources below:

Key Resources:

Watch the live event recording here: For a full briefing on key benefits for using ADO and Viva Goals together, as well as how to communicate with leaders and employees around this topic
Viva Goals x ADO Playbook: Use the exact same playbook which Mark and Johnny created and shared with their teams to equip your leadership and employees for using Viva Goals and ADO in perfect harmony.
MS Learn Documentation for the Viva Goals x ADO Integration: Read through the documentation about how to set up the Viva Goals x ADO integration
Read about our latest product announcements, including recent ADO integration enhancements

Microsoft Viva Goals feature releases for July–September 2023

Lucy_Hitz — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 15:00:00 GMT

During the last quarter, the Microsoft Viva Goals team focused on feature enhancements that continue to enable collaboration, help deepen engagement, as well as make it easier to share and track objective and key results (OKRs). We are proud to announce the general availability of features that not only address these needs but also help further enhance the Viva Goals experience.

Interactive collaboration and easier sharing

Viva Goals is committed to collaboration and sharing information and as part of this commitment we are proud to announce the availability of two new features. The first enables users to interact with Viva Goals from within Microsoft Teams and the second provides an easier and navigable way to readily present OKRs in PowerPoint. Together both these features make it easier to collaborate, interact, and share details on Viva Goals OKRs.

Interact with Viva Goals directly within Microsoft Teams allows users to share links from Viva Goals as rich adaptive cards in Microsoft Teams. The rich adaptive card provides preview on status and links for users to readily get the context needed around the goals they are working towards.

To share Viva Goals OKR as a rich adaptive card, you can either copy/paste the URL address or click the ellipses and select ‘Copy link’. Simply paste the link into Microsoft Teams chat where the Viva Goals OKR will automatically appear as a rich adaptive card.

Rich adaptive Viva Goals OKR card in Microsoft Teams chat.

Without losing focus or clicking away from the conversation, users are able to see OKR details in Viva Goals by clicking “View details” or “Open in app” in the OKR adaptive card.

Viewing OKR details from within Viva Goals.

Export Viva Goals OKR view to PowerPoint allows users to export content into PowerPoint. By clicking “Export as PowerPoint” in Viva Goals, it will generate a PowerPoint slide for each OKR selected.

Once in PowerPoint users can easily share and edit information relevant for business reviews, planning, closeouts or other rhythm of business needs.

PowerPoint slide with exported Viva Goals OKRs and details.

Help drive engagement with personalized content

We understand the challenges in driving employee engagement on the goals and OKRs relevant to them. To help improve OKR collaboration and engagement, Viva Goals provides the ability to personalize activity feeds. With personalized activity feeds, the right information is available to the right people, enabling employees to stay up-to-date and make more informed decisions.

Personalized activity feed empowers users, including non-OKR owners, to receive updates from leaders and people they work with regularly on the OKRs that are relevant to them. Designed to help users stay informed, each user’s activity page will include activity on the goals they care about. By clicking on the “Feed” button in the left-hand navigation bar, Viva Goals users can quickly check status, see progress, as well as view comments and reactions from people relevant to their goals/OKRs.

Viva Goals personalized activity feed

Better tracking and visibility into OKR progress with child-level targets

To help customers follow the ebbs and flows of their business, we are pleased to announce the ability to incorporate tracking/progress for child level OKRs. With this enhancement, Viva Goals customers with greater visibility into the overall OKR progress and ability to better track dependencies.

Improved phased target to reflect child-level OKRs feature provides customers with the ability to track progress at the child level. Taking into consideration key business rhythms, users can factor seasonality by setting child OKR expected targets for specific time periods. This provides customers with greater visibility into parent OKR progress and ability to better track overall progress.

Check out these resources for the latest on Viva Goals

Want information on future Viva Goals feature enhancements? Go to Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft Viva Goals.
Want to learn more about Viva Goals? Visit Introduction to Microsoft Viva Goals | Microsoft Learn.
Interested in a Viva Goals trial? Go to Start a trial overview | Microsoft Learn.
Currently a customer and want to stay engaged and informed? Go to Microsoft Viva Goals Community page at Goal setting & management - Microsoft Community Hub.
Interested in attending a Viva Goals event? Check out these upcoming Viva Goals online events:
- Oct 26th at 9AM PDT/12PM EDT: Art of the Possible: The future of goal-setting and management: Achieve more with Viva Goals
- Nov 8th at 9AM PDT/12PM EDT: How to Drive Team Performance and Results with Viva Goals - Microsoft Community Hub
- Find more events by scrolling to the bottom Viva Goals - Microsoft Community Hub page and select ‘Events’ on right side of the page.

Drive Mission and Alignment with Copilot in Viva Goals and Goal Customization in Private Preview Now

Lucy_Hitz — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:49:35 GMT

Starting today, Viva Goals is delivering on its promise to make the goal-setting and management process easier, more efficient, and more impactful for organizations, leaders, and employees across the globe with Copilot in Viva Goals available in private preview, as well as goal customization capabilities for Viva customers who want to leverage Viva Goals outside of the OKR framework.

We also have exciting enhancements to our ADO integration available now, to make product and engineering progress updates more accurate and precise than ever in Viva Goals.

Copilot in Viva Goals: Private Preview Available Now

We have great news for Viva customers reflecting on 2023, summarizing progress, and planning for 2024: Copilot in Viva Goals is available now in private preview.

Using next-gen AI, Copilot in Viva Goals helps you align organization-wide goals, team goals, and daily work, prepare for business rituals, and give updates on progress with less redundant, manual work and time spent, so you can be productive in the ways that matter to your business.

How?

Copilot in Viva Goals simplifies and improves goal-setting and management end-to-end by...

Generating OKR recommendations from existing strategy documents

Generating and refining suggestions with conversational AI

Publishing progress summaries based on contextual data

Customers are already seeing value from Copilot in Viva Goals, and we’re just beginning.

"Previewing Copilot in Viva Goals has shown great potential for critical time savings and more impactful goal-setting and management. We are especially seeing the value in assisting users as they create better goals and craft more relevant progress summaries, so we can free up time for improved productivity and innovation."

-Charles Bowles, Manager, Workplace Experience Advisory, Avanade

"As someone deeply passionate about the endless possibilities of AI, I find the integration of Copilot into the world of OKRs and Viva Goals truly exhilarating. The fusion of these technologies has the potential to revolutionize how we craft and pursue meaningful goals. With Copilot in Viva Goals, we're not just setting objectives; we're harnessing the power of data-driven insights to sharpen our focus, create more relevant targets, and elevate our goal-setting game to new heights."

-Scott Blackwell, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

IT admins for Viva customers can sign up for private preview of Copilot in Viva Goals here.

Goal Customization in Viva Goals: Private Preview Available Now

Viva Goals was built upon the proven goal-setting methodology of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) because they are the most preferred framework at enterprise organizations. Viva Goals allows users to get started with OKRs easily, see immediate benefits, and get better and more agile at writing OKRs over time—especially with our announcement of Copilot in Viva Goals.

But, starting today in private preview, Viva Goals is embracing flexibility to meet leaders where they are and how they like to plan, regardless of whether they are using a formal OKR approach or have a different philosophy on team goal management.

All teams can benefit from the improved sense of mission and alignment that Viva Goals helps create, and that begins with giving organizations and teams the flexibility to title and structure goals in line with their organization’s own goal-setting methodology and preferences, beyond the OKR framework.

Admins can now modify settings in the “Custom Terminology” tab, with the following options:

• Change the term OKR to Goal
• Change the term Objective to Goal, Outcome, Theme, or Big Rock
• Change the term Key Result to Metric, Outcome, or Result
• Change the term Initiative to Project, To Do, Deliverable, Milestone, or Action

In coming months, you can expect to see additional flexible features, including the prompt to choose between goals and OKRs when you enter the product for the first time and create your organization, and the ability to create metrics and projects without a direct alignment to a goal.

IT admins for Viva customers can sign up for private preview of goal customization capabilities here.

Not a Viva customer yet? Sign up for an admin-led trial here, then request private preview access to goal customization capabilities here.

Available Now: Enhancements to the Viva Goals ADO Integration

In addition to rolling out significant new innovations with our private preview programs, Viva Goals continues to improve existing integrations that customers care about.

The enhanced Viva Goals integration with Azure DevOps enables users to track progress using ADO fields such as story points, effort, completed work, remaining work, original estimate, as well as any numeric custom field that the team may have defined for the Azure DevOps project for tracking their work.

This is in addition to the completion status of work items previously supported by Viva Goals. You can review our updated Learn documentation for more details here.

We have also just released our Viva Goals x ADO Playbook, which explains how to think about Viva Goals and ADO working in harmony, how to set up the integration, and how to successfully deploy and communicate with leadership and product teams.

Want to stay in the loop on all things Viva Goals?

Be sure to check out our Viva Goals Community—your one-stop shop for asking questions, learning from experts and peers, and getting access to upcoming events.
Our upcoming events are as follows:

• 10/18 Viva Goals October Office Hours: How to Build a Healthy Team Culture and Coach Your Team with Viva Goals

• 10/26 Art of the Possible: The Future of Goal Setting and Management: How to Achieve More with Viva Goals

• 11/8 YouTube Live: How to Drive Team Performance and Results with Viva Goals

o Featuring:

Jeff Kotz, Microsoft Viva Partner, McChrystal Group
Kevin Cole, Microsoft Viva Partner, McChrystal Group

Not a customer yet? Try Viva Goals today. With our free trial, you can experience Viva Goals for yourself, no commitment required.

Present your goals with ease with Export to PowerPoint in Viva Goals

Anna_Pope — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 17:58:13 GMT

Spend less time making slides so you can focus on achieving your goals.

Whether you are announcing new goals, reporting on status and progress, or celebrating key wins, transparency is paramount to a successful goals program. We’ve heard from customers that integration between Viva Goals and PowerPoint is essential to communicating goals. Now, with export to PowerPoint in Viva Goals, progress updates on goals are less painful and time consuming. In other words, no more copying and pasting goal information for your town halls and other important business rhythms!

Export to PowerPoint gives Viva Goals users the ability to export a Goal list and automatically create slides for progress on each goal in PowerPoint. Templates are flexible to meet your unique business needs.

With Export to PowerPoint, you can...

• Provide deep context to employees on organization-wide and team-level goal progress and how their contributions play a part in the tool where leaders feel most comfortable presenting: PowerPoint
• Prepare for business rituals and compile pre-reads involving goals with greater ease and shareability by modifying goal updates directly in PowerPoint, giving collaborators the ability to provide extra context and details
• Give meeting participants the ability to click on OKRs and visit Viva Goals when the PowerPoint is presented on Microsoft Teams, improving employee engagement with team and organization-wide goals, so they can connect daily work to business outcomes

Export to PowerPoint is available to all customers today. To get started, follow the directions at Engage with Viva Goals - Microsoft Support, and let us know below if you have any questions as you get started!

Foundations for Success: 3 things you need to do in your first 30 days of Viva Goals

jimhopkinson — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 21:35:47 GMT

Imagine the first 30 days of exploring something new — moving to a new city, exploring a new career path, taking up a new hobby. There’s a blend of curiosity, excitement, and uncertainty as you start the journey ahead. Isn’t it nice when you have a guide to steer you in the right direction and hint at what’s to come?

We can find parallels between these life events and getting up to speed with Microsoft Viva Goals, a goal and OKR management solution designed to help leaders and teams create, manage, and track organizational goals.

To keep things simple, we’re going to give you just 3 key things to do in your first 30 days. After all, if a friend was moving to your city, you wouldn’t overwhelm them with a list of 27 restaurants to explore. You might start out with a fast but delicious lunch option, your favorite restaurant for dinner, and a great weekend brunch spot. So grab a snack and let’s take a look at the 3 key areas to explore.

[Note: For the purpose of this article, we’re assuming you’re an end user and that your company has already set up and configured your instance of Viva Goals. If you’re a business leader still evaluating the software, check out our validation and configuration checklist to understand how to configure and use the core features within Viva Goals.]

1) Get to know the Viva Goals software

While Viva Goals offers an intuitive interface that allows users to jump right in, it’s wise to take some time and learn your way around.

Resource 1: Viva Goals Quick Start

This area begins with a quick 2-minute video to give you a visual of the software and what it can do. You'll discover how to navigate various screens, and then can get an overview of what we call “The 4Cs” … Collaborate, Create, Check-in, and Close.

Resource 2: Viva Goals 101

This slide presentation gives you the background and benefits of Viva Goals, illustrating how it helps take companies from strategy to execution by connecting you to organizational goals while providing visibility and alignment.

2) Learn about Goals and OKRs

If you’ve ever used any kind of budgeting or online investment platforms, you know that software is only half the battle. Equally important is a working knowledge of personal finance.

The same holds true here – the software is important, but so is the language around it. Your company might define their strategy around milestones, targets, “big rocks,” or simply “goals.” If that’s the case, it’s helpful to learn some of the foundations of creating great goals.

Additionally, Viva Goals is built upon the OKR framework, which stands for Objectives and Key Results. It’s the #1 most commonly used goal-setting framework at enterprise organizations. So if your company has chosen to utilize OKRs, we’ve got content to get you up to speed on those.

Resource 1: Guide to great goal writing

This guide provides an overview of what makes a goal great and best practices for writing goals that inspire action and deliver results.

Resource 2: Guide to OKRs

Learn more about the OKR framework, the benefits, pitfalls, and best practices.

Resource 3: OKRs 101

This slide presentation gives you a visual walkthrough of OKRs: what they are, how to write them, how they help high performing organizations, and how they fit into your company’s mission and purpose.

3) Enter your first Goal

With a solid foundation of the Viva Goals software and knowledge of the OKR framework, you’re ready to begin tracking your goals.

If you already have some goals sketched out, great. Feel free to start with what you have and get them entered into the system. It’s far more important to make initial progress, add them to Viva Goals, and build on them, rather than get hung up trying to craft the perfect metric. When starting out, keep it simple and have some fun.

However, if you need help figuring out how to formulate or phrase your goals, we have some great resources to make things easier and faster. The guides to Goal and OKR writing in the previous step give you a broad understanding of what’s important, but we’ve gone ahead and distilled that knowledge into an easy-to-use cheatsheet, along with specific examples broken out by department.

Resource 1: OKR Writing Cheatsheet with Examples

This guide provides simple formulas and real-world examples to teach you how to write effective OKRs that inspire action and deliver results.

As with any new venture, having a guide to steer you through the first 30 days is helpful, and the journey to embrace Microsoft Viva Goals is no different. By familiarizing yourself with the software, understanding the art of goal setting, and crafting your first set of OKRs, you’ll be able to confidently get up to speed and make an impact for your organization.

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Are you in your first 30 days with Viva Goals? Drop your questions below and we’ll be sure to answer them.

The 6 People You Need to Roll Out Viva Goals

linseylamba — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 18:11:53 GMT

At Viva Goals, we believe there are key people that every organization needs to roll out a successful program. We set out to uncover who these core people are and exactly what they do within a Viva Goals program.

The journey began by diving into how customers think about goals and use Viva Goals. This included an in-depth exploration of roles and responsibilities, competitor analyses, and customer interviews.

In the end we boiled it down to six core personas that we typically see in a goals program.
Below, I’ve listed the roles and responsibilities to help you identify these people within your organization.

Viva Goals Program Roles & Responsibilities

The first person you need is the Business Leader. This is the fearless leader who is ready to jump into Viva Goals and drive change across the organization. In fact, it doesn’t have to be just one person, you might find yourself having a few of these people depending on the size of your organization.

Leader who drives company, group, or team strategy, creates and approves team / organizational goals, and reviews progress.

Typical titles: C-suite, Vice President, General Manager

Next, you will need a Champion. You can think of this role as your Viva Goals quarterback. This person works closely with the Business Leader to develop the strategy, goals and acts as the connective tissues across the organization to make sure all the Business Leaders and Planning Managers are working in harmony.

Central expert and axis that keeps programs on track and connected. Drive overall program and rhythm of business across the entire organization (or multiple teams).

Typical titles: Chief of Staff, Planning Lead, Strategy & Operations

Then you will need a few Planning Managers to make sure each team is making progress. You can think of this person as the one in meetings who is taking notes, driving action items and keeping everyone on track to hit the goals. They are also the ones to flag anything that is at risk and help get things back on schedule. This person works closely with the Champion to ensure all reporting is done on time.

Individuals and team managers who drive planning & tracking process on a given team. They ensure check-ins, reporting, and meetings follow prescribed rhythm of business.

Typical titles: Team Manager, Business Manager, Chief of Staff, Data Analytics Manager

One of the most common roles in an organization will be the Goal Owner. Every organization will have several individuals who are responsible for checking in on the progress of their goals within Viva Goals. This can be anyone from an Individual Contributor to the VP and beyond.

Users who own goals and are accountable to drive and report progress on goals.

Typical titles: Anything from Individual Contributor to Vice President or beyond

Another common role will be the Stakeholder. In large organizations there could be hundreds or thousands of stakeholders. While they might not own a goal, that doesn't mean they don't have a responsibility within Viva Goals. In fact, they take their role very seriously, care about the company mission, and make it a point to keep up to date with the trends and news coming from senior management. Transparent goals visible in Viva Goals are a huge perk to them.

Users who engage with updates on progress of goals.

Typical titles: Anything from Individual Contributor to Vice President or beyond

And last but not least is the Tech Admin. This is someone who is generally more involved at the beginning of a program, working closely with the Champion to get Viva Goals set up. Their role doesn’t just stop at set-up though. Typically, they continue to manage any technical aspects of the program as new folks onboard, offboard and other changes occur.

User who does the technical setup & responsible for managing the software and ensures licenses are assigned and security/compliance needs are met.

Typical Titles: IT Admin, Technical Operations

While you might not start out with all these roles, it’s important to consider them as you continue to develop your Viva Goals program. For more information on how to roll out a successful Viva Goals program check out our Adoption Resources here.

5 Steps to Challenge Mindsets and Transform Your Business with OKRs and Viva Goals

Lucy_Hitz — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 21:02:02 GMT

Note: This blog post was cowritten by Copilot in Microsoft Teams

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are not about monitoring “business as usual.” As Monique Little, Director of Business Management in Customer Experience & Success, Microsoft, put it during our recent webinar Challenging Mindsets: How to use OKRs and Viva Goals to Enhance and Encourage Growth, “We already have KPI scorecards for that.”

OKRs are about business transformation and getting to 10X where you are today as a business. Ryan Lowdermilk, Cloud Solution Architect and OKR Coach in the Microsoft Americas Partner Tech Team, said it best: “You’re selling things off a truck. Great—but how can you modify the truck? How can you sell better?”

OKRs and Viva Goals sit at the intersection of improved employee experience—better role clarity, maintaining focus during reorgs and restructures—and greater business impact—ruthless prioritization and clear communication between leadership and employees.

Here are 5 steps you can start taking today to improve your business and employee experience based on the wisdom of our speakers—really, guidelines for anyone seeking to improve their goal-setting and management practice in an organization.

Step 1: First comes mission, then strategy, then impact

OKRs, and Viva Goals as the engine which make them work, aren’t a band-aid for not having a clear mission and strategy.

First, make sure your mission, values and culture, and strategic priorities are clear to leadership and employees. Then, use OKRs as the actioning, and make sure your tech tooling is set up to support this process.

During this step, you should be:

- Locking in leadership sponsorship

- Holding an OKR setting session with the leadership team to ensure alignment at the highest level of your organization and/or team

- Encouraging the leadership team to limit objectives to five and having one of those objectives be related to people and culture

- Ensuring there is clarity on the difference between KPIs and OKRs: KPIs are important for measuring performance (your “scorecard”), but OKRs are meant to transform organizations by driving alignment, and helping teams achieve ambitious, collaborative goals that supercharge their growth. Viva Goals helps organizations put this process into practice.

Note: Not all OKR programs begin at the very top of the organization—the definition of leadership team can mean leadership within one department or even team within a department

Step 2: Plug into existing rhythms of business

While bringing any new process into an organization requires time and training, one way to ease the burden on both leadership and employees is to weave OKRs into existing rhythms of business.

"One of my big early learnings was, rather than creating separate sockets or meetings, infuse OKR management into your existing rhythm of business. That way, you're not creating the perception of an additional tax when you're going through this process."

-Maryleen Emeric, Chief of Staff, Modern Work & Business Applications Marketing, Microsoft

During this step, you should be:

- Evaluating what meeting cadences and communication rhythms exist, and figuring out the best ways to weave OKRs into those

- Getting all your integrations with project management and data management tools set up in Viva Goals to make the updating process as seamless as possible for users in your organization

Step 3: Prioritize clarity and communication with employees

As you implement OKRs and work towards a higher performing organization, it will be critical to make the “why” clear to employees, keep in mind that you won’t “get it right” the first quarter, and emphasize the ideal state for all stakeholders involved.

During this step, you should be:

- Making sure employees understand the “why” behind using OKRs and Viva Goals—and that this “why” is coming through leadership’s voice in team meetings and email communication. One common “why”/benefit for employees is a better understanding of how their work contributes to organizational mission

- Emphasizing the growth mindset by positioning OKRs as a collaborative process, encouraging ambitious goals and embracing failure as a way to learn

- Guiding the process of setting OKRs at the team level and creating a community of champions to help guide the process

Step 4: Stay up-to-date on progress and close the business cycle with clarity

Great goals aren’t “set it and forget it,” and OKRs are a discipline in which reflection and resetting is necessary for the organization to learn and grow.

In our webinar, the team discussed the importance of setting time-bound goals to enable a retrospective moment, incorporate feedback, and make better choices in the future. They also discussed the importance of celebrating successes and talking about challenges and what needs to change.

"Teams should answer the question “What matters most now?” every 12 weeks to ensure that everyone is aligned and clear on outcomes"

-Ryan Lowdermilk, Cloud Solution Architect and OKR Coach in the Microsoft Americas Partner Tech Team

During this step, you should be:

- Leveraging the new Goal Broadcast feature to send Outlook emails with goals and context updated directly from Viva Goals

- Making sure goal owners in Viva Goals understand the expectations and timelines for check-ins

Throughout: Maintain a caring, coaching approach

In the webinar, Maryleen, Ryan and Monique discussed the importance of OKR coaches being patient and understanding when introducing an OKR program to an organization. They discussed the importance of using OKRs to measure transformational work, rather than just KPIs, and how to incorporate feedback from leaders and employees into the OKR process.

- Take the time to collect feedback and listen to Viva Goals users in your organization via lightweight polling using a resource like Viva Pulse or 1:1 coaching

- To scale, build an internal community of people who are using OKRs to share experiences and source solutions. Viva Engage is a great internal community solution you can leverage for this use case.

- Turn to the Viva Goals Community to ask questions about the OKR methodology or Viva Goals product, attend events, and learn from experts in the field

Have follow-up questions for our expert speakers? Share in the comments below and we’ll be sure to respond.

Viva Goals Releases New Features to Help Improve Organizational Performance

Lucy_Hitz — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 18:23:11 GMT

Just in time for Inspire, our annual Partner event which kicks off today, Viva Goals is releasing several features which improve organizational performance by increasing visibility, shareability, and engagement with goals in organizations across the globe.

Our 2023 Forrester State of Goal-Setting Report found that the majority (61%) of employees at enterprise organizations do not understand what their company-wide goals are; building off this startling finding, the latest Work Trends Index revealed that clarity around goals is one of the top obstacles to productivity for employees today, second only to inefficient meetings.

By providing employees with clarity on what their immediate team goals and company goals are, organizations can drive mission, alignment, and productivity across all levels.

TL;DR: Want a productive and engaged workforce that drives results for your organization? Make sure employees know what they are working towards, why, and what true progress looks like.

Viva Goals is committed to making goals available to all employees by increasing visibility, shareability, and engagement with goals across the organization, and decreasing the amount of manual work it takes to set and manage goals—so every customer and every employee can benefit from organizational alignment and efficiency. Read on to learn how.

Increase Visibility, Shareability, and Engagement with Goals Across Your Organization

Viva Goals is releasing several new features which foster a shared understanding of goals and keep progress top-of-mind across your organization, driving organizational performance through clarity, visibility, and alignment.

Goal Broadcasts – Preview October 2023, Generally Available December 2023

Want to keep teams aligned and clearly focused on the right initiatives? Your employees want the same thing, but they need to be kept in the loop. According to the 2023 State of Goal-Setting Report, more frequent progress updates is the #1 request from employees when it comes to goals. Often, changes and outcomes of leadership meetings don’t make their way to employees who need this information to be the most productive.

But providing team and organization-wide updates can feel like a heavy lift for leadership teams; sending out newsletters and email updates on goals can take hours, days, or even weeks to gather data for and share efficiently and effectively.

With Goal Broadcasts, leaders can now share updates on goals to all members of their team directly from Viva Goals during key moments ad-hoc, as well as in key moments of the goal cycle, like goal finalization, business update meetings, and at the end of the goal cycle to summarize highlights, learnings, and opportunities for improvement.

How it works: Click on the “Share” button directly from your team’s OKR view, select “Share an update,” and a draft email will be loaded up for you with text placeholders for section titles. Simply fill out the information most relevant to your team.

When Copilot in Viva Goals is released later this year, Copilot will write the first draft of this summary for you, originating content from check-in information within Viva Goals.

Team members will receive actionable emails in Outlook and can react and comment on updates, improving engagement along with visibility.

Personalized Activity Feed – Generally Available by the end of July 2023

Employees are constantly managing multiple initiatives as they work towards team and organizational goals. It is a challenge to keep tabs on and engage with goal progress and status changes for work they are not leading, especially across distributed teams. But it is also critical to ensure teams are aligned and rowing in the same direction. With more context, your employees can make more informed decisions on a daily basis.

With the Personalized Activity Feed, all users, including non-goal owners, have clear visibility on the progress of their most relevant goals, all in a single landing page. Users can engage with updates and ask deeper questions to drive their initiatives—and the business—forward.

How it works: By clicking on “Feed” in the left nav bar, Viva Goals users can see status updates from leaders and relevant stakeholders, with the option to react and comment directly within the activity feed. This is the perfect place for users to catch up on what's happening within goals across their organization.

The activity feed is personalized for the user and is relevant to the goals related to them, their team, their close collaborators, and their leaders. This feature helps Viva Goals users understand at a glance what is top of mind for leaders so they can have productive conversations and make better decisions in the flow of work.

Goals in People Profile Cards – Generally Available by the end of September 2023

Organizational performance, efficiency and collaboration improves when employees understand the goals and outcomes that their collaborators in other teams are working towards. This accelerates productivity and helps teammates identify where they can most effectively collaborate—a challenge especially prominent for large organizations and distributed teams.

In Viva Goals, you are now able to understand the reporting structure, contact details and LinkedIn highlights of your coworkers by hovering over their avatar—without ever having to leave the app.

Coming September 2023, users will be able to see reporting structure, goals, cross-organization alignment, all within the People Profile Card in Outlook, scaling goal visibility across the organization.

How it works: In the Viva Goals, live today, hover over an avatar to see the user’s People Profile Card.

Coming September 2023, in Outlook, hover over the user avatar to see all the information you currently see, in addition to the employee’s team-level goals, keeping goals front-and-center as a key part of organizational context-setting.

Alignment Chart View - Generally Available by the end of September 2023

It can be hard to understand how company and team-level goals align across the different levels of an organization. The Viva Goals Alignment Chart View shows how all levels of the organization are aligned to the company goals, making the connection clear in an easily navigable, dynamic way.

Users in Viva Goals can see how goals cascade from the organization level all the way to their team's work with an easily expandable, scrollable, and zoomable view.

How it works: Under the OKRs tab in the Viva Goals app, navigate your organization’s OKRs from top to bottom, scrolling through and expanding the teams, goals, and initiatives that matter most to you.

Share Goals in PowerPoint - Generally Available by the end of September 2023

When it comes to sharing information and driving engagement in an organization, there is no more powerful tool than PowerPoint for presenting material in an easily navigable visual way.

Viva Goals users can now export OKR tables as PowerPoint slides in various presentation-ready templates that can be used to drive business rhythms like planning, MBRs and Closeouts.

How it works: Simply click “Export as PowerPoint” in Viva Goals to generate and customize a view of goal progress that lands directly in a PowerPoint presentation for you to share and edit as needed within PowerPoint.

Save Time with Less Manual Work

Manual tasks eat up much of our precious time at work. This is why Viva Goals is on a constant quest to make the goal process easier for users and organization admins to manage their organization’s goal setting and management experience. Viva Goals is accelerating the onboarding experience for users, improving the ability to export data, and simplifying the creation of teams in bulk to give back time spent on these activities, so you can focus on achieving your goals.

Bulk import of teams – Generally Available by the end of July 2023

With the new bulk import feature, Organization Admins can create teams and add members in bulk, easing the set-up process for Viva Goals and decreasing time to value.

Integration with Project for the web – Generally Available by the end of July 2023

We are removing the need for manual updates and cross-checking in two systems with our new integration with Project for the web. Now, Viva Goals will automatically update as tasks are updated in Project. You will also be able to view task details in Viva Goals so you can easily stay apprised of what’s on track and at risk.

Public Export API – Generally Available by the end of November 2023*

*Blog has been updated with new release date
Leaders want to frequently view progress being made towards goals alongside other data sources that matter to the business; employees want to be able to view custom data reports to home in on the status of which goals are on track, behind and at risk. We have made this easier by enabling developers to create combined views by making Goals data programmatically accessible via Graph APIs.

Previously, users needed to manually export data from Viva Goals via Explorer Views. Now, users can use the public export API built into the Microsoft Graph to programmatically create an export job for their Viva Goals Explorer View, check the status of the export job, and download the data when the job completes. This saves users time, and helps them automate many of the reporting and data join scenarios that organizations need.

Simplified integration availability – Generally Available by the end of July 2023

Integrations in Viva Goals are a strong lever for decreasing manual work and increasing value. Now, when new integrations are available for a tenant, they will be automatically available to all Viva Goals organizations. We’ve also made it easy for organization administrators to notify users when new integrations are available to them in Viva Goals.

Want to stay in the loop on all things Viva Goals?

Be sure to check out our Viva Goals Community—your one-stop shop for asking questions, learning from experts and peers, and getting access to upcoming events.

Not a customer yet? Try Viva Goals today. With our free trial, you can experience Viva Goals for yourself, no commitment required.
For users that have started a trial (either via the Microsoft Admin Center or from the self-service trials experience we announced in April), requesting a Viva Goals license is becoming even easier—simply hit "Request license” at any point in your trial journey, and an alert will be sent to your Global or Billing Admins within the Microsoft Admin Center (MAC). These admins can then either provision Viva Goals subscription licenses, or share your request via email with the right stakeholders at your organization and get guidance on how to proceed with the license request, taking you from trial to org-wide rollout more quickly and efficiently.

What’s New in Viva Goals: Feature and Content Releases for April-June 2023

RaSanders — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:25:00 GMT

Product releases for April-June 2023

Overview

In the last three months Microsoft Viva Goals has released a series of features enhancing our integration with Azure DevOps, EU Data Residency, and permissions (such as the new IT Admin role).

Feature Releases

New Features:
- Viva Goals extension in Azure DevOps: With Viva Goals and Azure DevOps, you can automatically track progress of initiatives and key results in Viva Goals while ensuring that everyone using Azure DevOps has transparency to how their work items connect to the bigger picture.
- Enhanced Viva Goals Azure DevOps integration: Learn how to integrate your Azure DevOps work items with OKRs in Viva Goals.
- Goals EU Data Residency
- Notifications in Teams activity feed in Viva Goals: Learn how to receive notifications about activity from Viva Goals in Microsoft Teams.
- Viva Goals OKR level permissions enhancements
- Live people card within Viva Goals: Users can view people cards by hovering over a user image within Viva Goals, allowing them to see contact information and other data, similar to Microsoft 365
- New Tenant IT Admin role: Global administrators and Viva Goals administrators can configure the Viva Goals policy settings for the company from the Viva Goals admin portal page.

Content releases for April-June 2023

Overview

For the last quarter, Microsoft Viva Goals has focused on building strong content around best practices to support a healthy goals program. At the end of last quarter, we launched: Viva Goals Solutions- Discover goal-setting best practices with Viva Goals.

This quarter we have continued to grow these best practices and have developed content around five major categories:

Create Goals and OKRs This area targets one of the biggest blockers to a successful OKR program, which is getting your Objectives, Key Results, and Initiatives written in a simple and comprehensive way that rolls throughout your organization.
Collaborate with Viva Goals This area focuses on how to align your OKRs with your organization to help promote transparency and accountability across your separate teams and departments.
Check-in and track Goals This area teaches how to build efficiency through check-ins to make sure goals are updated and progress is rolling through your organization.
Close and score Goals This area demonstrates how to score and reflect on OKRs and Initiatives that have reached the end of their cycle and provides the tools for reviewing and restarting the OKR process in a new cycle.
Business rhythms and dashboards This area focuses on the best ways to incorporate OKRs into your business rhythms. One of the most useful sections here is a series of templates with widget recommendations for building Dashboards in Viva Goals.

This quarter we have taken this structure and built it out to include overviews, common OKR program issues, and recommendations on how to improve in each area.

Content Releases

Additional changes that happened to learning content related to Viva Goals during Q4FY23

Admin content: Learn.microsoft.com

Table of contents overhaul: the table of contents was changed to make navigating the Viva Goals content more intuitive.
Added links to Viva Goals community in key articles.
New Articles:

User content: Support.microsoft.com

Table of contents overhaul: the table of contents was changed to make navigating the Viva Goals content more intuitive.
Each article had a “Learn more” link added directing users to community.

How to write great goals, get six-pack abs, and live forever

jimhopkinson — Wed, 31 May 2023 17:00:52 GMT

Your diet can often seem very, very complicated.

You might be eating fresh kale from your garden, dining at a fine restaurant, existing on a stream of home-delivered takeout, or indulging in all-you-can-eat buffets. Your food could be baked, fried, grilled, roasted, or steamed. And if you’re looking to get six-pack abs or live a healthier life, you might be following Paleo, Keto, Vegan, or intermittent fasting.

With so many options, best-selling author Michael Pollan tried to distill his 30 years as a food expert down to its simplest form:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

And what if your goal is to live forever? There are probably 100 things you could think of doing, but in his book Outlive, author, physician, and longevity expert Peter Attia narrows it down to focusing on just four core things:

Exercise. Nutrition. Sleep. Emotional health.

Now that we have your diet and health goals out of the way, let’s talk about your business goals.

Surely there are similar complications. Are you a large enterprise with 100,000 employees, or an aspiring startup? Do you run a multi-national technology firm or a service-based financial company? And what about all the acronyms, from KPIs and ROI to EBITA and NSAT?

It’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to write the perfect goal, but it doesn’t have to be that hard.

Let’s try and simplify the elements of a great goal in the same way these authors did:

Set aspirational goals. Not too many. Have measurable results. Focus on action.

Let’s break down those steps.

1. Set aspirational goals

Start with a goal you’d like to achieve in your organization or team; do your best to make it clear, concise, and aspirational so that others can easily articulate it and share your vision. Picture it as a slogan that would fit on a t-shirt.

A good example might be, “Build a world class company culture filled with rockstar employees.”

If you already have goals written, don't feel like you have to throw them out and start over. There are small tweaks you can make to move from your starting point to something more inspirational for your team. In other words, instead of just listing the goal itself, make sure it encapsulates WHY you want to achieve it, and WHO the result will benefit.

It’s the same as starting an exercise program. Before you buy that $5,000 aerodynamic triathlon bike and shoes with carbon fiber soles, start with what you have, even if it’s a dusty 10-speed in the garage.

These goals are generally known as your Objectives within Viva Goals, though you might choose to call them “big rocks” or something similar.

Pro tip: If you’re completely starting from scratch, check out our article that outlines the most common business goal categories, Profit, Product or Service, People, Promotion, and Progress (the 5Ps).

2. Not too many

For someone looking to improve their diet, trying to change a dozen unhealthy eating habits is (ahem) a recipe for disaster. In the words of Michael Pollan, simply eating “not too much” could have a great impact.

Similarly, one of the pitfalls in setting and achieving goals isn’t actually not doing enough, but rather, trying to do too much.

The key word here is focus. It’s been said, “If everything is important, then nothing is.” For that reason, setting just 3-5 goals per team is the optimal amount.

Limiting the number of goals set each quarter actually improves performance, allowing you to focus on the most important things to get done, and being able to lower the priority of everything else.

3. Have measurable results

With your aspirational goal set, think about how you will know if you’ve achieved it. What you’re looking for is 3-5 measurable results … numbers and metrics that will let everyone know if you’re on track to meet that goal.

If author Peter Attia’s goal was to “live to be 100,” then his measurable results might be exercising 4-5 times per week, eating a balanced diet of 2,000 calories, getting 7-8 hours of sleep per night, and meditating for 15 minutes, 5 times per week. These are all activities that can be specifically measured.

These metrics are generally known as your Key Results within Viva Goals, though you might choose to call them “metrics” or something similar.

Pro tip: Viva Goals allows you to set your key result type to match your goals, such as “increase from,” “stay above,” and “find a baseline.”

4. Focus on action

With your goals set and tracking metrics in place, the last thing to do is take action to make it happen. So if your health goal was exercising 5 times a week and eating 2,000 calories, your tactical plan each day might alternate between weightlifting, running, and biking, and your meal plan might spell out your lunch of salmon, brown rice, and broccoli.

Similarly, Viva Goals offers a category called Initiatives. These are the actions that you do in order to achieve the metrics you’ve set. So if your marketing goal is broader reach for your brand, and your metric is reaching 50,000 page views per month, then your action might be a new social media campaign and posting 1-2 times per day on various platforms.

Again, you can track these Initiatives within Viva Goals, where they are sometimes called Projects.

What’s next?

Now that you’ve reached the end of this post, I hope you’re not disappointed to discover that you didn’t magically obtain ripped abs and eternal life. What I hope you took away however, is that sometimes starting with just the core elements, sets you on the path to achieving your goals, no matter what they are.

As you build upon these lessons, you’ll start to establish a goal setting rhythm of business -- a continuous flow of collaboration, goal creation, check-ins, and closing -- that will make your aspirational goals lead to the actions you desire.

How Specific Is Too Specific When It Comes to Key Results? A Program Manager’s Perspective

Mariavermeer — Mon, 15 May 2023 16:59:46 GMT

As we look ahead to our new fiscal year here at Microsoft, many teams are in the process of creating and reviewing FY24 Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

Working through this process in our own organization, a topic has come up in discussions more than once: Should we layer secondary key results, (aka sub-KRs), beneath our high-level Key Results (Fig.1), or stick with high-level Key Results only (Fig.2)?

When it comes to Objectives, the consensus is clear. Keeping Objectives pithy, direct, essential, and limiting the number of Objectives you commit to will drive the best outcome. Viva Goals advises readers of their Microsoft Learn OKR 101 primer to select 3-5 Objectives that are clear, concise, and inspirational. Said differently, they should be like a slogan that could fit on a t-shirt: simple and focused. Limiting the number of objectives enables teams to rally around common goals and focus on progress in areas of agreed value.

Makes sense to me. Why introduce nuance and confusion with too many Objectives? After all, Objectives are the first thing we see in Viva Goals. They command the best real estate on the page, and they are the umbrella under which all Key Results live.

But there is a bit more gray area when it comes to Key Results. Your Key Results are where the rubber meets the road. They are specific, measurable, and tell you whether you are achieving your Objective or not.

In Microsoft’s own Vetri Vellore’s book “OKRs for All,” he notes that 3-5 solid Key Results per Objective is the sweet spot for bringing the best clarity and focus to an Objective. And once the Key Results are defined, they should favorably pass the “necessary and sufficient” gut-check questions:

• “Are all these Key Results necessary to reach our Objective?”
• “If I accomplish all my Key Results, will I have achieved my Objective?”

But when creating said Key Results, we’ve bumped into the thought that brings me here today: should we layer Key Results (sub-KRs) below our high-level Key Results? How specific is too specific?

Take, for example, a team that wants to measure downloads and adoption of a newly introduced app. Although the app was built for a wide audience, the team has identified the Consumer market as a key user group and are channeling time and resources into looking at usage in that specific segment.

Would it be more effective to add a detail about Consumer downloads and usage in their KR commentary monthly (Fig.4) or add a Consumer specific sub-KR under the overall App KR? (Fig.3)

One side may argue that a sub-KR highlighting Consumer downloads is critical information that should be surfaced and seen, and deserves its time in the sun. By naming and framing your goal into a sub-KR, there’s a level of transparency and accountability that comes with having it “in writing,” which can be especially helpful for large or matrixed organizations.

The flip side of the debate may advocate for an all-up uber KR that measures the full app usage, with relevant commentary notes on specific segments, Consumer amongst them. This keeps the attention solidly on the main goal, with notable call outs earning space in commentary.

This is debatable—and rightfully so. I would argue that there likely isn’t a one size fits all answer to this question.

But in terms of pure content management, (my arena), there is a clear advantage to keeping KRs at the all-up level and forgoing sub-KRs.

• Keeping the focus on the bigger picture. Perhaps there are more appropriate meetings and forums where specifics (such as the status of Consumer adoption) should be discussed. In our structures, KR review meetings focus on facilitating a productive discussion at the leadership level. Adding more and more layers of nuance and details could pull attention and effort from the big picture- the impactful review we are trying to drive.

• Avoiding additional layers of contributors and requirements on a monthly basis. A large part of my role in our OKR process is getting folks on board with the what’s, how’s, and why’s of our monthly KRs. Turnover within teams is inevitable and getting folks in the rhythm is no small task. Tactically we have deadlines, commentary standards and review cadences that must be met. I see and feel the benefit of keeping KRs “necessary and sufficient,” which in turn keeps our monthly requirements manageable and highly aligned to overall objectives. In my realm, this boils down to less is more and simplicity drives focus.

Which path is your organization taking? To sub-KR or not sub-KR? Please share your thoughts below.

-Maria Vermeer is a Business Program Manager on Microsoft’s IDEAs Team

How to Measure the Health of Your OKR Program

linseylamba — Tue, 02 May 2023 18:30:38 GMT

To run a healthy OKR program, we must first define one. This is similar to when someone says, “I want to be a healthier person”; a personal trainer might say, “That’s great, let’s define what that looks like for you.”

That’s because there are several ways to define “healthy.” This differs from person to person, and, when we’re talking about OKR programs, from organization to organization. While what a healthy OKR program looks like will differ depending on your company, there are still some core characteristics every program needs to get on track.

I’ve worked with dozens of customers as an OKR Consultant, and found there are four key characteristics of healthy OKR programs: adoption, engagement, focus, and efficiency.

What does a healthy OKR program look like, and which metrics should you use to track success?

1. Adoption - An OKR program thrives when it is available to all employees, from senior leadership to individual contributors. Adoption begins with strong buy-in from leadership and has a key “bottom-up” component as individuals see value and adopt OKRs. Leaders should demonstrate how embedded OKR tracking is in the organization and integrate OKRs into the existing rhythm of business.

Recommended metric: Percentage of teams that have created OKRs.

2. Engagement – After adoption is established and people have access to a goal-setting platform, you need to drive engagement, with users actively viewing and checking on their goals on an ongoing basis. This gives visibility and awareness of goals across the organization.

Recommended metric: Percentage of check-ins in the last 28 days.

3. Focus – As engagement and usage increases, teams begin to leverage the power of OKRs to focus on what matters -- and say no to what doesn’t. In a healthy OKR program your employees should come to work knowing the top 3-5 things to work on, and how those are aligned to the overall company strategy. This drives meaningful interactions at all levels toward achieving common goals.

Recommended metric: Percentage of teams that have less than 5 objectives, percentage of objectives that have 5 or less key results.

4. Efficiency – The first three steps can have a huge impact on your business, but not if they come at the expense of feeling burdensome to maintain. OKRs should seamlessly flow into your daily work, and not take up too much time to operationalize. An OKR platform like Viva Goals facilitates efficiency, with check-ins taking just a few minutes a week, and data integrations automatically pulling from a single source of truth to make updates simple and effective.

Recommended metric: Percentage of key results that are automated through integrations.

I could go on for days about all the things you can do to run a healthy program. But if you start with these four foundational areas and recommended metrics, you will be on your way to running a healthy OKR program in no time.

Looking for where to find these metrics? Check out our analytics tab feature!

Looking for more tips on how to build a healthy OKR Program? Check out our series of solutions articles: Run a healthy OKR program with Viva Goals.

The Future of Goal-Setting with Viva Goals: Copilot, Customized Experiences, and More

nirjatrivedi — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 15:00:00 GMT

We’re entering a new age of work, one that requires clarity, alignment, and a sense of purpose to employees and organizations. By centering actionable goals in our work, we address many of the challenges we’re hearing from customers like:

Only 39% of employees fully understand their company goals which makes it impossible to connect the work they are doing every day to the work that drives business impact
Employees want more visibility into progress towards goals at the team and organization level. The #1 thing practitioners would change about the goal-setting and management process is having more frequent updates on their goal progress.
Leaders are looking for a quicker goal-setting process to present goals to employees earlier.

How is Viva Goals supporting our customers in coming up with goals more quickly and efficiently, connecting daily work to top-level goals, and increasing visibility into goal progress? We are thrilled to announce several features today including AI capabilities with Copilot for Viva Goals, new and enhanced integrations, and stronger admin functionality.

New AI Capabilities with Copilot in Viva Goals - Coming later this year

We’re excited to announce that Copilot in Viva Goals will be coming soon! Copilot in Viva Goals leverages next-generation AI capabilities to work hand in hand with you to unlock productivity by creating and refining your goals in meaningful and outcome-driven ways, while also removing the manual work around check- ins and progress.

Authoring your goals with Copilot

Defining and writing new organizational goals can be daunting. Many organizations and leaders will plan and set goals for their teams and organizations by writing vision or strategy documents. Copilot in Viva Goals can help translate your vision and planning documents into Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), helping you identify and create actionable goals within Viva.

You can also use Copilot’s assistive chat experience to request help in generating new OKRs or initiatives to support these larger objectives. Copilot uses organizational and team context, OKR best practices, sample OKRs and expert recommendations to suggest OKRs for your organization. From there, you can partner with Copilot to refine your team’s OKRs to better address your priorities and desired outcomes.

For example, with a few simple commands, Copilot in Viva Goals can transform your OKRs to become more aspirational or conservative or propose Key Results for objectives you’ve already written. Using conversational AI or inline editing, you can tailor your OKRs to fit the goals that work best for you.

Summarizing your progress with Copilot

Creating goals is a fundamental first step in aligning teams and driving clarity, but keeping track of progress and providing regular updates is how organizations successfully move from strategy to execution.

Copilot in Viva Goals summarizes your progress on OKRs, identifies areas to focus, and suggests next steps, streamlining the update and check-in process. By summarizing your progress within your Viva Goals dashboard, Copilot helps reduce overhead for teams conducting executive business reviews, team meetings, sharing progress, and more.

Copilot also helps individual users to generate more comprehensive check-ins by consolidating existing relevant data, making it even easier and faster to provide updates on how you are tracking towards your team goals.

In-product guidance with Copilot

As you create, track, and share your goals, it’s important to ensure that none of your top priorities are ignored. Copilot will help highlight OKRs that need your attention, by identifying the top items that are at risk and surface them in Viva Goals or Microsoft Teams. This helps leaders to focus on OKR gaps to achieve better outcomes.

A More Personalized Viva Goals Experience- Coming Soon

In addition to the exciting new functionality of Copilot in Viva Goals, Viva Goals will be releasing new features for a more curated experience by Q2 CY2023. With the Personalized Activity Feed, all users, including non-OKR owners, have clear visibility on the progress of their most relevant goals, all in a single landing page. This feature includes status updates from leaders and relevant stakeholders, as well as the ability to react and comment directly from the activity feed.

With Customized Views coming soon, users will also have new filtering capabilities, along with the ability to save and pin their most used views. With this functionality, leaders will be able to streamline reviews, highlight gaps in progress and quickly access views most relevant to them to drive a high quality goal-management process.

Enhanced Administrator Functionality – Available Now

Last quarter, we announced the launch of the Analytics Dashboard which provides visualizations and insights around OKR adoption, engagement, and overall OKR health.

Now we’re excited to announce new enhancements to the dashboard that provide increased granularity on team level analytics, rather than just an aggregation of the organization level data, and the ability for admins to drill down to multiple levels of teams. The dashboard will also include metrics broken down by Objectives and Key Results. Lastly, teams will be able to filter the data through tags which can align with strategic initiatives or lines of business.

Can’t wait for some of the new admin features? Now generally available, we have two additional admin capabilities. With the New Admin Center Console, admins have a designated page to enable and disable integrations, configure organization permissions and manage organizations access. Admins can also now streamline the process of adding teams members through the bulk provisioning teams via Azure Active Directory.

Improving Interoperability with the Microsoft 365 Stack

As Viva Goals continues to grow, we’ve made a commitment to become more embedded within the functionality of the Microsoft platform. In addition to the first party integrations we’ve previously announced, such as the Microsoft Project integration coming this quarter, we’re excited announce a new wave of interoperability across M365.

Easily Paste OKRs from Viva Goals to any Surface- Available Now

The first step to increase native integration by bringing in OKRs to all the tools you use today, like Excel, Word Documents, PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams, is creating a seamless copy paste experience. By easily pasting formatted OKRs and sharing across any surface, you easily share increase visibility and adoption across your organization.

One-click PowerPoint templates and Outlook emails from Viva Goals - Coming Soon

As the next evolution to increase native integration and empower leaders to drive alignment and purpose, users will be able to share OKR views directly with Outlook and PowerPoint.

Coming soon, leaders can support existing ROB mechanisms by leveraging Viva Goals to share OKR updates to Outlook. With one click, leaders can disseminate vital information on OKR progress and top priorities. Team members will also be able to react to an OKR update directly within Outlook, without having to navigate separately Viva Goals.

Additionally, users will also be able to share views through PowerPoint. Here, they can export their OKRs into presentation ready templates which can be leveraged in pre-reads or presented in town halls.

*UX and flow subject to change

Introducing the Profile Cards Experience for Viva Goals- Coming Soon

Furthermore, Viva Goals will soon surface within Profile Cards in Outlook. In addition to seeing where in an organization a peer may sit, users will be able to easily discover team goals, explore alignment across organizations, and scale OKR visibility, all within Outlook.

In addition to viewing Profile Cards in Outlook, Profile Cards are coming directly to Viva Goals! Coming soon, Viva Goals users will be able to harness the benefits of live Profile Cards such as understanding the reporting structure, contact details and LinkedIn highlights of your coworkers all within Viva Goals.

Enhancements to Current Functionality – Coming Soon

Coming soon, Viva Goals users who leverage Microsoft Teams will get real time notifications within their Teams activity feed for mentions or check-in reminders, allowing them to seamlessly act within one workspace.

With the Adaptive Card feature coming soon, URL links that users paste from Viva Goals to Teams chats will now unfurl to a preview card. The cards include specific OKR details from the shared link, such as check-ins, project status, and other updates, so users can view a snapshot of Viva Goals without having to leave the chat.

Increased Azure DevOps Functionality

We’ve previously announced the Viva Goals Azure DevOps integration , which allows you to leverage ADO tooling within your Viva Goals environment. In the first iteration, users could connect ADO work items to a Key Result or initiative through a shared query to see the progress reflected in their KRs and initiatives.

Directly Link ADO Work Items to OKRs- Now Available

With the new ADO integration improvements now generally available, users can directly link ADO work items to KRs and Initiatives, removing the dependency on a shared query, saving both time and effort.

Native ADO Extension- Coming Soon

Coming soon, Viva Goals Extension in ADO will allow users to seamlessly connect the dots between ADO work items and the OKRs and Initiatives they are driving. When a work item in ADO is linked to an initiative in Viva Goals, users will be able to view how that work item aligns in Viva Goals without leaving ADO. The new embedded work item experience enables you to explore alignment, view progress, and check-in OKRs directly within ADO.

New Third-Party Integrations

Along with the investments Viva Goals is making with first party integrations, we’re thrilled to announce new additions to our already extensive and industry leading list of third party integrations

Coming this quarter, the Zapier data integration allows Viva Goals users to automate their KR progress with data from any of the 5,000 apps in the Zapier library. This includes apps like CRM, Marketing, and Project Management, so users automatically update progress and center goals across different workstreams.

In addition to the Jira cloud data integration, Viva Goals is excited to announce that we now integrate with Jira Server and Jira Data Center. Similar to the Jira cloud data integration, the on-prem data integration enables users to automate KR and initiatives progress using data from Jira Server and Data Center.

Want to experience Viva Goals for yourself?

If you’re excited about what’s to come and curious about how Viva Goals can impact your organization, sign up to try Viva Goals for free for 60 days. Organizations looking to trial Viva Goals internally are welcome to sign up for IT Admin-led trials.

We are also excited to announce the launch of self-service trials. These new self-service trials allow business leaders and individuals in existing Azure AD tenants to sign up for a Viva Goals trial and experience team goal-setting and management together. To learn more about best practices when setting up a trial, download the Microsoft Viva Goals Trial Configuration Checklist.

How we are improving employee engagement and business value with Viva Goals

AmyStrande — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 17:21:20 GMT

As Director of Business Management and Customer Zero Strategy at Microsoft Viva, my passion is creating a better employee experience for Microsoft employees, so it makes a lot of sense that I’ve chosen a role that allows me to light up Microsoft Viva in HR and across the company. But as any HR leader knows, creating a purpose-driven employee experience with happy, motivated employees is easier said than done.

Our journey to engagement and impact with Viva Goals

We began our journey with OKRs and Viva Goals in November 2021 with 8 Objectives at the team level on the VivaHR team. This is way more than the recommended 3-5, but we were learning this powerful framework and knew we could refine and use this refinement to better prioritize work for our employees later on. Here are the results we saw within one year:

A 25% percentage increase in employees who reported they felt they were doing meaningful work
A 34% percentage increase in employees who said they have time for learning, to expand their skillset and grow in their field
A 75% reduction in manual tasks around goal-setting and management for team members

The image below illustrates the results we are seeing with OKRs and Viva Goals so far. I will go into further detail around each of the benefit areas of OKRs: Alignment and Focus, Transparency, and Adaptability, and Growth.

Alignment and Focus

Two of the most beloved benefits of OKRs are alignment (ensuring teams are aligned and moving in the same direction, with purpose) and focus (setting 3-5 objectives per team, per quarter, so that teams can prioritize what is most important).

What does this actually translate to on our team? How have better alignment and focus made us into a more priority-driven, productive team?

When it comes to alignment, with OKRs and Viva Goals, we have been able to make our employee and managers’ daily experiences more sustainable and scalable based on collective results leveraging Viva Goals. When new asks come to our team, we can compare to our Objectives and determine if there’s a strong alignment to our current book of work and how we can best think about the asks of us to best drive the work we have in motion. We can enter the targeted key results in Viva Goals and quickly see how they fit into the big picture to help drive every individual on the team to see how it fits.

Thus far, our team has achieved a 50% increase in alignment and capability using OKRs with Viva Goals.

Shifting to focus, reducing our objective load from 8 to 4 helped get the team inspired and prioritizing the work that is most important to our business, like supporting product teams to roll out Viva modules to our employee and manager ecosystem and advocating for Viva integration into existing HR programs.

This increased focus also made our team more productive by giving us more time to focus on actioning Microsoft employee feedback.

VivaHR EXP H1FY23 Team Objectives

Support product teams to roll out Viva modules to our employee and manager ecosystem
Advocate for Viva integration into existing HR programs
Recommend new HR employee experience scenarios to influence understanding and shape future product design
We thrive by showing up as one team to each other and beyond

Transparency and Adaptability

Transparency (clearly defined ownership of core outcomes across the organization, creating accountability and surfacing roadblocks) and adaptability (faster and better decision-making based on real-time data insights) have been two of my favorite benefits from using Viva Goals.

With Viva Goals, we have been able to track OKR progress in one central location for efficient cross-team awareness.

One of the biggest benefits here is limiting manual tasks and data entry for our team, so goals stay top-of-mind while tracking progress directly in the application doesn’t replace actually doing the work that is moving the needle for our business.

When it comes to adaptability, OKRs and Viva Goals have promoted frequent discussion around our goals at the team and individual level and helped us identify blockers early so we can tackle them as a team. We meet to check in with our goal progress on a monthly basis and use OKRs/Viva Goals to help our team pivot with clarity and purpose during team changes like our recent reorg.

Growth

It feels right to end this blog post with “growth,” because our learning is never done and the growth mindset is such a core part of how we run our business here at Microsoft. As I mentioned above, after rolling out OKRs and Viva Goals, we saw a 34% percentage increase in employees who said they have time for learning.

On a broader level, in terms of how our team is impacting the entire Microsoft organization, VivaHR has strategically influenced and evangelized Viva Goals integration in HR to achieve more across Microsoft.

The VivaHR EXP (Employee Experience) adoption of OKRs leveraging Viva Goals continues to deliver valuable employee experience and business results, and we can’t wait to continue to improve in the year to come. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn or let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

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

nirjatrivedi — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 22:53:32 GMT

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

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

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

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

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

1. Provide transparency on progress and increase OKR adoption

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

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

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

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

2. Foster collaboration with key stakeholders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Bring your favorite products into the flow of work

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

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

How you can use this integration:

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

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

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

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

How you can use this integration:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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