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.