Hybrid work is up seven points year-over-year (to 38%) with a workforce that is still in transition. Many hybrid employees are considering a switch to remote work and even more remote employees are considering a switch to hybrid work in the year ahead.1
Whether your people are back in the office, working from home, or a mix of both, these new features and enhancements coming to Viva Insights will help people, teams, and organizations improve productivity and wellbeing.
Your feedback and ideas are important to us, so please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.
Hybrid workforce experience report
The Hybrid workforce experience report helps leaders make data-driven decisions about hybrid work models and practices that create better and more equitable experiences for all employees, regardless of where and when they work. In addition to actionable recommendations, leaders can track trends and changes over time to help them understand how hybrid work impacts employees in various work modes differently.
The Hybrid workforce experience report is available now worldwide. Explore this interactive demo to learn more about this Power BI template.
Meeting effectiveness report
There’s been 252% increase in weekly time spent in meetings for the average Teams user since February 2020.1 Meeting habits can impact organizational efficiency, employee engagement, connectedness, and external relationships. Simple changes to meeting culture can have positive repercussions across your organization, and incremental changes can translate into cost savings and efficiency gains.
The Meeting effectiveness report is a Power BI template that provides leaders with a visual analysis of their organization’s meeting culture, including meeting lifecycle habits, time spent in meetings, and insight into meeting behaviors that can impact progress against goals, such as providing ample meeting notice, starting and ending on-time, and multitasking. This report also offers best practices to make meetings more effective and worthwhile for everyone.
The Meeting effectiveness report will be available in preview worldwide beginning September 1, 2022.
Meeting category insights in the Viva Insights app in Teams
Near the end of August 2022, a new "Effective meetings" tab will be introduced in the Viva Insights app in Teams, giving you visibility into the categories of meetings where you spend your time. Meeting category insights can help you align time spent in meetings with your goals. For example, a leader might find it helpful to reflect on how much time they are carving out for customer meetings, mentoring or coaching, and business reviews. With future updates, you will see more personalized insights and suggestions displayed in this tab that can help improve meeting habits as well as options to create and share meeting plans that can help set team meeting norms.
Shared focus plan
In addition to the 252% increase in weekly time spent in meetings since February 2020, there has been a 32% increase in chats sent per person since March 2020. People need time to be creative and think through big problems and challenges without distraction, but both these factors drastically reduce the opportunity for deep work throughout regular working hours. Instead, work may be bumped to off-hours, which can lead to burnout and attrition.
The shared focus plan, available in the Viva Insights app in Teams, allows managers and team leads to invite their teams to automatically book up to four hours of uninterrupted time every day. The shared focus plan helps teams build shared productivity habits with the flexibility to prioritize personal preferences. Viva Insights books focus time two weeks in advance and will not schedule over existing calendar events.
The shared focus plan has started rolling out and will be available worldwide by August 31, 2022.
Inline suggestions while composing an email or meeting invitation in Outlook on the web
In the coming weeks, Microsoft Viva Insights will begin to display the following inline suggestions, tips, and best practices to users composing an email or a meeting invitation in Outlook on the web. These complement the inline suggestions available while reading emails and meeting invites. Inline suggestions are also available in Outlook for Windows.
- Delay delivery to help schedule email delivery aligned with the working hours of the recipients in their respective time zones
- Suggested outstanding tasks to keep tab of tasks you promised to get done or that team members asked you to complete
- Plan your time away with a checklist to reduce the stress of planning for time away from work
- Shorten a meeting to build some buffer time and save attendees’ time
- Track email open rate to understand what percentage of email recipients opened an email you sent to more than five recipients
We look forward to your feedback! Stay tuned to the Viva Blog to keep up with the latest news about Viva Insights enhancements.
1 Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work
