Viva Goals Retirement
Hi, Microsoft just announce at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/goals-retirement that Viva Goals ending in December 2025. How do you feel about this announcement? It was one of the top business use cases with significant business value in Viva Suite after Viva Topics deprecation.I used to think that OKRs were not for everyone...
So my response to a post from BrittHarper90 got me thinking about how my/our method at TBG has evolved over the years regarding that perennial question: how many OKRs should we have? I've worked with clients who called me in after having dived head-first into OKRs and mandated that everyone in the organisation should have their own. This didn't go well for several reasons: The amount of managerial effort needed to review & reset every quarter was huge, so the effort expended/benefit realised equation was way off in the negative People felt "forced" to develop their own OKR that directly aligned with Exec OKRs. The result: Over 1000 people tried to align with the CEO's OKRs. These had next to no value and caused significant anxiety for those who's work was more "transactional" and so didn't have a direct contribution to make to the growth and transformational OKRs the Exec had. The focus was on individual OKRs which did nothing to foster shared goals and stronger collaboration across the organisation. It's worth mentioning that each time I've seen this, it's been HR who have been leading on the OKR implementation. HR definitely have a huge role to play. Still, in my experience, implementations work best when led by those responsible for the strategic planning process across the organisation. If that specific function doesn't exist, then the COO or Chief of Staff are usually well-placed to lead. Based on those experiences, my opinion has since been: have as few OKRs as possible and think of them as a spotlight to shine on what will generate the greatest value for the organisation. Makes sense, right? I always thought so, and for a lot of clients, it works for them. However, I've shifted on this and I'd like to share how and why. Let me introduce to my concept of "hard" and "soft" alignment. Hard alignment is when you have a clear parent and child relationship between two OKRs. You believe that the child OKR (eg. a 3 month OKR) can make a direct contribution towards the parent OKR (eg. often a 12 month OKR focussed on a strategic priority). These are governed by a recognised cadence of check-in and reporting back up to Exec teams. Soft alignment is when you have an OKR which you believe will have a less direct and more general contribution to a strategic priority or theme. The governance around these is less formal and they don't need to be reported back up to Leadership. By making this distinction, I've found that it helps open up OKRs to those teams who are not in a position to directly contribute towards a strategic priority but can still do their bit, albeit indirectly. Lets look at an example: If the organisation had a strategic priority to improve the quality of its service, it could have one or two specific transformational OKRs which will help to drive that (hard alignment). Also, for a team who's work is more transactional like a logistics team, might still have their own ideas about how they could contribute and so could develop a team OKR to test out their ideas but these are in line with a strategic "theme" (big move I like to call them) rather than a specific parent OKR (soft alignment). By making this distinction, I've found that OKRs can be for all, and not at the expense of creating a bureaucratic beast of a process that buckles under its own weight.Alternatives to Viva Goals?
Viva Goals being retired wasn't good news. It put many of us in the community in a pretty tough spot. There is less than a year to find a new OKR software and migrate. We really liked Viva Goals because our team could use it inside Microsoft Teams. Some of the alternatives we are considering switching to are: Teamflect WorkBoard Perdoo All three of these have great Microsoft Teams integration and solid OKR features. We are also considering other alternatives such as Profit Co and Lattice. Any opinions on or experience with these tools?
Join us for a Customer Event on Executing a Scaled Adoption!
When: Monday, October 30th What does it take to launch Viva Goals to large, complex, multi-tier organizations? What details support a healthy program roll-out at this magnitude? Viva Goals experts Liz Pierce, Jatone Wilson, and Preethi Vemu share their experience launching Viva Goals at Microsoft, what worked (and what didn't), and what the Viva Goals team is working on to simplify this process. We invite all Viva Goals customers to join us next Tuesday, October 30th for a conversation on how to successfully launch or expand Viva Goals adoption at the enterprise level. Click here to registerHow about a new topic group for discussing evolving the use of OKRs?
Now that OKRs have been around for a few years, and many of our clients have tried them in some shape or form (usually after reading a certain book), myself and my teams are being asked questions like "what more can we do with OKRs?" and "how can we gain more value from them?" That got me thinking that perhaps there's an opportunity for a new discussion group. I'd kick it off by asking what experience people have in measuring OKR maturity. This is something we have played with, and I've see the Viva Gols PDF on maturity, but I'd be curious to hear more about others experiences in their attempts to do this. Thanks!Now Available: Export your goals to PowerPoint
Hi everyone! We are excited to announce that you can now export your OKRs to PowerPoint so you can save time and energy preparing for your business rhythms. More information can be found in this blog post. Please take a moment to try it and let us know your feedback. Thanks!How to write great goals, get six-pack abs, and live forever
Your diet can often seem complicated, but writing great goals doesn't have to be. This blog post investigates how simple rules from diet and fitness experts can translate into writing great goals, ultimately distilling it down to 12 key words. How to write great goals, get six-pack abs, and live forever
Possibility to adjust the automatic weekly summary?
We have just started to use Viva Goals in our organization and I am one of the admins. We would like to adjust the automated weekly summary that is being sent out via mail. Is that possible? And if yes, where do I find this setting? The only setting I can see is under the "notifications" tab ("summary update rhythm")? Thanks in advance 😄, Fabian
Creating A Performance Review with Power Automate leveraging Viva Goals
We are moving away from a HRMS that does performance management and want to use Viva Goals for all of our individual/team/organizational goals. Our organization still has a desire to do paid for performance structure requiring us to find a Performance Review process that we can use with Viva Goals data. Has anyone used Power Automate to create a review process leveraging the Viva Goals data?How to Drive Team Performance and Results with Viva Goals
Join us tomorrow for the How to Drive Team Performance and Results with Viva Goals at 9:00AM Pacific! In this conversation with Jeff Kotz, Director of the Microsoft Channel Alliance at McChrystal Group, and Kevin Cole, Implementation Program Manager, McChrystal Group will share their experience driving team performance with customers by improving strategy and goal alignment across teams, including real-world examples of how implementing Viva Goals is driving performance for organizations around the world. RSVP and add your questions now!
