We are thrilled to share that Gartner® named Microsoft Viva as a Representative Vendor in their November 2023 Market Guide for Voice of the Employee Solutions (VoE). Please enjoy a complimentary copy of the report here.
Microsoft Viva covers all key data sources to understand the Voice of the Employee
With Microsoft Viva, you can measure organizational health with employee feedback and Microsoft 365 workplace data to quickly identify actionable employee engagement opportunities.
Table 4: Representative VoE Vendor Data Sources Support from 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Voice of the Employee Solutions
According to Gartner, many organizations still struggle to measure employee sentiment and take effective action to improve the employee experience. The Gartner Market Guide for Voice of the Employee Solutions (VoE) highlights pivotal changes in how organizations are evaluating VoE solutions to help drive organizational success, transformation, and agility in today’s fast-paced global marketplace. HR and IT leaders should use this guide to understand the latest trends and solutions in the VoE space.
The Market Guide summarizes key findings for organizations as they evaluate VoE solutions including:
• It is no longer enough to periodically measure employee engagement. Organizations are seeking more agile, effective, and innovative ways of assessing and responding to employee sentiment to improve employee experience.
• AI is embedded as a core capability for collecting, inferring, analyzing, and describing employee sentiment and employee experience. Applied AI ranges from established natural language processing and machine learning techniques to the early use of GenAI for summarization and data storytelling.
• Voice of the employee (VoE) is an evolving but fragmented market, with no providers meeting all requirements yet. Early adopters are managing multiple sentiment collection and analytics tools to satisfy their needs.
• Some providers are responding to customer demand by blending VoE with other HR processes, such as performance, recognition, learning, leadership actions and workforce management. Others are exploring the intersection of employee and customer experience. Regardless, both approaches are building an ongoing “sense and respond” capability that crosses application boundaries.
Based on these findings, Gartner recommends HR technology leaders strive to deliver deeper, more meaningful employee engagement and experience insights faster by adjusting VoE strategies (including choice of metrics and measurement intervals). Also, expedite vendor selection by prioritizing differentiating capabilities (listening professional services, manager enablement, EX insight management), since basic employee listening features are expected in today’s market.
We believe all of these can be found in the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform:
• Ability to look at insights from employee feedback with Viva Glint and Viva Pulse and workplace collaboration patterns and trends with Viva Insights for a comprehensive lens into the employee experience.
• Templated, ad-hoc, and customizable survey solutions at an organizational and team/project level that cover various workplace experiences, including the employee journey, hybrid work, DE&I, collaboration, etc.
• Real-time analysis, comment summarization, and AI-driven insights and recommendations to radically shorten the time between data analysis and action.
• Built-in safeguards like de-identification, aggregation, and differential privacy to protect the privacy of individuals.
• Professional services from survey design to strategy and transformation planning
These features, combined with the ability for leaders to intersect, overlay, and converge both employee sentiment results with workplace data, unleashes a powerful tool to help HR see where the biggest opportunities are to support employees while directly helping impact company success.
Microsoft Copilot— a differentiator
In their report, Gartner mentions that AI is embedded as a core capability for collecting, inferring, analyzing, and describing employee sentiment and employee experience. This year we have made significant strides to bring Microsoft Copilot into our Viva apps. We are putting core responsible AI principles into practice across the company including policy, engineering, and research.
Using natural language as an input, Copilot in Viva Insights will help leaders generate custom reports to help answer their unique questions about the business. It will also simplify the query building process for analysts by suggesting relevant metrics to include in the analysis. These capabilities will be available in private preview in January 2024.
Microsoft Copilot in Viva Glint, also available for private preview in January 2024, enables leaders to explore and understand employee feedback from thousands of comments by asking questions in natural language.
Building the future together
We're dedicated to providing our customers with technology that unlocks limitless innovation wherever they may be on their technology journey. Customers like PayPal, Finastra, Sage, and Cricket Australia are leveraging Microsoft Viva to understand and enhance their employee experience. We are excited to continue to support the over 35 million monthly active users utilizing Microsoft Viva each month.1
Our deeply skilled team of Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychologists, organizational consultants, and data scientists are available through Microsoft Unified support to help customers co-design, configure, and implement their employee listening strategies. Established global partnerships help organizations define and deliver a world-class employee experience with Viva. Many of our partner workshops and consulting services can be found here.
With Viva, we are striving to improve employee engagement and business performance with responsible AI and actionable insights, which is why we’re thrilled that Gartner has recognized us as a Representative Vendor for VoE solution.
Learn more
• Read the full complimentary Gartner Market Guide.
• Learn more about Microsoft Viva Workplace analytics and employee feedback.
• Get a free copy of our Holistic listening eBook
• Watch an overview of Microsoft Viva Glint and Copilot.
• Review the extensive documentation for Microsoft Viva.
Gartner, Market Guide for Voice of the Employee Solutions, Ron Hanscome, Helen Poitevin, and 1 more, 27 November 2023
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The graphic/table was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available here: https://aka.ms/2023GartnerVoEGuide
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
