Ignite 2022: Updates, new features coming to Microsoft Viva

Microsoft is improving the employee experience platform in its Office 365 for Business offering.  Microsoft Viva allows organization leaders to track the productivity of employees but allows them to interact in a private setting to keep company goals in line with worker goals and satisfaction.  Microsoft is bringing several enhancements to Viva to help enhance relationships inside organizations.

Viva Insights Updates 

Employee feedback is a key aspect of any productive organization.  Meeting effectiveness surveys can now be displayed at the end of meetings with five or more participants.  Meeting organizers with a Viva Insights subscription will be able to see the aggregated results and feedback to promote an effective engagement.  Employers and Employees can also set up a Focus mode experience that allows users to break up projects into short undisturbed bursts followed by a short break.  New Quiet Time settings will also allow admins to silence after-hours notifications and limit the use of apps after hours.

New Viva Learning Experiences 

Learning Paths will allow managers to create a sequenced group of learning materials and make those available to employees as a Learning Path that can be discovered and shared through Viva Learning.  A learning path can be created on any topic. Learning collections will allow employees to organize content from Learning Paths to fit their personalized likes and needs.

The new Viva mobile app features a private homepage with access to required information and pieces of training.  You’ll also be able to see your notifications and complete training exercises on the go.

Viva Engage Storyline is Now Available

Viva Engage provides organizations with a way to create social connections between company leaders and various interests inside the organization.  Anyone inside the company can create feature-rich posts to share with others.  These posts will appear in the Storyline which can be viewed in Viva Engage, Outlook, and the Viva Connections feed inside of Teams.

Stories, which is currently in preview, will allow a more feature-rich experience on the Storyline.  This allows users to share short video clips or photo collections to help enhance relationships among colleagues.

Goals Integrations 

Viva Goals has just launched to help employees and organizations keep their goals aligned.  This helps ensure that people are working on the top priorities that they expect to have the biggest impacts.  It also allows employees to see how their work makes a difference.  New third-party integrations with Microsoft Goals from Slack and Google Sheets are available today, with a Jira integration coming soon.  The Slack integration will allow users to receive notifications, and reminders and conduct OKRs directly from Slack.  The Google Sheets integration will allow users to sync their results inside proper sheet cells.  Microsoft will also be releasing integrations for first-party Microsoft tools and OKR notifications with Azure DevOps, Microsoft Planner, Dynamics 365, and more in the future.