Keeping teams connected and moving in the same direction is challenging any time, but it’s been especially so during the pandemic.
Businesses have to change the way they do things, facilitate remote teams and consult with IT professionals to ensure their workflows are cloud-friendly and secure.
And it looks like this shift to having employees working from home is not going to be just a temporary thing. Many businesses in Fresco and the rest of the world are looking at remote working as the future for both leaner operations and improved productivity.
This year, the number of people working from home on a permanent basis is expected to double.
What are some of the challenges with this new office paradigm?
- Employees feeling disconnected from their colleagues
- Time wasted trying to locate information in the cloud
- Employee burnout from working longer hours than they did in the office
- Things like ongoing training and enrichment being put on the back burner
- Disengaged employees that feel less like they’re part of a family
Teams that are highly engaged exhibit 21% greater profitability than less engaged ones.
Microsoft has come up with a way to meet all those challenges and to keep teams, no matter where they are working, more engaged, connected, and working productively. The platform the company has created to facilitate this is Microsoft Viva.
Improving Employee Experience with Microsoft Viva
Microsoft Viva was just announced in February 2021. It’s a brand-new approach to happy, healthy, and productive workforces. The platform functions as an add-on to Microsoft Teams and it utilizes data from the entire Microsoft 365 universe of apps.
Microsoft calls Viva the “first employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work.”
There are four key components to Viva, these are:
- Connections
- Insights
- Topics (Resources)
- Learning
Here’s how you can use these components to improve the knowledge, expertise, engagement, and connections for your employees.
Keep People Connected To Colleagues & Resources
The Viva Connections area of the tool is about keeping your team connected to the information they need in a fluid and natural way. It includes a page of curated content that can include:
- Conversations
- Internal Content
- External Content
- News
- Tools & Apps
All images are from Microsoft
According to Microsoft, only 26% of employees feel they are up to date on company news. You can think of Viva Connections as a personalized company portal for “what’s happening” both in the company and in your industry as a whole.
Leaders can help create strong connections with employees by communicating through Connections, and employees gain a feeling of team and family through real-time updates.
Foster Healthier Work Habits Through Insights
Viva Insights is designed to help prevent burnout that can happen if newly remote employees start working later into the evening (“to get caught up”) or are changing their work habits in a way that isn’t productive.
The Insights pages gives your team positive reinforcement and reminders of healthy habits, like doing a mental commute between work and home and taking breaks regularly.
For leadership and managers, it provides general information on how teams are doing and if there are any areas of concern that should be addressed to ward off employee overwork.
Reduce Information Search Time & Keep Everyone “In the Know”
The Topics area of Viva is designed to catalog your company’s content and serve it up to employees right when they need it.
For example, if someone mentions a company policy in a Teams chat thread, Viva Topics will link that mention to the actual policy document, or a page related to that policy, so employees don’t need to waste time searching for the reference.
The tool uses AI to turn your company content into helpful and timely knowledge. It does this by:
- Automatically identifying topics used in conversations to generate topic pages.
- Finding related topics and displaying them alongside your information to expand knowledge.
Make It Easy to Keep Employees Growing
Viva Learning’s purpose is to make employee training and ongoing enrichment more fluid and less time-consuming. It can integrate multiple learning tools, such as LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and those of multiple third-party LMS providers.
Microsoft notes that 94% of employees would stay with a company longer if they felt it invested in their learning and development.
Learning modules are integrated into virtual spaces where people are already spending their time, like Microsoft Teams. The tool also brings all learning tools into one space, giving companies the capability to add more training options without having a complex system of different interfaces that employees must use.
Position Your Business for the Next Generation of Business
Unity IT can help your Fresno area business with the cutting-edge tools you need to stay ahead of the curve and be ready for the next evolution that the working world makes.
Contact us today to schedule a technology consultation at 559-297-1007 or reach out online.