How? What? Viva is alive again?

I have to admit — my sponta­neous associ­ation with Viva leads to the music station of the same name, which I last watched years ago and which was discon­tinued at the end of 2018, as Wikipedia tells me. I wouldn’t have known. But I’m looking for something else. When I enter Viva in my favourite search engine, the station is still at the top of the hit list despite the setting. But just behind it is Viva from Redmond — Microsoft’s new platform, which is to become the dae facto standard of a market segment that is abbre­viated by EPX and called the Employee Experience Programme. I would like to take a closer look at that today.

Microsoft offers a 30-minute intro­duction to the topic on the Viva home page: (https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/microsoft-viva/overview). Okay, I invest those 30 minutes. Time for the Viva Show!

Working from home or sleeping at work?

I think the intro­ductory question on remote work has been successful. Hybrid work has many people in control, blurring the bound­aries between work and home. Instead of travel time, you have more working time, real teams give way to virtual and meetings are sewn together in close time, because you no longer have to go from the meeting room Helsinki on the 3rd floor in building 9 to the Milan area in building 1 to the basement. We leave a conference with the words “sorry, I have to go to the next meeting” and hop into the next virtual room, where we apologise again and say “hello” and a few more words. Shortly there­after, at least one partic­ipant writes in the chat that our micro­phone is muted.

This brings us back to the video, on the subject of cooper­ation. In addition to learning and well-being, this is Viva’s central focus. The basis here is teams, the fastest growing and central driving force of Microsoft 365. Viva therefore wants not only to bring these compo­nents into a common platform, but also to network the function­ality as much as possible. The conceivable combi­na­tions are therefore learning new things while working, learning from other learning while working together, unlocking new knowledge through integrated learning, not forgetting well-being in all work and sometimes taking a break.

Beautiful new world?

Well, I think everyone has to decide for themselves. When we work with Microsoft 365, Microsoft just knows a lot about us. When we work, what we do, what we look for, what we write and read, as long as it only happens in this virtual universe. Therefore, in order to provide a platform such as Viva and deliver very accurate infor­mation to the user over time, it is important to be aware that usage and usage data is being analysed by Microsoft. This has already prompted data protec­tionists to do this in the past and has resulted in M365 being classified as non-compliant with data protection.

GDPR and Office 365 — what does this mean for businesses? (anwalt.de)

Four-wins? or What belongs to Viva?

In the context of the first video sequence, the 4 compo­nents are worked out:

Viva Connec­tions
Access to internal commu­ni­ca­tions and resources using the Teams app

Viva Insights
The image of the personal user behaviour that Microsoft 365 users have already been able to get to know in the form of MyAna­lytics mails

Viva Learning
To integrate training content and support a permanent learning process, started with onboarding

Viva Topics
A knowledge base that lists corre­sponding content from the corporate universe for a specific term

Back at the Viva TV studio: Who is Viva for?

So yes. Viva TV is back. In the following sequence in a virtual TV studio, Microsoft presents some use cases for exclu­sively large companies that illus­trate the positioning of Viva or have been active in the EPX environment for a long time, or let experts have their say on the topic.

Microsoft also tends to address the larger companies in terms of price, preferably with an E5 plan and currently charges Viva 5 euros on top per month per user.

According to Microsoft’s own formu­lation, the EPX market segment is still highly fragmented. Companies that are very committed to personnel devel­opment find approaches in Viva to improve the integration of tools and know-how. The evalu­ation of the respective benefits must be carried out individ­ually. Currently, the platform is also being strongly promoted by Microsoft, so that new inter­esting possi­bil­ities can arise.

How do I integrate employees without a computer workstation?

I have not found an answer to this question in the whole 30 minutes. There is always talk of shop workers, but how do I transport the infor­mation there, how do I bring Viva (life!) to them? I think I’ll have to do some research on that. On the other hand, I do not have to dig too deep, because we have covered these issues well with the baliosoft products. Employee app, ad screens, as well as bs one: portal and bs one: workplace also bring infor­mation into the middle of (work) life, so to speak.