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September 27, 2022

Microsoft upgrades its employee learning experience with Viva

To help develop a learning culture, Microsoft HR has invested heavily in its learning platform and content. About two years ago, the company started a project to revamp its employee learning experience. The project sought to empower employees, using self-directed training options and intelligent recommendations to help them gain necessary skills for their career goals. By transitioning to Viva Learning, Microsoft employees are now able to find and complete training in the flow of their work across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. Most employees are taking advantage of this new streamlined learning experience with 169,000 monthly active users - about 80% of Microsoft's employee population. Since the rollout of Viva Learning earlier this year, the number of employees who have taken two or more elective learning courses in a month has increased by 58 percent.

Microsoft Corporation

“Everyone at Microsoft had access to all these fantastic resources, and yet, people didn’t use them much. Viva Learning breaks down some of those barriers so that employees can easily find content and prioritize time for learning.”

John Mighell, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft

Managing a complex learning environment

Microsoft’s learning environment provides employees with more than 100,000 courses across a wide range of topics. The courses come from a variety of sources, but most were developed internally or made custom for Microsoft. Because of the wide variety of learning sources, Microsoft built a separate data services layer on top of its learning management system (LMS) to host its master course catalog and all the related transactional data for the learning environment. This layer supports all the activities in the learning environment, such as publishing, targeting, and reporting. 

Before Viva Learning, the learning experience for users was delivered through a highly customized SharePoint environment that provided a lot of flexibility for course producers to showcase their content. Content could be organized in many ways, including academies that highlighted curated content for specific roles. While the SharePoint environment was successful, it had a few drawbacks: it was expensive to maintain and separate from other applications. Additionally, Microsoft found that people visited the learning site when they received email notifications to complete required training, but they weren’t visiting the portal to find voluntary learning activities. This insight was particularly concerning as the company transitioned to focus on self-directed learning in addition to important required training. 

“Our previous learning environment was great as a single destination for content, but it was designed as a company-led training journey with content pushed out to users. We wanted to create a different experience with peer-to-peer and social recommendations to put employees at the center of their learning,” says Nur Duygun, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft. “We also wanted to bring learning into the flow of work because we always hear from employees that they don’t have time for learning. Anything we can do to make the learning experience more convenient for them is really appreciated.” Viva Learning was the ideal solution to meet these goals.

“We wanted to create a different experience with peer-to-peer and social recommendations to put employees at the center of their learning.”

Nur Duygun, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

Simplifying the learning experience

Microsoft has a complex learning environment with dozens of teams creating and managing content. It also uses many external content sources in addition to the content in its LMS. To bring this content into Viva Learning, the team used the employee learning API, which is part of Microsoft Graph. The team used the employee learning API to build a custom interface between Viva Learning and the existing learning data service layer. “Even though we have a very complex environment, the employee learning API is rock-solid, and we easily built the adapters required to link our content and data to Viva Learning,” says Chris Mead, Principal Program Manager for Learning IT at Microsoft. Microsoft has also released dedicated connectors for popular LMS systems and content providers that make the process of incorporating content into Viva Learning even easier.

When Viva Learning was ready to deploy, the team focused on change management for content creators because Viva Learning requires them to promote content in new ways. Rather than relying on custom layouts in SharePoint, content in Viva Learning must be searchable with course-appropriate metadata. “We helped the learning teams think through how search and discovery works in Viva Learning so they can promote their content successfully,” says Duygun.

Microsoft employees readily adopted the Viva Learning app in Teams with little training necessary. The team developed a FAQ so that employees knew how to migrate their favorites and customizations and how to configure their interests for optimized content recommendations in Viva Learning. Viva Learning and the SharePoint learning site overlapped for a few months before the SharePoint site was closed, which was a relief to the Learning team and freed up a lot of time spent maintaining the site. “Viva Learning now acts as the front end for all learning courses at Microsoft, including online and in-person courses,” says Laura Landau, Senior Business Program Manager at Microsoft. “With Viva, we’re trying to put more responsibility in the hands of learners and give them tools to make decisions about what they want to learn and how to grow their careers.”

“Even though we have a very complex environment, the employee learning API is rock-solid, and we easily built the adapters required to link our content and data to Viva Learning.”

Chris Mead, Principal Program Manager for Learning IT, Microsoft

Measuring success with extensive metrics

Being a data-driven company, Microsoft tracks several metrics to understand how Viva Learning is being used and how it’s delivering value to the company. Microsoft tracks monthly active users (MAU) and has seen a steady increase to 169,000 MAU; about 80 percent of Microsoft employees are now using Viva Learning on a monthly basis. The company also tracks how the app is being accessed and was surprised at how much mobile usage was being reported. In August, 40,000 employees accessed Viva Learning with mobile devices, a modality that the old environment didn’t even support. “Right after I joined Microsoft, I got stuck on a flooded highway. Unsure how long I’d be waiting, I opened Viva Learning and started my new hire training,” says Noa Sharinn, Senior Sales Specialist at Microsoft. “I had no trouble accessing my required courses. I also took an optional leadership course that resonated with me so much, I immediately recommended it to a friend. After several hours in my car, I even found and took a relaxation course. I had such a positive experience and got so much done, I was surprisingly relaxed when I got home.”

Perhaps the most important metric that Microsoft tracks measures the impact on the learning culture. Microsoft tracks what it calls engaged quality learners, which is a measure of how many users have taken two or more elective learning courses in a month. This metric, which was already high, rose rapidly after deploying Viva Learning, increasing by 58 percent. “It’s really exciting to have the learning environment as part of Teams instead of a separate website that people rarely visit,” says Landau. “Viva Learning is helping to change learning from a last-minute sprint to complete an assignment the night before it’s due to something that’s a part of the average workday.”

Find out more about the employee experience platform on the Viva webpage.

Read the previous chapters in the Viva at Microsoft series: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4

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