CBRE strengthens every employees’ engagement and productivity with Microsoft Viva

Kickstarting a new, personalized employee experience 

Cicily Scharlach, Director of Client Strategy and Consulting at CBRE, focuses on workplace changes at the company and for its clients. She sees CBRE’s shift to more hybrid and remote roles for many employees as the one of the biggest changes in recent years. “As more and more of our employees started working at client locations or other places outside our offices, we had to ask ourselves, ‘How will we stay connected?’” says Scharlach.

That same question drove Sherwood and her team to assess different tools for modernizing employee communications and building a sense of community. Right away, the Microsoft Viva platform stood out. “With everything else we evaluated, we kept coming back to the fact that employees would have yet another app to download or another thing to learn,” says Sherwood. “When we looked at Viva, we saw that it exists within Microsoft Teams and could meet our employees where they already are working.” The team particularly liked the ability to target employees with personalized information in Viva Connections. Rather than a one-size-fits-all intranet portal, CBRE could use Viva to pair employees with the information that is relevant and meaningful to them. “Audience targeting is a very important feature of Viva for us,” says Luke Morris, Vice President of Digital and Technology at CBRE. “We use Azure Active Directory groups and attributes to create a much more personalized experience for our various employee personas.” For example, office workers at CBRE see different content on their Viva Connections homepage than frontline workers.

After evaluating the tool, CBRE joined a preview for Viva Connections, starting with the Corporate Communications and digital technology teams. Within two months, word-of-mouth interest in Viva was so strong that Sherwood and her team moved straight into a company-wide launch.

The opportunity to create an intuitive, personalized and easy-to-access portal for employee experience represented a big win for Sherwood and the global Corporate Communications team. With a combination of online and in-person trainings, CBRE brought Viva into the Teams app for all employees in December 2022.  “I love seeing that moment when employees open Connections, browse the tabs and see what’s available to them,” says Sherwood. “Putting our intranet in Teams with Viva helped us bring information closer to all employees and created a starting point for an enhanced employee experience.” Today, CBRE is continuing its Viva journey with the new home experience that brings together Viva modules and relevant content that’s easy for administrators to configure. “We already had a robust intranet at CBRE, and we didn’t want to lose that experience when we rolled out Viva,” says Sherwood. “With the home experience in Viva, employees can navigate between our existing home site and Viva features like the dashboard and news feed very easily.”

At the same time, CBRE focused on keeping employees closely connected while they’re on the move. “The real game-changer for us with Viva and Teams was mobile,” says Sherwood. Morris agrees. “We needed something easy to use from anywhere for our large mobile workforce.” With the tagline “CBRE in Your Pocket,” Sherwood and her team have been showing employees the benefits of downloading the Teams mobile app and using it to access Connections from a mobile device. “The whole idea of ‘CBRE in Your Pocket’ is to give every employee the same access to resources, news and information whether they’re in the office or on the go,” says Sherwood.

Juanita Mebane, Operations Manager at CBRE, has already experienced the benefits of Viva in the mobile version of Teams. “I’m away from my desk a lot throughout the day, meeting with colleagues and vendors, and I love being able to access Viva through Teams to stay connected from anywhere,” she says. 

Building communities across a global workforce

After adding Microsoft Viva Connections to the Teams platform for all employees, CBRE added Viva Engage. “We wanted to make that community aspect of Viva easily available to every employee,” says Sherwood. “So, we added a Viva Engage to Teams alongside Viva Connections.” The company took this step to foster more communities of interest across its large, distributed workforce and to help facilitate knowledge sharing between employees who might never meet in person. “With Viva, we get the work aspect and the social aspect paired together, like you would in any workplace,” says Sherwood. “But now it’s on a global scale. For example, an engineer might be working on a piece of equipment in one building in one part of the world. Using Viva, they can easily connect with another engineer with that same piece of equipment on another continent to share best practices and ideas. That simply wouldn’t have been possible without a tool like Viva.”

CBRE has already noted increased social engagement across the company. “We have some really great communities in Viva Engage—everything from Holistic Wellbeing to CBRE Pets to Sci Fi Fans,” Sherwood says. “It’s fun to watch those interactions happen between employees from around the world.” Building strong employee communities is one way CBRE hopes to support employee engagement and retain great talent. She continues, “These are the types of fun and meaningful connections that you hope to have with your colleagues and your company.”

Sherwood also finds Viva highly effective for certain types of corporate communications and for making sure important announcements reach a broad CBRE audience. “We’re doing a lot of cross-promotion,” she says. “We might post a news story to our intranet and then go into Viva Engage to post a poll related to the story. Then it all comes together in Viva Connections.” In general, the global Corporate Communications team at CBRE favors Viva Engage for more informal communications. “Not everything needs to be an official news story,” says Sherwood. “It’s much more natural and authentic to post certain stories in Viva Engage.” However, Sherwood still sees Viva Engage as a great place for employees to uncover news and updates about the business. “People might go to there to look at cute pet photos in our CBRE Pets group, but in the process, they will come across information about one of our employee resource groups or see an important company announcement,” she says. “Our hope is that no matter what initially draws them to Viva, they’ll find it and plenty of other interesting and beneficial things, so they will keep coming back.”

A seamless addition to the digital workspace

CBRE employees report that they’re enjoying the Microsoft Viva platform as an intuitive way to find news and resources. “Now, we’ve got Viva as a one-stop-shop for all things CBRE,” says Scharlach. “I love how quick and easy it is to see all my news and information in my feed,” she says. “It holds my attention more than an email and helps me stay up to date on more topics in less time.”

The Digital and Technology team at CBRE also appreciates how easy it is to manage the platform. “Because Viva resides within the Teams application, we administer the Viva applications using Teams policies ,” says Morris. “The team can administer Viva with very little additional learning. In short, we can focus on managing the whole rather than its parts.”

Keeping the employee experience at the forefront of corporate communications

CBRE’s Viva journey is far from over. Today, Sherwood and her team are testing Microsoft Viva Amplify, an app designed to help corporate communicators share and manage campaigns more effectively. “I’m really excited about the potential of Viva Amplify at CBRE,” says Sherwood. “For our team to be efficient, we can’t be recreating a single piece of content to publish in five or six locations. With Viva Amplify, we can create a single piece of content and distribute it across multiple channels, which will save us time and keeps our message more consistent.” It all goes back to the team’s desire to meet employees where they are, making sure that key information is available everywhere employees spend their time. Concludes Sherwood, “We’re using Viva to make life easier for our employees. Now they can go to one place to get the information they need—and it’s at their fingertips, whether they are in the office or on the go.”

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