Tracking business deliverables and setting employee goals are key to any company’s workflow and success. It’s how companies ensure employees stay focused and prioritize big-picture initiatives. At Microsoft, we’re learning that every team needs clear objectives and measurable outcomes to ensure success. That’s why Microsoft Digital Employee Experience and other teams have embraced OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—as our framework for ensuring our investments in digital transformation are driving the right outcomes for the business.

In fact, we’re so excited about the transformative potential of OKRs that we recently announced the addition of a new Microsoft Viva module, Viva Goals (currently in private preview).

Erinn Rominger, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience’s leader for Microsoft Viva Goals, put it plainly, “It’s a service where organizational leaders and IT professionals are able to integrate employee experiences seamlessly, with clear alignment to a governed set of business Objectives and Key Results at all levels of an organization.”

Understanding how individual and team contributions align to overall company goals is especially important in today’s work environment, where purpose-driven and meaningful work has become a critical driver in the employee experience. A recent study at Microsoft found that beyond pay, one of the top three priorities for employees is a sense of purpose and meaning in their work. Similar research from Gallup shows that providing clarity to employees can lead to a 10 percent increase in productivity, and this starts with “clear and meaningful organizational objectives.”

Implementing a transparent and cross-functional OKR methodology can be complex. Add the nuances of hybrid and remote work, and it’s even harder. This is where Microsoft Viva Goals comes in.

[Learn more about Microsoft Viva Goals. Read more about reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a Hybrid World. See how Microsoft uses OKRs to achieve goals.]

Fostering company culture

In today’s new way of working, a successful organizational culture is predicated on aligning employees, teams, and organizations for a collective purpose. That’s why Microsoft acquired Ally.io last October to incorporate this critical capability into Microsoft Viva.

Within Microsoft, we’ve been using Ally.io to gather feedback and insights from our employees as “customer zero.” In parallel, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience has been working with the Viva Goals team to incorporate the new module as a key new employee experience at Microsoft.

Powered by Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights designed for the future of work and focused on critical dimensions of the employee experience including wellbeing, engagement, growth, and development. Viva has multiple modules available to general audiences:

• Viva Connections: Powers culture and acts as single entry for employee engagement and communication.
• Viva Insights: Helps employees and businesses understand work patterns, productivity, and wellbeing.
• Viva Learning: Provides a central hub for learning resources to help drive talent skilling within the employee everyday workflow.
• Viva Topics: Acts like a corporate Wikipedia bringing knowledge and experts in one place.

Integrating Microsoft Viva Goals is a great example of Microsoft’s commitment to help companies foster a culture where employees and teams can achieve desired results in the new world of hybrid work.

Evolving Microsoft Viva Goals for the enterprise

At Microsoft, our employees help us to make our solutions better as customer zero. They test our technologies and solutions first and make suggestions for how they can be improved. Through testing, we’re learning about the complexities an OKR tracking tool can have at the enterprise level.

Ife Kolawole, Ally.io and Microsoft Viva Goals integration lead in Microsoft Digital, described that process. “The feedback we’re getting from customer zero (our own employees) is helping us evolve the tool, from administration capabilities to global scaling. It’s making Viva Goals better for Microsoft—and by extension, our customers.”

At Microsoft there’s a diversity of teams with different modes of working, from engineering, to sales, and many other functions. We learned that different teams, even within the same function or division, operationalize OKRs in different ways. There can also be multiple teams contributing to common OKRs.

Erinn Rominger expounded. “We’re in the process of scaling and enhancing Viva Goals as a tool. We’re excited about making it easy for customers to adopt and manage the visibility of shared OKRs, taking into account the structures each team requires. That’s part of the evolution.”

What’s next?

While the concept of OKRs has been around for a long time—Andrew Grove famously introduced the concept at Intel during his tenure—they really took off after author John Doerr released his book Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs in 2017, leading to an evolution in how OKRs are utilized. With the advent of Microsoft Viva Goals, we’re working on ways to help customers migrate to this new solution, and enabling integration with tools like Microsoft Azure DevOps, to further connect employee’s work with desired outcomes. We’re also creating operational frameworks for both business and IT teams to maximize the value of their investments in OKRs.

Like our customers who are currently getting an early preview of Microsoft Viva Goals, as customer zero user of Viva Goals, we’re enthusiastic about this latest addition and its potential to improve outcomes across the enterprise.

When we announced Viva Goals, Kirk Koenigsbauer, our Chief Operating Officer in the Microsoft Experiences + Devices group, stated we’re excited to help “customers drive mission alignment and increased meaning and fulfillment into the employee experience.” That’s our objective, and we’re working hard in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience to drive that key result for our customers and employees.

Microsoft Viva Goals will be generally available to Microsoft Viva Suite subscribers in Q3 Calendar Year 2022.

• Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a framework for ensuring your team is achieving its strategic objectives.
• Teams at Microsoft have embraced OKRs as a model to ensure investments in digital transformation are yielding the expected impacts.
• Microsoft Viva Goals, built on Ally.io, is one way to embrace OKRs in your organization.

Learn more about Microsoft Viva Goals.

Read more about reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a Hybrid World.

See how Microsoft uses OKRs to achieve goals.