Evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva

We’re learning a lot from deploying Microsoft Viva here at Microsoft, lessons we want to share with you.

Microsoft Viva is a digital employee-experience platform that brings together essential capabilities such as communications, knowledge, learning, and workplace insights in the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best. Powered by Microsoft 365, Viva enables our employees—and anyone who uses it—to hone their skills and acquire new ones. It gives our managers data-driven insights that help them make better decisions. Ultimately, Viva helps us—and organizations like yours—build inclusive, thriving cultures where people can achieve their full potential.

How does Viva work?

It centralizes resources to support the hybrid workplace, increasing employee engagement. Viva provides an integrated experience, using existing Microsoft 365 tools in an easily customizable and extensible platform that’s accessible from anywhere.

Our team, Microsoft Digital, in partnership with Microsoft Human Resources (HR) and our leadership, deployed Viva across Microsoft to accelerate our evolving growth-mindset culture and help ensure that our employees thrive.

Supporting employee engagement

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to power, protect, and transform Microsoft. Part of that responsibility is ensuring that Microsoft employees can thrive in a flexible hybrid work environment. Our team obsesses over every dimension of an employee’s experience, from early on when they are a candidate for employment to when they become an alumnus of the company. We steward employees’ digital experience through many dimensions, ensuring that they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure they need to be productive on the job, regardless of what they do or where they do it.

Improving employee experience with Viva requires a company-wide effort to build awareness and drive adoption. It’s an effort that’s both technical and cultural, driven by Microsoft HR in partnership with our team and the Viva product group.

Evolving our culture

To support our mission, Microsoft Digital works in close partnership with Microsoft HR to manage and support employee-related activities across the entire Microsoft organization. Microsoft HR is an important driver of organizational culture at Microsoft, helping our employees thrive in a growth mindset culture with a focus on being customer obsessed, diverse and inclusive, and unified as One Microsoft.

Microsoft leadership and the HR team collectively focus on embracing our company’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Technology can accelerate our culture and improve our employee experience. Our leaders and HR team sponsor and advocate for Viva as our internal experience platform.

Our Microsoft HR centers of excellence are groups of experts and leaders in areas such as culture, talent management, people analytics, learning and other people practices. They help drive cross-company HR programs and processes using evidence-based research and external benchmarks. Microsoft HR teams serve as experts in the employee life cycle, providing HR-related insights such as onboarding, wellbeing, recruiting, and career growth. This collective expertise was a key influence on Viva’s development and implementation.

From the start, Microsoft HR have been Viva advocates, looking for opportunities to streamline work using Viva for existing HR programs and processes and recommending new HR employee-experience scenarios that shape the future of Viva product design. As Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR deployed and implemented Viva internally, we found new opportunities for product features and improvements.

Adopting Viva as Customer Zero

At Microsoft, we are early adopters of our own technology. We believe in our products, and we obsess over making them better for our customers. This all happens within a culture and practice called Customer Zero.

Customer Zero is Microsoft’s journey to make our products better using our own business experience. Across our company, we respect employee privacy, data-access regulations, and the laws of the countries and regions where we operate while using powerful tools to understand how work gets done. By acting as Customer Zero for Viva, Microsoft Digital provides valuable employee feedback that enables the product team to develop features and experiences that further benefit not only Microsoft employees, but our global customers.

Throughout the Viva adoption process, the Customer Zero relationship includes the Viva product team as they develop new modules and features, using Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR as their first customers. Our role as Customer Zero extends beyond the scope of Microsoft’s business. While Microsoft is like many large, global enterprises, our Customer Zero leadership recognizes that there are a wide variety of business needs and corporate structures that Microsoft products must account for and support. Customer Zero includes data-centric research, common enterprise practices, and industry trends in tandem with internal Microsoft feedback to create the most accurate and comprehensive picture of enterprise needs.

Embracing Customer Zero practically

In practice, our Customer Zero approach requires involvement from all three contributors—Microsoft Digital, Microsoft HR, and the Viva product team. This involvement creates dependency among the three contributors for successful deployment, adoption, and testing. It also creates a cycle of benefits that positively affects all three contributors and, ultimately, Microsoft’s customers:

Microsoft Digital. As the team responsible for implementing and supporting Viva within Microsoft, our team has direct access to the product group. This provides us with:
- Access to preview features and capabilities at a controlled rollout schedule.
- Direct support from the Viva product team for software updates and testing.
- Support from Microsoft HR for driving cultural change and adoption and encouraging feedback from Microsoft employees.
Microsoft HR. Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital technology teams have been partnering to drive Viva adoption to accelerate culture and business outcomes. This gives us:
- The ability to guide feature development in Viva for specific use cases and scenarios within Microsoft.
- The ability to contribute thought leadership in Viva’s product roadmap and overall design.
- Assurance that the Viva product team is building a platform designed to meet business needs and evolve culture.
Viva product group. The Viva product team has an in-place test and feedback environment, from both technical and cultural perspectives. Practically, the team receives:
- Enterprise testing in real-life scenarios within the global Microsoft context. Our Microsoft Digital team conducts this testing.
- Input from Microsoft subject matter experts in crucial Viva subject areas such as employee experience, HR processes, learning, and knowledge management.
- Access to existing tools and capabilities across Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR tools that are already in place. We’ve developed a wide variety of apps and tools used for HR processes. The code and capabilities in these tools can be used in Viva modules and components.
- Controlled feedback loop. As Customer Zero, Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR directly communicate with the product group.

Customer Zero is our way of improving our products and services before we release them to our customers, and it reflects our commitment to making Viva—and all our enterprise apps and services—the best they can be, based on our own internal usage at Microsoft.

Accelerating the employee experience with Viva

We’ve had great success driving usage and adoption of Viva across Microsoft through structured, globally relevant change-management activities. Enabling employees to thrive and be their best from anywhere by bringing knowledge, learning, resources, and insights together in the flow of work is always the central focus of our larger Viva adoption. At the same time, much of the practical implementation happened at the individual Viva module level, where each module supports culture evolution and employee experience at Microsoft.

Viva Topics

Viva Topics is helping us change our knowledge-management principle from knowledge is power to knowledge is empowering. Viva Topics provides information to our employees when and where they need it. For example, our new employees must ingest a lot of information quickly, and they’ll encounter terms and acronyms unique to Microsoft. Viva Topics provides this type of information for users, in context. In the following figure, a Viva Topics card presents people, resources, and related topics based on a subject search.

Viva Topics uses AI to automatically search for and identify topics in our organization. It compiles information about the topics, such as a brief description, people working on the topic, and sites, files, and pages related to the topic. A knowledge manager or contributor can choose to update the topic information as needed, creating a partnership between human and AI–driven knowledge management. Topics are available to users, which means that for every instance of the topic that appears in a modern Microsoft SharePoint site in news and pages, the text will be highlighted. Users can choose to select the topic to learn more about it through the topic details. Topics can also be found in the flow of work in other Microsoft 365 applications, such as Microsoft Search, Bing, Outlook on the web, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams.

At Microsoft, Viva Topics is helping us unify our knowledge-management approach, consolidating many disconnected knowledge sources that account for more than nine petabytes of content into a central repository. We’re democratizing knowledge management through Viva Topics’ curation capabilities, and Microsoft Digital is empowering and encouraging volunteer knowledge managers and subject matter experts across the company to share their expertise with everyone.

Viva Insights

Viva Insights is designed to guide individuals and teams toward better work habits and norms to improve wellbeing and productivity. Viva Insights respects employee privacy while leveraging Microsoft 365 data to measure the day-to-day actions that contribute to our culture and success, like how employees use their time, their collaboration habits, and how they operate across team, business, and geographic boundaries.

Organizational insights help leaders understand how teams and groups are managing their work-life balance. At Microsoft, we use Viva Insights to promote a more productive workplace culture across all levels of the company using capabilities like Personal insights, Teamwork habits, and Organization trends:

Personal insights. Provides personal insights that only the employee can access. These insights help employees prioritize wellbeing with recommendations such as scheduling time for focused work, taking regular breaks, and practicing mindfulness.

Teamwork habits. Teamwork habits use team-level insights to help managers maintain regular 1:1 personal interaction and keep up with outstanding tasks to unblock the team and recognize strengths and accomplishments. They also help to establish team norms through shared plans that help build better work habits.

Organization trends. Provides insights that help managers and business leaders track leading indicators of employee wellbeing and engagement. These insights show how work culture is affecting organizational resiliency, including areas such as meeting effectiveness, overall employee wellbeing, and process efficiency.

By aggregating and evaluating this kind of data at the highest levels of the company, we’re able to use organizational trends to make changes that help us improve the employee experience.

Viva Learning

We’re using Viva Learning for high-value learning experiences, a part of which is creating a single front door for the wide variety of learning experiences available to Microsoft employees. Viva Learning is a centralized learning hub in Microsoft Teams that lets our employees seamlessly integrate learning and skill building into their day. With Viva Learning, our teams can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries provided by the organization and content recommended by peers. They can do all of this without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Viva Learning reduces learning-resource isolation, providing employees with a single portal to discover opportunities to build their skills or manage required training. Consolidating these experiences into a single environment, where learning can be discovered and shared within the flow of work, is a significant value of Viva Learning at Microsoft. AI-based content recommendations and peer-recommended learning enable our culture of learning, encouraging our employees to be full-time, lifelong learners in whatever areas they choose to pursue.

Viva Connections

Viva Connections is the gateway for our employees to connect with Microsoft culture and to stay engaged and informed. Viva Connections provides a branded app experience in Microsoft Teams, both mobile and desktop, to give our employees a personalized and curated destination to discover the relevant news, conversations, and tools they need to succeed.

Our employees interact with Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams. Connections creates the opportunity to present specific content and resources by combining information from Microsoft 365 apps such as SharePoint, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, and Teams.

Viva Connections homepage screenshot showing an employee’s personalized news, announcements, and individual dashboard. — The Viva Connections experience showing what a company’s employee homepage could look like.

We’re using the Viva Connections Dashboard to provide a curated experience using Adaptive Card Extensions that give employees access to their most critical content and tools. Cards are easily built and provide an extensibility mechanism that enables quick task completion directly in the card or by opening a quick view in the Dashboard.

Viva Connections is an excellent example of the power of our Customer Zero approach. Viva Connections was inspired by and based on Microsoft MyHub, an internal Microsoft employee mobile app built by our Microsoft Digital team that connects our employees to our corporate culture.

Viva Goals

Viva Goals is designed to help give employees a sense of purpose at work. A goal-setting and management solution, Viva Goals helps align our teams to our organizational strategic priorities, which helps us drive results.

When employees can align their daily work with a greater purpose, whether that’s tied to social good or the progress of their organization, they are more likely to find intrinsic value in their work. Because Viva Goals is a part of Microsoft Viva, it integrates into our employee experience, empowering employees and teams to be productive and feel inspired by their work.

At Microsoft, we’re using Viva Goals to define objectives and key results (OKRs) for our teams. We’re also using it to connect our employees’ daily work to broader business outcomes.

A Viva Goals screenshot showing a fictional product team's progress on five workstreams. — An example of Viva Goals in Microsoft Teams.

At Microsoft, we’ve achieved over 97 percent employee usage across Viva as a suite, and our adoption continues to grow. As we continue to drive additional usage, we’re continuously directing insights back to the Viva product team that help improve the experience for our customers. Based on our own usage and feedback from our customers and partners, we continue to help the product team build out new capabilities. These capabilities deliver additional value and help ensure that Viva is the centralized, digital platform to stay productive, connected, and supported in the hybrid workplace.

Our employee-experience evolution with Viva has been underway now for over two years, but we aren’t finished. We’re continuing to refine the capabilities of currently deployed modules and features based on our insights as Customer Zero. We’re committed to improving Viva for our customers and for our employees, and we look forward to sharing our future innovations with you.