Unpacking how Microsoft employees collaborate on Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage

This question comes in frequently: When do Microsoft employees use Microsoft Teams and when do they use Viva Engage?

“The company’s employees use Teams as their primary client for calling, holding meetings, chatting, and collaborating with colleagues,” says Frank Delia, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital. Think of it as the place for your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.

“It’s the single screen where employees can have a conversation right alongside their work in real time, whether coauthoring a document, attending a meeting, or collaborating on projects across apps and services,” Delia says.

On the other hand, Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) powers communities that connect people across teams and organizations across Microsoft.

“It allows leaders to engage with employees at every level while enabling organizations and departments to communicate at scale,” Delia says.

Diving a bit deeper, Viva Engage communities empower employees to share their knowledge, find experts, and get answers from their peers—all while fostering an inclusive culture where they can connect with each other around shared interests and experiences. It’s the place where people can have company-wide discussions, engage in the company’s cultural transformation, and connect in communities that cross the boundaries of their day-to-day work.

“If you’re trying to reach a large audience, then Viva Engage is a good interactive platform to do that,” Delia says. “Our CEO sponsors a community that brings people across all levels of the company into conversations with senior leaders about our company strategy.”

In contrast, when someone wants to collaborate with their direct colleagues, they do it in Microsoft Teams.

“Teams is well-suited to work for a team trying to accomplish a specific task,” Delia says. “It’s a hub for teamwork.”

Viva Engage is inherently open and content is discoverable by default.

“People who haven’t joined a community can discover conversations and be @mentioned to solicit their input,” Delia says. “Teams is about an invited set of people chatting. If you aren’t explicitly added to the team, you won’t see the conversation. Viva Engage conversations reach people who otherwise wouldn’t see the conversation.”

Better together

Delia says Microsoft employees are finding smart ways to use Teams and Viva Engage together. Now, notifications for both show up in the Teams activity feed.

Frank Delia and Pranav Farswani talk animatedly in front of a Microsoft building. — Frank Delia, a senior program manager, discusses the comparative attributes of Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams. (Photo by Marissa Stout | Inside Track)

“Every team is different,” Delia says. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to collaboration.”

When people at Microsoft need help on something and don’t know who to turn to, they might ask their colleagues in a community for help or find and post questions within Answers in Viva. Many employees might jump on the thread to troubleshoot the problem. Often, an expert gets @mentioned by someone watching the conversation and join the thread with an official explanation or product information.

The two organizations that build Teams and Viva Engage use each other’s products every day.

“Even the Microsoft Teams development group uses Viva Engage to share the latest product information and in-turn get feedback from their fans in the Microsoft Teams community in Viva Engage,” Delia says. “And vice versa––the Viva Engage team uses Teams chat for spontaneous collaboration.”

Throughout Microsoft, product teams work in Teams and use Viva Engage to connect with people across the organization to answer questions, solicit feedback, and crowdsource ideas for new features, Delia says. Viva Engage communities act as a front door for each team.

Each product has its own strengths.

“Viva Engage embraces a sense of openness, and a desire to have single conversations on important topics,” Delia says. “Because I can find or a colleague can share a conversation even if I’m not a member of a community, I don’t have to follow everything. It allows our community to work together to solve challenges.”

Answering thorny questions

What happens when a thorny question comes up on a Viva Engage thread? That’s when the conversation might switch to Microsoft Teams. The experts can move the conversation into a designated Teams channel where they can talk candidly with their fellow subject matter experts about how to answer the tough question, agree on how to respond, and then head back to Viva Engage to share their best answer or preferred solution.

Eva Etchells, a program manager on Microsoft Digital’s End User Readiness and Communications team, is one of those who uses both Viva Engage and Teams to get her job done.

“My whole thing is to live in Viva Engage,” says Etchells, who sits on the team that answers common IT-related questions that employees post in Viva Engage. “We’re a catchall for all the work issues people have—sometimes we’re the librarians for the company.”

Etchells says she uses Teams to find and contact subject matter experts who know the answers to specific questions, and then she invites them to provide answers directly in Viva Engage.

“Not everybody is in Viva Engage,” Etchells says. “Our most important job is to make sure the questions our employees have get answered, and we use both Viva Engage and Teams to do that.”

“Teams is for working with people you know, chat, calling, projects, and so on,” Delia says. “Viva Engage is for community building, organization-wide conversations, and finding knowledge, information, and answers from people that you may not know or even know how to find.”

Happy collaborating.