Microsoft’s Viva reinvents the intranet in the post-COVID world

The promise of a slowdown in the number of COVID-19 cases and the development of vaccines give hope that workers exiled at home can return to work. While no one expects a quick return to the workplace, one thing seems clear: the way we work has probably changed forever.

Before the pandemic, only 3% of employees worked from home. Last year, thanks to COVID-19, remote working increased to 40% of the workforce.

The almost overnight overhaul of how workplaces have operated for years is forcing companies to rethink the way they manage and communicate with employees.

Microsoft says more than 115 million users rely on its cloud-based office productivity software and application suites, and its managers understand their services will need to adapt to the vast change in the months and years after. -pandemic to come.

With such a change in mind, Microsoft on Thursday introduced Viva, a suite of tools called the “Employee Experience Platform” that integrates with Microsoft 365 and Teams.

It connects employees to the business by providing work, research and training resources in an intranet setting.

Viva includes several modules: Connections provides employees with company news and policies; Learning provides educational resources; Topics manages the company’s database and has been called “a Wikipedia for the organization” by Jared Spataro, who runs Microsoft 365; and Insights will generate data for managers and leaders to monitor work patterns and trends.

“We need to stop thinking of work as a place and start thinking about how to maintain culture, connect employees and harness human ingenuity in a hybrid world,” said Spataro. “As the world of work evolves, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and well-being so that organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity.

Microsoft hopes to juggle all aspects of an individual’s workday – planning, meetings, phone calls, video chats, text messaging, research – in a common framework that will help employees navigate a new and changing world of work. adapts to changing schedules and possible changes between working from home and working in the office. All the while, the system would foster a sense of community.

“We were part of the biggest large-scale remote working experience the world has seen and it had a huge impact on the employee experience,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “As the world recovers, there is no turning back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be essential.

The learning module, which will be made available to everyone later this year, brings together educational resources for new hires who are navigating their early days and for established employees looking to expand their knowledge. It includes content not only from the company, but also from LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, Coursera, EdX and others.

Likewise, Topics coordinates payload data from experts across the organization, using AI to analyze an employee’s database, for example, and match it to the appropriate resources for analysis.

Insights in effect is the company’s therapist. Keeping an eye on an employee’s workflow and habits, it can be used to gently suggest breaks and encourage relationships with colleagues. Additionally, according to a Microsoft blog post, Insights “allows organizations to combine employee feedback from LinkedIn Glint with collaboration data from Viva Insights, allowing leaders to more precisely identify where teams may be struggling, to proactively adjust work standards and then quantify the impact of those changes over time. “

While Microsoft has said personal privacy will be protected, this add-on is eerily similar to last year’s introduction of a “productivity score” feature in Microsoft 365 that drew criticism from experts in the field. confidentiality. This feature allowed managers to track employee activity at work or home and produced scores based on factors such as workflow, participation in discussions, and number of emails. A quick review of the feature followed.

“The word dystopian is not strong enough to describe the new hellhole that Microsoft has just opened,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of the Basecamp office suite, referring to productivity scores. “Just as a reputation for a new and better business was built, they blew it up with the most invasive workplace surveillance system to date. To be under constant surveillance in the workplace is psychological abuse, ”he said.

Microsoft ultimately removed the ability to identify individual users, saying the score “is a measure of organizational technology adoption, not individual user behavior.”

Microsoft said this week that Insights data is “aggregated and de-identified by default to maintain personal privacy.”

The Themes module is now available for Microsoft 365 customers, and Insights and Learning is previewed for everyone starting this week.

© Science X Network 2021