Microsoft Viva Engage Explained in 10 minutes!
In this video, I’m going to be giving you a bit of an introduction on what is Microsoft Viva Engage.
Also I will be showing you how some of the key feature’s work. Microsoft’s goal through Viva Engage is to connect everyone at your organization through employee communities and conversations.
Why use Microsoft Viva Engage
Before we talk about the exact specific features of Viva Engage, I want to talk a little bit about how Microsoft break down what they see the outcomes of using Viva Engage are. And they’re broken into four specific areas, which is
- Build community
- Share knowledge
- Engage employees
- Connect with leadership
Building communities with Microsoft Viva Engage
The topic of build community relates to connections with co-workers, engage in social communities created around interest, job types, departments and other topics.
Microsoft Viva allows you to start open conversations, join discussions, create posts, mention coworkers, pin conversations and build dialogue across teams.
As well as that we can make announcements at scale, keep employees informed and engage with various types of announcements wherever they are.
And finally under the topic of build community we have great feature that allows us to create virtual town halls. This allows us to bring leaders and employees together for virtual events with video q and a’s and meaningful conversations.
So communities can be built around many different things from different types of work and departments to social initiatives, such as football teams, interests, book clubs, company benefits and other things which we’re going to look at later on.
Sharing knowledge on Microsoft Viva Engage
The second type of outcome of using Viva Engage would be sharing knowledge.
Now the first area of this is discovering information. Encourage sharing of ideas, answers, best practices, and finding interesting people to connect with.
This can be done using the questions feature that we’re going to look at later on. Also, we can post questions as I was saying before that is a feature which allows us to connect with experts and get answers to questions within your organization.
This means that you can tap into some resources that might have some skills and knowledge within other teams that you don’t necessarily have.
How Viva is engaging employees
The third area of an outcome of using viva engage would be engaging employees and encouraging collaboration.
So, asking questions, participating in polls, praising colleagues as well, which is very important and voting on answers.
When asking questions, we see employees engaging with each other and even encouraging one another through highlighting the best answers.
So those questions which gets posted we can also help employees learn by upvoting them, which is a bit like how inside of reddit works.
We can up upvote those replies and mark best answers to crowdsource solutions. So not only can we get different experts from around the organization to respond we can also almost encourage this further by marking the best answer.
Not only does that person feel like okay, they’ve contributed but also, it’ll speed up the process next time someone’s looking to answer a similar question.
Why Viva Engage is important for Leadership
The final outcome of using Microsoft Viva Engage is to connect with leadership.
It will allow an organisation to foster open dialogue and open conversations between leadership with employees so everyone thrive.
We could engage the employees by providing a centralized place to find discussions, events, campaigns and recent activity from leaders.
Often employees go months or sometimes years at a time before they hear progress on the strategic vision from senior leadership.
With Viva Engage, it streamlines this by providing an almost social media style platform that leadership can drop information little and often through to employees.
So, to summarize the purpose of Viva engage is to Basically provide a platform that fosters deeper community engagement similar to enterprise social networks It provides employees with a space to engage in meaningful conversations share ideas and communicate across the wider business So now let’s jump into looking at some of the features of Viva engage.
Key features of Microsoft Viva Engage
In this section I will describe to you the key areas you need to be aware of within Viva Engage.
Employee profile pages
So the first feature is your own profile page. Now every employee that uses viva engage will have their own profile page and think of this a little bit like your own Say facebook page or instagram page, which is personal to you.
It allows you to have visibility of your own storyline which is essentially where you can post different types of content to your own feed and then you can see a roll up of your feed.
As I said, there’s different types of posts that we can create. We can create what they call discussions which are essentially sharing thoughts or ideas Maybe updates or just general things that you might post In a kind of social setting by clicking into the text box.
We can choose to Create a post so we could say something like who? Is it is excited for our next town hall meeting I know I am we can apply Emojis and things like that in here.
Also tag, other people as well. So if we wanted to we can tag other people inside of this particular post and that will give them a notification To come and take a look.
We can also format this and we can make Bold, italic, hyperlinks, bullet points. Then we could also add in images or if you wanted to we could even record a little video and embed that directly into a post.
I created a little video and basically just to show people how Viva Engage works and embedded that directly into a post from my recording.
We can attach files, attach what we call topics, so it makes it easier to find things using topics, maybe if it’s related to a specific project or initiative that we have inside of an organization, we can tag that with a topic, and we can find all the different conversations which are taking place using that topic.
I can then click on post, and that then creates me my post which appears on my own feed.
How to praise employees in Viva Engage
Praise is where we want to specifically call out a colleague for something that they’ve done and give them a public recognition.
Using this praise feature again all we need to do is type in a little message and maybe specify who it is we’re praising
In the screenshot below you can see that Sion has praised two of his team members Jamil and Mubarak for working in the evening to help troubleshoot a wi-fi issue that a Valto customer was having.
He then could tag people in there or the team members could come along give it a like or drop a comment and say well done.
Survey employees using Polls
Then the final type of post is a poll where essentially you could put in a question you can add in multiple answers. This might be for example You Where do we want to go for the Christmas party or what did we think of XYZ.
We could put in here for example a quick poll say what do we think of the new ev car benefit? Which is a new benefit that’s been rolled out at Valto.
Valto may choose to ask people to say whether it’s amazing Okay, or they do not like and again by posting that that then create us our little poll which we can then choose to say for example, we think it’s amazing and we can see the number of votes that have been pushed through.
Our Expert Says
There is no better way to boost employee engagement and community spirit than with Microsoft Viva Engage.
Think of a Viva Engage like your own internal social media, just for your organisation.
Employee engagement is not just about storing and sharing documents. You also want to make it super easy for users to communicate, share ideas and ask each other questions.
By creating your social media style communication within Viva Engage, it keeps all of your data safely secure inside of Microsoft 365.
Then combine those applications with your SharePoint Intranet via Microsoft Viva Connections to create a one stop shop to fulfil your users daily needs.