Microsoft is launching an employee-focused platform to help businesses manage, train and engage their workforces in remote settings.
'Microsoft Viva' is an integrated suite of collaboration services for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.
The company and its CEO Satya Nadella have repeatedly raised concerns about the consequences and limitation of remote working, particularly for onboarding, learning and the mental health of employees.
"We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.
"Every organisation will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams."
Viva focuses on four areas; engagement, wellbeing, learning and knowledge. Businesses will be able to integrate their existing tools into the platform or use Microsoft's built-in capabilities.
Viva Connections is a customisable app within Microsoft Teams that's made up of internal communications and resources, such as policies or benefit programmes. Viva Insights is an index of 'actionable' insights that give employees information, visible only to themselves, to help manage time for regular breaks, focused work and learning.
Viva Learning and Viva Topics are both educational extras. 'Learning' is for employee development and training, bringing together all of the learning resources available to an organisation in one place. It includes content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn and other third-party providers such as Skillsoft and Pluralsight.
Viva Topics, on the other hand, is more about connecting employees with the right learning tool or internal expert. It uses AI to pull together 'topic cards' with information from a variety of third-party sources, such as ServiceNow and Salesforce.
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