The Microsoft Viva Engage app for workplace communities brings employees together, completing the Microsoft Viva product family that improves the employee experience.
Microsoft’s Viva applications help employees in organizations work better, supporting the building of an inclusive and successful work culture as part of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams collaboration and productivity tools.
The current applications Viva Insights, Viva Topics, Viva Connections, and Viva Learning help to structure the working day and form new work routines, find relevant people and information for your work more easily, and develop your own skills.
Viva apps have supported working at the individual and team level, but with Viva Engage, improving the employee experience expands to include the entire organization’s community.
Viva Engage is the organization’s own social media as part of Microsoft Teams.
It works on the Yammer platform on the same principle as Facebook and LinkedIn: the employee can update his/her affiliations in their own feed and belong to communities created around a work-related issue, hobby, or other interest. By relying on the comprehensive expertise of the entire organization, the answer to the question can be easily found.
Communication within the organization
The affiliations of the user’s Viva Connections contacts are displayed in Viva Engage, and new persons can be followed from among the employees suggested by the application. In addition to discussions, you can like and comment on other people’s content in the feed of the Storylines tab, which makes building a professional network easier and strengthens the sense of community.
With Viva Engage, management can, for example, organize virtual events, highlight noteworthy conversations, and create news posts on current topics. These and other activities will be notified to Teams, Outlook, and Viva Connections.
Similar to Facebook’s stories and Instagram’s reels sections, employees can also publish short videos or photo posts using the stories function on Viva Engage.
With its social media-like functionalities, Viva Engage offers a welcoming platform to create a genuine sense of community and engage employees around the world in different locations and home offices in today’s remote and hybrid work cultures.
Own place for management communication
Viva Engage also brings the organization’s leadership closer to employees with the Leadership Corner, where leaders can connect with employees, introduce employee resource groups, and foster culture through conversations, story posts, events, and more. In the section, managers and their representatives can promote, connect, and launch initiatives in one place.
The Leadership Corner section also introduces a new event type in Viva Engage called Ask Me Anything (AMA) events. Events in question-and-answer style bring traditional meetings held in close contact at the workplace into virtual events. You can participate in them by voting, polls, and chat functions that support the sending of GIF files and images.
Long-form AMAs work well for managers with globally distributed teams, so everyone has a chance to ask questions, vote on others’ questions, and get answers from their managers. With virtual events, managers can see what’s important to employees, answer questions, and ensure employees have the latest information when they need it most.
Viva Engage managers and spokespeople can create campaigns to promote key initiatives to support the organization’s operational goals. Campaigns include their own campaign page and a visual goal tracker to measure progress, as well as the ability to showcase key sponsors and recognize the most active contributors to initiatives. The campaigns are automatically connected to the Leadership Corner section.
Leveraging expertise in Viva Engage
The Answers function is coming as a new tab to Viva Engage for customers using Microsoft Viva or Viva Topics license.
The new function uses Viva Topics and artificial intelligence to highlight and connect employees’ questions with answers and experts around the work community across organizational silos. Answers highlights similar questions that have been answered, recommends topics and experts, highlights the most suitable solutions, and gives recognition to the people who have answered the questions.
With the new functionality, the entire staff can benefit from collective information in one place.
Viva Engage replaces Yammer
Viva Engage works on Yammer’s platform and replaces Yammer without any interruptions to the use of the service. Customers using a Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva license can use Viva Engage, which works on Teams, as part of the Viva product family. The use of the new application does not cause changes to the pricing of existing Microsoft 365 customers or limit the use of features.
At the end of August 2022, Viva Engage replaced the Communities application used in Teams. In March 2023, Viva Engage will also replace the Communities application used in Outlook. The appearance of the application changes automatically, and it does not require any action from the users.
Yammer’s mobile application will also be updated to the Viva Engage application in March 2023. The change requires users to update the application. Viva Engage is also available via the Teams mobile app.
Marko Koskela
Chief Commercial Officer, Partner
