Microsoft has been introducing enhancements to its Viva employee experience (EX) platform at a fast pace since the platform’s launch, and last week saw several notable announcements. Additionally, Microsoft released research that ties employee engagement to companies’ financial performance, and identified some challenge areas that can be addressed by capabilities found within Microsoft Viva.

Related Article: Microsoft Announces Major Viva Enhancements and Work Trend Research

Copilot in Microsoft Viva

The biggest splash was Microsoft announcing Copilot in Microsoft Viva. Microsoft 365 Copilot was just announced in March, and the addition of Copilot into the Viva platform layers in next-generation AI to support performance and engagement. The integration promises many ways to save both employee and manager time. Microsoft laid out several examples of how Copilot will be leveraged within Viva:

• Copilot in Microsoftm – Viva Goals. Helps manager create objectives and key results (OKRs), as well as simplifies goal management across the organization. Copilot can recommend draft OKRs based on existing internal Word documents, and once created, Copilot can then save employees time by summarizing the status of OKRs, identifying blockers, and suggesting next steps.
• Copilot in Microsoft – Viva Engage. Helps leaders craft interesting and motivating posts from simple prompts or trending topics within workplace communities and storyline conversations. Copilot can also personalize messages by adjusting tone and length and suggest relevant images. Copilot can also be used to analyze engagement metrics, assess sentiment, and recommend responses.

• Copilot in Microsoft Viva Learning. Curated learning collections can be suggested, and succinct knowledge summaries can be personalized to specific roles or development needs.
• Copilot in Microsoft Viva Topics. A conversational interface can be leveraged by employees to discover more information about important topics in addition to related topics and projects. 
• Copilot in Answers. Can be used to build questions with just the right amount of specificity and completeness. It can also extract the pertinent topics to help categorize the question.

Copilot in Microsoft Viva will begin rolling out to customers later in 2023.

Related Content: Tapping into the Power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot Across the Organization

Viva Glint Coming Soon

Viva Glint will officially join the Viva suite in July 2023. Glint was brought into the Microsoft fold through the 2016 acquisition of LinkedIn and already has a strong user base. The company has a detailed migration program for customers to transition from the version of Glint on LinkedIn to the version that will be offered with Viva and that is part of the Microsoft 365 stack. It will include all the compliance, security, and privacy features that are part of Microsoft 365.

Including Glint to the Viva Suite strengthens the other feedback tools found within the Insights portion of Viva which also includes Viva Pulse and Viva Insights, each which bring their own unique benefit to the feedback loop.

Copilot will also be used with Glint, providing the ability to summarize and analyze the thousands of employee comments coming in as well as support users with novel ways to dig into feedback and ask questions using natural language.

VivaGlint will be available for free with a Viva suite subscription and will also be available separately.

New Workplace Trends Index Pulse Report: Employee Engagement Matters to the Bottom Line

There has been heightened discussion over the past few years on the EX to CX link and how it can help or hinder not only experience, but a company’s bottom line. Microsoft has released research that demonstrates a clear tie between employee engagement and financial performance. Additionally, it highlighted areas closely tied to engagement that can be well supported by Viva tools such as Engage, Connections, Goals and Insights.

Microsoft analyzed surveys of more than three million employees at more than 200 companies across industries and looked at the combined stock price movement of these companies throughout 2022. Seventeen industries were included.

Key findings:

• High employee engagement links to stronger financial performance.
  • Organizations that focused on employee engagement, even in times of economic uncertainty, performed twice as well financially as organizations that deprioritized it.
  • Companies with the most engaged employees outperformed the S&P 500 at the end of the year.
  • On average, each additional point of engagement reported by employees correlated with a +$46,511 difference in market cap per employee.

• Clear communication and goals support employee engagement
  • In organizations at the bottom of engagement scores, nearly one in four employees are not sure what they should focus on.
  • On the other side, employees at highly engaged organizations are 46% more likely to see their organizations as strong communicators, 37% more likely to express confidence in leadership, and 16% more likely to be clear on what to focus on than the least engaged organizations.

• “Feedback flywheels” sustain engagement
  • Employees at highly engaged organizations are 40% more likely to have confidence that their feedback will lead to action, and they are 56% more likely to say their organizations continually improve processes.
  • According to Microsoft, being able to combine employee feedback data with behavioral data from productivity, collaboration data from productivity, and collaboration signals and sentiment coming from communities can create a continuous flow of data churning through; in essence, this create a feedback flywheel that can quickly get the needed information collected, analyzed and turned into action that is communicated to employees.

Overall, this is a good set of upcoming enhancements. Leveraging Copilot will aid with efficiency and engagement as employees get assistance from Copilot when it comes to finding information and accessing more personalized learning materials. Likewise, managers will also benefit by Copilot lessening the more laborious tasks related to goal setting and message personalization.

As a follower of all things related to voice of the employees and feedback technologies, it was also good to see the roadmap of how Glint, Pulse, and Insights would be complementing each other, allowing for a more holistic view of employees by combining employee engagement data, as well as behavioral and collaboration data from Viva Insights and Microsoft Graph. It should be a good step towards getting the insight to action cycle shortened.