Microsoft’s Viva Introduces Intranet in the Post-COVID World

The promise to delay the number of COVID-19 cases and the development of vaccines offers hope that workers banned at home can return to work. Although no one returns to the workplace quickly, one thing seems clear: how we work has probably changed forever.

Pre-pandemic only 3 percent of employees worked from home. Last year, thanks to COVID-19, remote work decreased to 40 percent of the workforce.

The fact that the workplace is almost overnight for years forces businesses to reconsider how they manage and communicate with employees.

Microsoft claims that more than 115 million users rely on their software and cloud-based office productivity applications, and its officials understand that their services will have to deal with the big change in the months and years following the pandemic.

With such changes in mind, Microsoft on Thursday launched Viva, a series of tools called ‘work experience platform’ that integrates with Microsoft 365 and Teams.

It connects employees with the enterprise by providing work, research and educational resources in an intranet environment.

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

“We need to stop thinking about work as a place, and start thinking about how to maintain culture, connect employees and harness human ingenuity in a hybrid world,” Spataro said. “As the world of work changes, 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 bring together all aspects of an individual’s workday – scheduling, meetings, phone calls, video chats, text messages, research – into a common framework that will help employees navigate a new world of work that changes hours and accommodate possible shifts between work from home. and work in office. All the while, the system would foster a sense of community.

“We participated in the largest large-scale remote experiment the world has seen and it has had a dramatic impact on the experience of employees,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “As the world recovers, there is no going back. The most important thing is when, where and how we work.”

The learning module, which will be available to all later this year, gathers educational resources for new employees navigating through their first days and for established employees who want to broaden their heritage. It contains not only content from the company, but also from LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, Coursera, EdX and others.

Topics also coordinate useful data from experts across the enterprise, using AI to, for example, scan an employee’s database, and match it with appropriate analytics resources.

Insights is the occupational therapist. If you monitor an employee’s workflow and habits, it can be used to suggest rest periods and to promote relationships with co-workers. According to a Microsoft blog post, Insights allows organizations to combine feedback from LinkedIn’s Glint employees with Viva Insights collaboration data, enabling leaders to more accurately identify where teams are struggling, proactively adjust work standards, and then impact those changes over time. ‘

While Microsoft has said that personal privacy will be protected, this module is as grim as the introduction of a “productivity statement” feature in Microsoft 365 that drew criticism from privacy experts last year. The feature enabled managers to track employee activities at work or at home, and yielded scores based on factors such as workflow, participation in discussions, and number of emails. Rapid criticism of the feature followed.

“The word dystopian is nowhere near strong enough to describe the fresh hole that Microsoft has just opened,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of the Basecamp office productivity suite, referring to productivity figures. “Just as the reputation of a new and better business has been built, they are exploding with the most invasive workplace surveillance scheme that could yet hit the mainstream. To be constantly under surveillance in the workplace is psychological abuse,” he said.

Microsoft eventually removed the ability to identify individual users, saying the score was “a measure of organizational acceptance of technology – not individual user behavior.”

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

The topic module is now available to Microsoft 365 customers, and insights and learning are available to anyone starting this week.

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