Microsoft Corp. has launched Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing, and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work. Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow and thrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity and collaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

“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.”

The announcement comes as economic and social trends are driving durable changes in workforce engagement. Amid the shift to an increasingly distributed and digital work environment, demand has grown for solutions that support corporate culture, knowledge discovery, on-the-job learning, and employee wellbeing. 

“As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement, and wellbeing so organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. “Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders.”

Microsoft Viva builds on the power of Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning, and Knowledge — in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best. Today, Microsoft is announcing an initial set of modules in Viva that will provide built-in capabilities, integrations from a strong and growing ecosystem of Viva partners, and platform extensibility that will enable customers to integrate their existing employee experience systems and tools with Viva to make them more accessible and discoverable to employees.

Viva Connections provides a personalised gateway to your digital workplace where employees can access internal communications and company resources like policies and benefits and participate in communities like employee resource groups, all from a single customisable app in Microsoft Teams. The Connections app for Teams will be available on desktop in public preview the first half of 2021 with a mobile app coming later this year.

Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders personalised and actionable insights that help everyone in an organisation thrive. Personal experiences and insights, visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks, focused work, and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with their colleagues.