He didn’t plan it.

Yet somehow, he became a Viva Engage superstar.

“Modern leadership is about kindness, it’s about empathy, and, frankly, it’s about authenticity. With Engage, I get to talk to my 1,000-plus-member team every day. I get to know them, and they get to know me.”

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

When Vedula looks back at why he first started posting on Microsoft Viva Engage, it was because he wanted to connect with a team that was too big to meet with one-on-one. The team also spans multiple continents and time zones.

It was about being real and accessible.

“Modern leadership is about kindness, it’s about empathy, and, frankly, it’s about authenticity,” says Vedula, a corporate vice president of engineering who leads our IDEAS (Insights, Data, Engineering, Analytics, and Systems) team here at Microsoft.

“With Engage, I get to talk to my 1,000-plus-member team every day,” he says. “I get to know them, and they get to know me.”

That’s the “why” in this story.  

The “what” is how Vedula became a Viva Engage superstar—he is now arguably the most influential person on the platform here at Microsoft.

Connecting with your employees

For many leaders, the challenge isn’t deciding what to say to their team—it’s figuring out how to build visibility and trust with employees spread across regions and time zones. At Microsoft, that challenge has reshaped how leaders like Vedula think about communication, presence, and influence in a digital workplace.

Traditional leadership communication models based around periodic team meetings and carefully phrased messages don’t always scale. They can inform, but they rarely invite participation. And when communication stays unidirectional, leadership presence can begin to feel distant, even invisible.

“What stands out about Ravi’s use of Viva Engage is how naturally he connects with his stakeholders. He brings technical depth without losing the human element, and this combination has expanded his reach across the organization.”

Murali Sitaram, corporate vice president of Viva Engage

That’s why more leaders are rethinking not just what they say, but how they show up. Leadership presence isn’t about volume or polish. It’s about showing up consistently, in ways that invite participation and dialogue.

The journey that Vedula took from new Viva Engage user to influencer offers a clear example of how leadership presence can scale without becoming impersonal.

“What stands out about Ravi’s use of Viva Engage is how naturally he connects with his stakeholders,” says Murali Sitaram, a corporate vice president of Viva Engage. “He brings technical depth without losing the human element, and this combination has expanded his reach across the organization.”

Leadership with Viva Engage

Download the eBook to learn more about Ravi Vedula’s Viva Engage adoption journey—and to chart your own course.

Sitaram says his colleague’s goal has always been about creating a dialogue with employees to give them a closer connection to their work and our company mission.

“Ravi does this with transparency and openness, qualities that are accentuated by his use of the Engage platform,” Sitaram says.

From broadcast to conversation

Vedula first started using Engage because he wanted a way to show up consistently for his team, to build trust, and be visible, and he wanted to do this without relying on one‑directional broadcasts or infrequent all‑hands meetings.

Engage gave him a place to speak directly and listen openly.

“Every Engage post is a statement of culture. It’s like a culture flare we’re sending up every time.”

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

What makes Vedula’s approach distinctive isn’t a communications plan or a carefully curated feed. It’s the decision to treat Engage as a place for conversation rather than corporate messaging. Instead of polished announcements, he uses storylines to recognize milestones, celebrate people, share personal anecdotes, reflect on lessons learned, and respond directly to employee comments.

Those everyday moments become signals—not just of what leadership values, but of how leaders can participate alongside their teams. “Every Engage post is a statement of culture,” Vedula says. “It’s like a culture flare we’re sending up every time.”

“Ravi’s use of Viva Engage shows exactly why we built deep integrations across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. By sharing openly through storylines, he’s created a trusted channel that meets employees where they work. That’s the kind of leader‑driven communication ecosystem we envisioned.”

Jason Mayans, vice president of product management, Viva Engage

Today, he posts consistently—often multiple times a week with lots of engagement. His team doesn’t just read his posts; they respond to them.

Meeting employees where they work

Using Viva Engage to meet employees inside the flow of their daily work enable Vedula to be persistently present to his employees.

“Ravi’s use of Viva Engage shows exactly why we built deep integrations across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365,” says Jason Mayans, vice president of Product Management for Viva Engage. “By sharing openly through storylines, he’s created a trusted channel that meets employees where they work. That’s the kind of leader‑driven communication ecosystem we envisioned.”

When communication shows up in the flow of work, leadership presence shifts from an event to a rhythm—something employees experience regularly, not just during major announcements or all‑hands meetings.

Over time, that rhythm of consistent communication shapes culture.

“Customers often ask what great leadership communication looks like in Viva Engage. Ravi is one of the examples I point to. His storylines feel real, relatable, and useful—and employees respond. It’s the kind of engagement I hope other leaders are inspired to model.”

Steve Nguyen, principal program manager, Viva Engage Customer Experience

Recognition feels authentic. Participation feels safe. Leadership becomes something employees experience consistently, rather than something reserved for formal moments. Comments and reactions aren’t afterthoughts; they’re part of the conversation—and part of how trust is built.

For Vedula, that visibility isn’t about scale for its own sake.

“It’s about ensuring people feel seen, heard, and connected to the work they do and the mission they support,” he says. “Consistent, everyday engagement reinforces that I’m present as a leader—I’m not just observing from a distance.”

Putting leadership principles into practice

From a customer perspective, Vedula’s journey offers a practical model for what effective leadership communication can look like with Viva Engage.

“Customers often ask what great leadership communication looks like in Viva Engage,” says Steve Nguyen, a principal program manager for Viva Engage Customer Experience. “Ravi is one of the examples I point to. His storylines feel real, relatable, and useful—and employees respond. It’s the kind of engagement I hope other leaders are inspired to model.”

What stands out in Vedula’s approach to using Viva Engage isn’t polish or personality.

“In the era of hybrid work, one of the biggest challenges in employee communications is helping leaders stay connected at scale. Viva Engage is a powerful tool to help leaders stay connected to their employees in the daily flow of work, rather than only during big events like an all-hands meeting.”

John Cirone, senior director of global employee and executive communications

It’s consistency, authenticity, and a willingness to treat communication as a shared space rather than a broadcast channel. Different leaders will bring different styles—but the underlying principles remain the same.

Crucially, Vedula’s approach doesn’t rely on personality or scale.

It relies on trust.

“In the era of hybrid work, one of the biggest challenges in employee communications is helping leaders stay connected at scale,” says John Cirone, a senior director of global employee and executive communications. “Viva Engage is a powerful tool to help leaders stay connected to their employees in the daily flow of work, rather than only during big events like an all-hands meeting.”

Leadership in digital spaces is cumulative. Each interaction either reinforces or weakens credibility. Scaling leadership isn’t about saying more—it’s about listening well and showing up consistently in the places where conversations already happen.

“I can’t be in every room… but the impact of what I’m saying can be felt in every room when I post on Engage.”

Ravi Vedula, corporate vice president, IDEAS

Vedula’s evolution from first Engage post to superfan favorite illustrates a broader lesson: when leaders treat communication as an opportunity for participation instead of a performance, employees feel empowered to help shape that culture.

Digital workspaces deserve the same care and intentionality as physical ones. The conversations that unfold there—day by day—send powerful signals about trust, recognition, and belonging.

As Vedula puts it, “I can’t be in every room… but the impact of what I’m saying can be felt in every room when I post on Engage.”

Key takeaways

Here are some insights that leaders can use to strengthen connection and trust in their organizations:

• Leadership presence is harder, and even more important, at scale: As teams spread across locations and time zones, visibility and trust don’t happen automatically. Leaders need deliberate ways to stay present so employees continue to feel seen, heard, and connected to the work.
• Dialogue builds trust faster than broadcast communication: Two‑way conversations signal openness and respect in ways one‑directional announcements cannot. When leaders invite participation and respond in the same spaces as their teams, trust compounds more quickly.
• Consistent, everyday engagement reinforces culture: Recognition, reflection, and small moments of interaction add up over time. Regular participation helps culture become something employees experience daily, not just during major events or when reading formal communications.
• Meeting employees in the flow of work increases connection: Communication that surfaces alongside the tools employees already use feels more natural and accessible. When leadership presence shows up in the flow of work, engagement becomes a habit rather than a special effort.
• Leadership communication is most effective when practiced consistently and intentionally: Impact comes less from polish and more from purpose. Leaders who communicate thoughtfully and consistently—focused on connection rather than performance—create spaces where trust and participation can grow.

Try it out

Download the eBook to learn more about Ravi Vedula’s Viva Engage adoption journey—and to chart your own course.

Related links

• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of Viva Engage at your company.
• Read how we supercharged internal communications at Microsoft with Viva Engage.
• Learn how our Copilot Champs helped us drive Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption internally with an assist from Viva Engage.
• Learn how Microsoft 356 Copilot in Viva Engage connects employees with insights.

The post Leadership at scale: The organic rise of a Viva Engage superstar at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Viva is a digital employee-experience platform that brings together essential capabilities such as knowledge, learning, and workplace insights in the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best.

Powered by Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI, Viva enables our employees—and anyone who uses it—to hone their skills and acquire new ones. It gives our managers data-driven insights that help them make better decisions. And with new Copilot Analytics integration, Viva is enabling leaders to measure and optimize the impact of AI across the organization. Ultimately, Viva helps us—and organizations like yours—build inclusive, thriving cultures where people can achieve their full potential.

Our team, Microsoft Digital, in partnership with Microsoft Human Resources (HR) and our leadership, deployed Viva across Microsoft to accelerate our evolving growth-mindset culture and help ensure that our employees thrive.

Supporting employee engagement

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to power, protect, and transform Microsoft. Part of that responsibility is ensuring that Microsoft employees can thrive in a flexible hybrid work environment. In partnership with HR, our internal business partner and customer, our team obsesses over every dimension of an employee’s experience, from early on when they are a candidate for employment to when they become an alumnus of the company. We steward employees’ digital experience across all aspects of their work, ensuring that they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure they need to be productive on the job, regardless of what they do or where they do it.

Continuing to improve the experience our employees have with Viva requires a steady company-wide effort to build awareness of improvements being made on the platform, including the integration of Copilot and AI, and to drive usage. It’s an effort that’s both technical and cultural, driven by Microsoft HR in partnership with our team and the Viva product group.

Evolving our culture

Microsoft HR is an important driver of organizational culture at Microsoft, helping our employees thrive in a growth mindset culture with a focus on being customer-centered, diverse and inclusive, and unified as One Microsoft. Microsoft leadership and the HR team sponsor and advocate for Viva as our internal experience platform.

The HR team’s collective expertise, developed in HR centers of excellence, has been a key influence on Viva’s development and implementation. HR centers of excellence are groups of experts and leaders in areas such as culture, talent management, people analytics, learning, and other people practices. They help drive company-wide HR programs and processes using evidence-based research and external benchmarks. HR teams serve as experts in the employee life cycle, providing insights into core HR functions such as onboarding, wellbeing, recruiting, and career growth.

From the start, our teammates in HR have been Viva advocates, always on the lookout for opportunities to streamline work using Viva for existing HR programs and processes and recommending new HR employee-experience scenarios that shape the future of Viva product design. As our team in Microsoft Digital and HR deployed and drove adoption of Viva internally, we found new inspiration for product features and improvements.

Adopting Viva as Customer Zero

At Microsoft Digital, we are early adopters of our own technology. We believe in our products, and we obsess over making them better for our customers. This all happens within a culture and practice we think of as being Customer Zero for the company.

Customer Zero is our internal journey to make our products better using our own business experience. Across our company, we respect employee privacy, data-access regulations, and the laws of the countries and regions where we operate while using powerful tools to understand how work gets done. By acting as Customer Zero for Viva, our team in Microsoft Digital provides valuable feedback that enables the product team to develop features and experiences that further benefit our employees and our customers.

Throughout the Viva adoption process, our Customer Zero relationship has included the Viva product team—as they have developed new modules and features, we in Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR have been their first customers.

Our Customer Zero approach requires involvement from all three contributors—Microsoft Digital, HR, and our product groups. This involvement creates dependency among the three contributors for successful deployment, adoption, and testing. It also creates a cycle of benefits that positively affects all three contributors and, ultimately, Microsoft’s customers:

• Microsoft Digital. As the team responsible for implementing and supporting Viva within Microsoft, our team has direct access to the product group. This provides us with:
  • Access to preview features and capabilities on a controlled rollout schedule.
  • Direct support from the Viva product team for software updates and testing.
  • Support from Microsoft HR for driving cultural change and adoption and encouraging feedback from Microsoft employees.
• Microsoft HR. Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital technology teams have been partnering to drive Viva adoption to accelerate culture and business outcomes. This gives us:
  • The ability to guide feature development in Viva for specific use cases and scenarios within Microsoft.
  • The ability to contribute thought leadership in Viva’s product roadmap and overall design.
  • Assurance that the Viva product team is building a platform designed to meet business needs and evolve culture.
• Microsoft product groups. Our product groups have in-place test and feedback environments that consider both technical and cultural perspectives. Practically, they get:
  • Enterprise testing conducted by our team in Microsoft Digital in real-life scenarios within the global Microsoft context. Input from Microsoft subject matter experts in crucial Viva subject areas such as employee experience, HR processes, learning, and knowledge management.
  • Access to existing tools and capabilities across Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR tools that are already in place. We’ve developed a wide variety of apps and tools used for HR processes. The code and capabilities in these tools can be used in Viva modules and components.
  • A controlled feedback loop: As Customer Zero, Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR directly communicate with the product group.

Customer Zero is our way of improving our products and services before we release them to our customers, and it reflects our commitment to making Viva—and all our enterprise apps and services—the best they can be, based on our own internal usage at Microsoft.

Enriching our employee experience

We’ve had great success driving usage and adoption of Viva across Microsoft through structured, globally relevant change-management activities. Enabling employees to thrive and be their best from anywhere by bringing knowledge, learning, resources, and insights together into the flow of work is always the central focus of our larger Viva adoption. At the same time, much of the practical implementation happened at the individual Viva module level, where each module supports culture evolution and employee experience at Microsoft.

Viva Engage

We use Viva Engage to build community with purpose across Microsoft—bringing our employees together across our organization to connect with our leaders, their coworkers, and our communities. It provides an experience that enables our employees to crowdsource answers and ideas, share their work and experience, and find belonging and connections at work. Engage also supports peer-to-peer knowledge sharing with dedicated Microsoft 365 AI adoption communities where employees can ask questions, get support from peers and administrators, and learn best practices for using Copilot effectively.

Viva Engage home feed

Engage has become the primary platform we use for enterprise social communication at Microsoft, supporting large-scale campaigns such as Copilot boot camps that help employees build shared understanding of AI and develop confidence using it. These campaigns activate communities and strengthen leader visibility, helping leaders to engage employees at-scale. We also use the integration of Copilot with Engage to refine our posts and to suggest where employees can post their updates to maximize their effectiveness and reach their intended audience.

Viva Amplify

Viva Amplify empowers organizations’ communication teams and leaders to elevate their message and energize their people. The app centralizes communication processes in a single space and offers writing guidance to help messages from leaders, corporate communications, and HR to resonate with employees. Communicators can orchestrate messages across multiple channels, manage their campaigns from a single coordinated workspace, and use engagement insights to refine and improve future communications.

At Microsoft, we use Amplify to organize and streamline our internal communications workflows, centralizing campaign management while simplifying publishing and reporting. Amplify helps us ensure that messages land consistently across audiences by using AI to optimize messaging and measure engagement. Business leaders at Microsoft use Amplify and Engage to run large, structured campaigns—such as Copilot adoption efforts—that reach employees across regions and roles, meeting people where they are and helping build shared understanding at scale.

Viva Amplify overview

Viva Insights

Viva Insights is designed to guide organizations toward better work habits and norms to improve wellbeing and productivity. Viva Insights respects employee privacy while leveraging Microsoft 365 data to measure the day-to-day actions that contribute to our culture and success, like how employees use their time, their collaboration habits, and how they operate across team, business, and geographic boundaries. Viva Insights has also become a valuable tool for helping managers understand how employees are adopting AI.

Viva Insights dashboard

At Microsoft, we use Insights to promote a more productive workplace culture across all levels of the company using capabilities like Copilot Analytics, teamwork habits, and operational insights:

• Copilot analytics: Copilot Analytics integration with Insights enables managers to observe how employees are engaging with AI technology and agents and offer actionable insights into adoption patterns and usage trends. This data helps leaders identify opportunities for further AI-driven innovation and support within their teams.
• Teamwork habits: Insights promotes productive teamwork habits by using team-level insights to help managers maintain regular 1:1 personal interaction and keep up with outstanding tasks to unblock the team and recognize strengths and accomplishments.
• Operational transformation: Insights helps managers and business leaders focus on streamlining operations and improving productivity, including such areas as meeting effectiveness and AI-driven improvements in process efficiency. Insights has helped us to measure the shift in meeting culture at Microsoft: thanks to AI-powered recaps and summaries, employees who aren’t central to a meeting can now catch up asynchronously, saving time and improving productivity.

By aggregating and evaluating this kind of data at the highest levels of the company, we’re able to use organizational trends to make changes that help us improve our employees’ experience while respecting individuals’ privacy.

Viva Glint and Viva Pulse

Glint and Pulse are voice-of-employee solutions that we use to transform feedback into action, at scale. The all backed by deep people-science rigor, Copilot-assisted insights, and native integrations across Microsoft 365.

We’re using these tools for multiple purposes while we navigate our AI transformation:

• Benchmarked org-wide sentiment: Glint enables our functional leadership teams to assess org-wide employee sentiment and drive targeted action—including via Employee Signals, our twice-yearly HR-led employee sentiment survey, our annual global Communications community survey. This enables our leaders to compare how AI is affecting workflows across different teams, functions, and parts of Microsoft, rather than looking at one org in isolation.
• Democratized local insights: Pulse enables our business leaders to send brief surveys in a local capacity, outside of the standardized org-wide programs. Our leaders use our Copilot templates to understand how their teams are getting the most value from AI—and where they still need help learning!
• Strategic initiative tracking: For key transformations like Copilot adoption, Glint and Pulse integrate seamlessly into our broader, companywide change management efforts with native experiences easily available in Copilot Dashboard to gather feedback from employees on additional change management support needs, highlight breakthrough success stories, and understand how Copilot adoption is driving changes in employee experience

Surveying our employees

Together, these tools help enable leaders throughout our organization keep up to date with how our employees are feeling as they navigate culture and technology transformations. This ensures our leaders get the critical, timely feedback needed to accelerate and achieve success in bringing their employees along in times of change.

Like Insights, Glint and Pulse include built-in privacy safeguards such as aggregation and differential privacy, so our HR teams can honor compliance obligations while gaining a better sense of the current status and needs of their organization and then share anonymized reports with business leaders.

Viva Learning

We’re using Viva Learning for high-value learning experiences, a part of which is creating a single front door for the wide variety of learning experiences available to Microsoft employees. Viva Learning is a centralized learning hub in Microsoft Teams that lets our employees seamlessly integrate learning and skill building into their day. With Learning, our teams can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries provided by the organization and content recommended by peers. And they can do all of this without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Viva Learning modules

At Microsoft, we use Viva Learning to:

Accelerate Copilot adoption with upskilling: Microsoft Copilot Academy provides our employees with structured, role-based learning paths and hands-on exercises that help them build their Copilot skills and confidently apply Microsoft 365 Copilot in their daily work.

Deliver organization-driven learning experiences: Viva Learning enables assigned compliance training and supports custom academies created by the organization, helping our employees improve their skills in their domains while aligning learning with business priorities.

Encourage peer-to-peer learning: Our employees can curate and share learning collections with peers, fostering collaboration and sharing knowledge across teams.

We also have launched a Learning Agent, which is currently in public preview for some customers. It delivers AI-powered, personalized learning experiences to our employees that complement what their Viva Learning experience. It helps our employees discover tailored content and accelerate skill development.

Bigger picture, Viva Learning reduces learning-resource isolation, and it provides our employees with a single portal to discover opportunities to build their skills and manage required training. Consolidating these experiences into a single environment, where learning can be discovered and shared within the flow of work, is a significant value of Viva Learning for us here at Microsoft.

AI-based content recommendations and peer-recommended learning enable our culture of learning, encouraging our employees to be full-time, lifelong learners in whatever areas they choose to pursue. Together, these capabilities support continuous learning at scale, empowering employees to upskill themselves, adapt, and contribute to business outcomes.

What’s next

At Microsoft, we’ve achieved over 97 percent employee usage across Viva as a suite, and adoption continues to grow. As we continue to drive additional usage, we’re providing our product teams with insights that help improve the experience for our customers. Based on our own usage and feedback from our customers and partners, we continue to help the product team build out new capabilities that deliver additional value and help ensure that Viva is the centralized, digital platform for staying productive, connected, and supported in the hybrid workplace.

Our employee-experience evolution with Viva has been underway now for over five years, but we aren’t finished. We’re continuing to refine the capabilities, and we’re committed to improving Viva for our customers and for our employees, and we look forward to sharing our future innovations with you as Customer Zero.

Key takeaways

As you evaluate the employee experience and learning management features of Viva and its newest AI-powered capabilities, here are some practical steps you can take to ensure you get all the benefits it has to offer:

• Use AI-powered analytics to optimize employee engagement: Surface actionable recommendations, automate routine tasks, and deliver tailored learning and wellbeing experiences that meet employees where they are.
• Centralize communications and feedback with modern platforms: Adopt solutions such as Viva Amplify to streamline campaign management, gather real-time feedback, and ensure consistent, impactful messaging across your organization.
• Align organizational goals and employee development with strategic business outcomes: Use AI-enhanced tools like Viva Learning to connect daily work to broader objectives and support continuous upskilling.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, inclusion, and knowledge sharing: Empower employees to connect, share expertise, and build community through platforms like Viva Engage, using its AI features to break down silos and amplify voices across the organization.
• Adopt a “Customer Zero” mindset to drive continuous improvement: Pilot new technologies internally, gather feedback, and iterate quickly, using your own organization as a testbed to ensure solutions are effective before broader rollout.
• Measure impact and adapt using data-driven insights: Track adoption, engagement, and business outcomes with AI-powered analytics, and use these insights to refine strategies and maximize the return on your digital transformation investments.

Try it out

Try out Microsoft Viva today to see how you can drive cultural change and AI adoption in your organization.

Related links

• Learn how Microsoft Viva became a business transformation engine at Microsoft.
• Read about how we’re supercharging our internal communications with Viva Engage.
• Step through our guide—based on our internal experience here at Microsoft—for transforming your business with Microsoft Viva.
• Find out how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage at Microsoft.

The post Accelerating our cultural transformation at Microsoft with Viva and AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.