Managing people isn’t about being a boss. It’s about understanding what your team members need to thrive in their roles—and making sure they have it.
But how can managers establish the organizational understanding they need to properly support their employees? At Microsoft, we believe our people managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability of their teams and that their responsibilities are to “model, coach, and care for their employees. To enable data-driven decision making, we created Microsoft Viva Insights for managers, a dashboard designed to help them cultivate employee wellbeing, productivity, and engagement.
[Discover fostering employee wellbeing and improving productivity at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Insights. Explore our collection: How Work life is better at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva. Unpack Microsoft Redefines the Digitally Assisted Workday.]
Improving business outcomes with actionable insights
Without a dedicated source for real-time employee experience and Microsoft 365 usage data, managers can struggle to verify the factors that underlie team engagement, wellbeing, and performance. They might feel like they’re basing their decisions on a gut feeling rather than concrete data.
Microsoft Viva Insights empowers managers and leaders with insights that identify opportunities to improve effectiveness and bring balance to productivity and wellbeing. The app—available in both the desktop and browser versions of Microsoft Teams—provides leaders who oversee nine or more people with data that helps them bring out the best from their teams. There’s also a standalone browser version of the app available.
“This tool gives managers additional data points about employee wellbeing and productivity, as well as overall engagement habits,” says Sandra Hausfelder, Microsoft Viva Insights global adoption lead in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, our internal IT organization here at Microsoft. “They get information about Microsoft 365 usage across Teams, Outlook, and how their employees interact as a team.”
Another major challenge that has emerged for managers is burnout—managers are feeling overly stressed at work, which leads to exhaustion and low morale. It’s vital to understand the patterns that lead to burnout. They might include a lack of focus time, too few opportunities for 1:1s, and excessive hours worked outside of typical working hours. Microsoft Viva Insights for managers provides visibility into all of these and other patterns or issues.
On top of actionable insights, the dashboard lays the groundwork for healthy work habits through team plans like shared focus time and collective no-meeting days. Together, these insights and actions can help managers be more proactive and informed about what their teams need and how to provide it.
Like any new product or service, we didn’t just evaluate the benefits this tool could bring to employees and how we could land it best. We also had to look at what elements of the tool would need to go through European works councils and other advanced regulatory reviews.
—Michael De La Rosa, product manager, Microsoft Viva
Unlocking insights while protecting privacy
Our first step was to put guardrails in place to make sure we were protecting employee data appropriately.
Product adoption is a complex process under any circumstance. When behavioral data is involved, there’s an extra responsibility to make sure information stays secure and anonymous. Our global privacy and compliance teams provide a rock-solid baseline for any new technology, but international operations mean we’re responsible for diverse stakeholder needs and additional reviews.
“Like any new product or service, we didn’t just evaluate the benefits this tool could bring to employees and how we could land it best,” says Michael De La Rosa, a product manager for Microsoft Viva. “We also had to look at what elements of the tool would need to be reviewed in partnership with our works councils, or that would require other advanced regulator review.”
Over the course of many deployments, our product groups, IT teams, and change management professionals have developed a streamlined process for partnering with our works councils to ensure our technology meets the highest standards for employee privacy and compliance. Microsoft’s works councils have been foundational partners in ensuring we are responsibly deploying and using technology that might be used for performance or behavior control.
“We care most about what Microsoft is doing with employee data, how it’s presented, and how it’s used,” says Peter Albus, chairman of Microsoft Germany’s Central Works Council Committee for Employee Data Privacy. “How should the company leverage it? What’s the risk of misuse? And how can we mitigate that risk while maintaining the potential gains from a new tool?”
The strength of Microsoft Viva Insights for managers is that it abstracts and generalizes employee data to create organizational insights. Between that core functionality, a close relationship between product teams and works councils, and ensuring we provided plenty of time for oversight, the module passed smoothly through review and into adoption.
Driving deployment with an emphasis on privacy
As soon as our reviewers were satisfied that Microsoft Viva Insights for managers met rigorous privacy and compliance standards, we launched into our well-established adoption process. It started with a pilot program featuring 7,000 managers across Microsoft.
We talked extensively about privacy to make sure we built that trust for employees. They need to know that the aggregated data we’re showing managers can’t harm their privacy, reveal too much behavioral information, or make them personally identifiable.
—Sandra Hausfelder, Microsoft Viva Insights global adoption lead, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience
Throughout that process, we were able to identify our evangelists, then support their work through regional Microsoft Viva experience leads and local business program managers. Central to our message was how Microsoft Viva Insights for managers could support our model, coach, care framework.
The pilot also revealed that since the dashboard deals with employee data, our change management efforts should actively communicate the privacy side of the tool. That helped assuage any fears that managers would be secretly monitoring their workers’ individual activities or assessing them based on their data.
“We talked extensively about privacy to make sure we built that trust for employees,” Hausfelder says. “They need to know that the aggregated data we’re showing managers can’t harm their privacy, reveal too much behavioral information, or make them personally identifiable.”
It’s changed my working style because now I have data for something that was just a feeling before.
—Anne Gebert, senior customer success manager, Modern Work
Between collaborating with works councils and taking special care around employee privacy concerns, our internal rollout for Microsoft Viva Insights for managers went smoothly.
A new addition to the management toolchest
Microsoft Viva Insights provides the data managers need to make decisions for themselves and with their teams, then lets them track the impact of their decisions.
“It’s changed my working style because now I have data for something that was just a feeling before,” says Anne Gebert, a senior customer success manager for Modern Work. “If I have a feeling that my people work too long, or their schedules are backed up, or they’re forced to multitask during meetings, I can understand it, act on it, and share it with the team.”
Often, managers get triggers for initiating important conversations by scrolling through different views within the dashboard. They might glance at the meeting time stats and realize they haven’t been providing enough 1:1 coaching to their workers. On top of that, by benchmarking managers’ teams against their peer groups, Microsoft Viva Insights helps establish stronger working norms.
“Peer group comparisons help me see where there are deviations from organizational standards, then think through whether those are positive or negative and make plans to address it,” Gebert says.
As managers use the tool for longer and longer, they’re building up rich historical context for their teams. The long-term effect will be that managers can examine trends over time to generate lasting impact.
Driving impact with insights
Since Microsoft Viva Insights for managers’ internal launch, leaders have made exceptional headway on after-hours and cross-geography collaboration, 1:1 connections with employees, and establishing good meeting habits. We’ve also seen benefits associated with focus blocks. They’re especially pronounced for developers, who reclaim 10 percent to 11 percent of their time when they put this strategy in place.
As the tool continues to mature, new features will unlock even better support for teams. Every manager is unique, so customization and personalization are upcoming priorities. We’re also exploring ways to pull insights into day-to-day workflows like reviews or integrating the data into the wider employee experience suite through Microsoft Viva Learn.
For now, simple visibility into organizational data is already generating significant results for managers.
“Committing to new habits and new working patterns and having a tool to do that effectively is the most powerful aspect of this app,” says Wendy Guo, a principal product manager in the Microsoft Viva product group. “We really do believe that deploying Viva Insights changes how you understand and employ data to make a meaningful impact on your organization.”
- Get into a cycle of proven practice between engineering, product, privacy and compliance, IT, and any other teams involved in change management.
- Trust is the key: Build trust with transparency.
- Start with thinking about what initiatives you already have going, then see how the data can apply to those.
- Run a pilot to understand how the culture can use manager insights.
- Be playful: Get into the app, embrace the data, and try out your ideas.
- Share the dashboard views: It’s aggregated data, so there’s no risk and it also helps assuage privacy concerns
Try Microsoft Viva Insights for managers.
- Discover fostering employee wellbeing and improving productivity at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Insights.
- Explore our collection: How Work life is better at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva.
- Unpack Microsoft Redefines the Digitally Assisted Workday.
