How Microsoft Viva became a business transformation engine at Microsoft

Business transformation is complex, multifaceted, and perpetual. It’s also firmly rooted in an organization’s culture, so it requires change management technology that meets human needs directly.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we have decades of experience leading technological change in search of innovation and better experiences for our employees. To ensure we’re matching transformation to our culture as we adopt new technology and integrate it into our processes, we use a powerful set of tools that meet our employees where they work and how they think.

The toolset at the core of our business transformation work?

Microsoft Viva.

Viva is more than just a collection of employee experience applications. We certainly use these tools to complete important everyday tasks and keep our teams connected. But thanks to Viva’s connected, integrated, human-focused experiences, it’s especially powerful for helping teams, leaders, and employees transform the way they work and how our company functions at a deep level.

In 2024, we were able to put the suite into action supporting the most revolutionary business transformation in decades: AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot. As a result, we learned lessons that can help any organization use Viva to guide change effectively.

Transformation starts with culture

At Microsoft, we have a strong culture built around embracing a growth mindset, achievement, and inclusivity. Whenever we drive transformation and adopt new technologies like Copilot, we build our efforts on those cultural values.

“Everything we do links back to our culture,” says David Laves, director of Business Programs at Microsoft. “What that means is we focus on the people side of change, and we take a human-centered approach that focuses on the user’s experience of the process.”

In practice, human-centered transformation relies on open, bidirectional communication that always ties back to the “why” of any change. It also depends on organizational leaders as the torchbearers of culture.

We continually ask ourselves a set of questions about how to engage and support our employees:

• How do we generate awareness and motivation in scalable ways?
• How do we understand what our people are feeling before, during, and after the transformation, and how can we track that progress effectively?
• How do we build knowledge, skills, and confidence to maximize impact across our workforce?

“Having a learn-it-all rather than a know-it-all culture implies that we need to listen to our users,” says Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president leading product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences. “We understand that we can’t solve everything with technology, and we need to attune transformation to people.”

Human-centric transformation at scale

In an organization as large as Microsoft, our sheer scale amplifies transformation challenges. We operate across so many geographies and so many business units, each with its own priorities, that finding a common thread requires immense effort and thought.

Consider the sheer number of different languages, regulatory frameworks, and even holidays to account for. Then imagine applying changes in all of those different environments.

There’s also the interplay between broad strategic transformation and tactical change management. True transformation requires mind shift, motivation, and cultural buy-in at the individual level.

“It’s about making sure every single employee knows there’s a change, understands why there’s a change, and feels included with where we’re going long-term,” Laves says.

All of this comes alongside the day-to-day demands of helping teams run smoothly and keeping objectives in sight.

“People have their day jobs, and they have other demands on their time than adopting new technologies or frameworks,” says Kevin Wooldridge, senior director with the Office of the Chief Operations Officer at Microsoft. “So we need to provide access to content and experiences that make sense for people where they work, on their timelines.”

Finally, the perpetual nature of business change means strategy needs to be robust and flexible. Otherwise, it risks irrelevancy or causing burnout.

“We know that change is evergreen on the business-wide, team, and personal levels,” says Dee Brake, strategic planning lead and principal program manager for Microsoft Viva Customer Experience. “But change always starts in the mind of individuals before it ever shows up in behavior or organizational transformation.”

Making change with Microsoft Viva

Business transformation relies on creating a vision that provides a durable North Star. From there, it takes collaboration between technical and change management professionals to achieve strategic alignment and create a holistic plan.

It’s the holistic aspect of change management where Microsoft Viva really shines.

“Understanding how an organization behaves and why, then aligning employees’ ambitions with organizational goals is the core discovery,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager of HR Digital Strategy and Innovation at Microsoft. “Our task is to enable these org shifts with technology. Viva’s focus on comprehending needs and promoting personalized adoption is crucial in achieving this.”

Microsoft adoption framework

Our Microsoft adoption framework helps us assemble business transformation efforts into four key stages.

In early 2024, we initiated our organization-wide adoption initiative for Microsoft 365 Copilot, our first major internal technology transformation using Microsoft Viva. This was more than just a product rollout—it was a way of embracing an AI-first approach to help us reimagine the way we work.

Microsoft Viva operates within employees’ existing workspaces and workflows. That was essential for helping us make a wide-reaching and profound change.

“It’s a natural fit, because awareness, engagement, and insight pieces are baked in,” Wooldridge says. “Instead of getting hit from different directions for each change management goal, employees embark on an orchestrated journey that change management leaders can monitor and modify as it progresses.”

Get ready

The initial stage of transformation is all about measurement, planning, and goal setting. For our internal Copilot rollout, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint were essential for establishing baseline usage and preliminary employee sentiment.

The Copilot Dashboard within Viva Insights delivered crucial usage data. But at this stage, it also provided an opportunity to align our change efforts with who our employees are, where they work, their roles, and other ways to organize usage data. We also had the opportunity to ensure the dashboard provided change leaders and managers with information that would help them guide the transformation.

Meanwhile, team-focused surveys in Viva Pulse and organization-wide questionnaires in Viva Glint gave prospective users a voice. Together, these sources provided transformation leaders with opportunities to understand what employees needed and how they felt. Our internal experience gave us extensive insights into what sentiments are useful for organizations implementing AI transformation, and we’ve packaged them into templates you can use to assess your own organization’s Copilot readiness or sentiment.

During this phase, we established our change charter and set objectives, determined who was essential for our change teams, and built out the components of success. Those involved metrics like percentage of adopters, number of users trained, and number of communications received.

Finally, Viva Amplify helped our change management professionals communicate with leaders and secure executive sponsorship. That high-level support would be crucial for driving ongoing change. Collaborative campaign creation and flexible audiences in Amplify made it easy to both craft and deploy messaging to potential leadership sponsors and their communications teams.

Onboard and engage

Onboarding and engaging employees during our Copilot transformation involved a mix of communication, skilling, and community building.

Viva Amplify was at the center of our communication efforts. Thanks to its ability to deploy campaigns from multiple sources across several channels that include Outlook, Teams, and Viva Engage, this app was instrumental in providing different touchpoints for adoption communications. These largely contained product documentation, tips for quick wins, and skilling opportunities.

To make that skilling a reality, we tailored curriculum in Viva Learning to our employees’ needs. The app’s flexibility allowed for multiple learning formats, from self-directed courses to videos and live sessions, resulting in the Copilot Academy.

As our Copilot implementation has grown alongside the product’s rapid evolution, we’ve been able to modify this learning path to continue meeting our employees’ needs, with significant results. Internally, employees who access the Copilot Academy see twice as many days of Copilot usage, 5% more engagement, and better Copilot adoption within Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps.

Because Microsoft is a culturally oriented organization, community-driven adoption was a core part of our Copilot transformation. Viva Engage provided a forum for peer leaders to hone their skills as Copilot leaders in the form of our Copilot Champs Community while also enabling the viral spread of tips, inspiration, and learning content through line-of-business communities and other groups.

As a personalized home feed, Viva Connections complemented both our communications and community-led adoption efforts. It helped us land connected community experiences by surfacing leadership and adoption communications in one place and ensuring employees learned about important engagements like Camp Copilot. This multi-week series of peer-to-peer, hands-on, gamified activations helped employees to engage with AI capabilities in community with likeminded peers.

Deliver impact

Deepening the impact of our Copilot rollout involved collecting employee signals across several vectors.

With the parameters we established during our readiness phase, we tracked our progress against individual and team objectives. Meanwhile, collating analytics and employee sentiment from Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint has provided relevant and powerful insights that we’re using to govern and guide our ongoing transformation.

For example, Pulse surveys alerted our team that employees were feeling saturated with onboarding sessions. Instead, they needed to see example scenarios that were directly applicable to their work. In response, we conducted focus groups that helped us build role-specific scenarios and guidance to demonstrate concrete ways our employees could adopt Copilot in their day-to-day work.

We also conduct regular, organization-wide Glint surveys that include questions about whether employees feel energized and empowered at work—what we call “thriving metrics.” By collating these signals with Copilot usage, our HR team has found that employees who use Copilot at least once every week are more likely to say they’re thriving and take initiative to be productive.

Communications and community apps also have a role to play at this stage of adoption. Our change managers have been careful to monitor Viva Amplify’s and Viva Engage’s built-in consumption metrics to help determine what efforts help employees most.

In a comparative trial that tested adoption communications through email alone versus campaigns using Amplify and Engage, the difference was stark. Over the course of the trial, conventional communications resulted in a 2.9% increase in monthly active usage. Meanwhile, the team that benefited from adoption campaigns flighted through Amplify and Engage saw monthly active usage increase by 6.6%.

Extend and optimize

Extending and optimizing business transformation creates a virtuous cycle where we harvest insights to deepen our change management practices while nurturing greater maturity with our target technology. That relies on visibility and effective measurement.

Once again, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint worked together to help us understand our Copilot transformation journey. They were particularly useful for comparing sentiment against behavioral data to give our change professionals a more holistic picture.

For example, change leaders noticed a spike in Copilot usage after adoption sessions with our engineering team, but that surge was followed by a drop-off. Thanks to Pulse surveys deployed to the relevant teams, we realized that the dip in Copilot uptake was associated with engineers’ Microsoft 365 usage patterns, and we needed to lead adoption work in that space. Through Microsoft 365 adoption drives, we were able to increase daily active usage of Copilot by 48% on those teams.

Viva Amplify and Viva Engage also provided opportunities to deepen our Copilot maturity. In the case of Amplify, our messaging centered around transformation progress and further opportunities for growth—for example by becoming a peer leader or even taking part in customer-facing engagements.

Engage provided a forum for emergent peer leaders to share their expertise. It also helped our change leaders solidify adoption by building a repository of conversations and knowledge. Using this resource, users can guide their own progress or seek help from trusted colleagues.

Microsoft Viva: Our primary vehicle for business transformation

Real business transformation involves everyone in an organization. Microsoft Viva capabilities accelerate how we meet those diverse needs and deliver value to employees and the organization faster.

“Microsoft Viva is one of the few tools that has different levers to pull across the entire change management framework,” Laves says. “Regardless of the change you’re trying to make, Viva increases the speed to value.”

For our change practitioners, the suite ensures they can connect with users. For our employees, it provides the support they need in the places where they need it—spaces like Microsoft Teams where they work every day.

Managers and directors get the insights and visibility they need to identify behaviors and provide course corrections. And for senior leadership, Viva provides opportunities to enact meaningful sponsorship by connecting directly with employees while they monitor the ROI of an unfolding transformation.

At Microsoft, the results of our Copilot transformation demonstrate the power these apps hold. In one region where we used Viva to support our rollout, daily active usage of Copilot increased by 39.6%. In a similar period and a comparable region that wasn’t able to use Viva during that time, that metric increased by only 4.1%.

Usage is only part of the story.

One of the business impacts that we were measuring involves Copilot-assisted hours. In the region that didn’t use Viva to drive transformation, Copilot-assisted hours increased to 5,090 hours. But in the area where Viva was in play, that metric rose to 9,143 hours, demonstrating real time-savings for employees and value to the organization.

Ultimately, it’s a testament to how Viva is more than the sum of its parts as a suite of communication, community, and analytics tools. It’s a connective, human-centered ecosystem that empowers business transformation for both change leaders and employees.

“Viva’s all about helping people thrive amidst transformation,” Gregersen says. “At the intersection of how people communicate with each other and how companies communicate with employees, at the junction of how people feel at work with how they do their work, that’s where Viva makes an impact.”