At Microsoft, sustainability is a top priority. As a company, we aim to be carbon-negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030. Across the globe, there are around 10,000 employees who spend part of their time helping us work toward these goals; including in France, where our Green Wave team is raising awareness about sustainability efforts and building an eco-conscious community.
Green Wave is the French chapter of Microsoft’s set of global sustainability communities, and is operated fully by employees who volunteer their time and efforts.
Our Green Wave team is using Microsoft Viva to consolidate resources and expand the reach of the team and its sustainability efforts. Microsoft Viva also helps our Green Wave team foster a sense of community among our employees in Microsoft France.
Unsurprisingly, complicated goals like improving our sustainability efforts present an array of obstacles. Effective communication and organization are made more challenging by the expansive size of Microsoft. Sourcing the right information and internal data also poses a challenge. For the Green Wave team, the first roadblock was finding a way to gather all the training, documentation, and company messaging surrounding our sustainability goals.
This was no simple task, as sustainability is baked into the efforts of a myriad of teams throughout Microsoft. Training and documentation for sustainability initiatives are scattered across various tools and platforms such as SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and throughout Microsoft 365 applications. This was costly for the Green Wave team—valuable time was being spent reiterating communications or tracking down information instead of advancing progress for key company initiatives.
To overcome this, Delphine Clement, a director of Enterprise Data Governance and Microsoft France Green Wave co-leader, and Guillaume Rossi, a customer success manager and fellow Microsoft France Green Wave co-leader, sought a centralized solution.
“We thought, what about Viva—that could be the way we get our message out,” Clement says.
Clement consulted with Edith Dubuisson, her fellow Microsoft French colleague and employee success manager in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, the company’s IT organization.
“We saw a lot of potential in Viva,” Dubuisson says. “It seemed like the right way to connect with all of our employees in France.”
Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform designed to enhance productivity, well-being, and engagement in the workplace. It integrates with Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications to serve as a centralized hub for employee resources, communication, and learning. Its key function is to enable employees to find everything they need for workplace success in one place.
Microsoft Viva has multiple modules, each with a specific focus. They include Microsoft Viva Connections for company news and information, Microsoft Viva Insights for personal and team productivity analytics, Microsoft Viva Learning for training and development, and Microsoft Viva Topics for knowledge discovery and expertise sharing.
[Click here to learn more about our vision for deploying Viva internally at Microsoft. Visit our Viva content suite to get more examples on how we’re using Viva internally. Go here to learn more about our role as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.]
Customization with Microsoft Viva
Microsoft Viva is an adaptable platform, and best-use practices vary throughout different teams. For the Green Wave Team, Dubuisson emphasized implementing Microsoft Viva Topics, Microsoft Viva Engage, and Microsoft Viva Learning.
Being able to identify what already exists in the company is fantastic because we didn’t have to recreate the wheel, we could leverage what already existed.
—Edith Dubuisson, employee success manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience
“At first, we leveraged Viva Topics to check to see if Green Wave existed as a topic in the system already,” Dubuisson says. “It turned out that Green Wave was not a topic yet, but we were able to create it as a new one easily. Then, we made a huge discovery: Viva Topics automatically curated content that already existed regarding Green Wave. We found that there was already a Green Wave SharePoint and a Green Wave community in Viva Engage.”
Knowledge discovery aspect of Microsoft Viva Topics
Finding previously made documentation in SharePoint gave the Green Wave team a major boost. At the click of a button, Microsoft Viva Topics brought together everything that already existed around past Green Wave efforts.
“Being able to identify what already exists in the company is fantastic because we didn’t have to recreate the wheel, we could leverage what already existed,” Dubuisson says.
“When Rossi and I took over responsibility for Green Wave, we didn’t have a central location to gather all the past information on Green Wave initiatives,” Clement says. “It felt like magic to have Viva Topics pull together all this data and documentation that we didn’t know existed.”
Clement and her team were able to avoid starting from scratch, freeing up their time. Things continued to move swiftly, too—Clement was able to create GreenWave as a topic within Microsoft Viva Topics the next day by filling out a quick form.
For me, the keyword I would use to describe the benefits of Viva for us as leaders of the Green Wave program is simplicity. Maintaining SharePoint content and ensuring that what we share as a team is up to date is critical—and Viva saves us a lot of time with this.
—Guillaume Rossi, customer success manager, Customer Success
Once the topic for Green Wave was created, the team was able to accelerate further by using a feature that allows users to “pin” people as relevant to a particular topic. With this feature, Clement was able to add Guillaume Rossi.
Rossi quickly felt the benefits of using Microsoft Viva Topics.
“For me, the keyword I would use to describe the benefits of Viva for us as leaders of the Green Wave program is simplicity,” Rossi says. “Maintaining SharePoint content and ensuring that what we share as a team is up to date is critical—and Viva saves us a lot of time with this.”
Rossi also frequently used Microsoft Viva Topic’s hashtag feature.
“The hashtag feature enables us to engage with others in online conversations about Green Wave,” Rossi says.
This saved time by reducing the need for back-and-forth emails and repetitive explanations about the Green Wave team and its ongoing projects. When Clement and Rossi shared the Green Wave Microsoft Viva Topics hashtag, other Microsoft employees could easily view all relevant content containing that hashtag—the same way hashtags work on social media platforms.
“It saves us a lot of time, because we don’t have to go back and forth to grab links or specific information, and we don’t have to make sure that the person we talk with is already aware of the Green Wave,” Rossi says. “It brings simplicity in communicating.”
Expanding the reach of Green Wave initiatives
Beyond being able to send hashtags to fellow employees for communication purposes, the Green Wave team has also found that the use of Microsoft Viva Topics hashtags has grown its community and expanded the reach and impact of its efforts.
“We have people coming to us because they saw our face in some event or some communication that used the Green Wave hashtags in their feed,” Rossi says. “They become interested in what we are doing and ask questions. And we can answer with this hashtag—that has been really helpful.”
It’s about connecting the dots.
Industry research supports the notion that when sustainability engagement reaches a 10 percent threshold, it becomes a formidable catalyst for transforming the company from within and achieving ambitious sustainability goals. Microsoft Viva has sparked increased involvement, paving the way for further progress.
—Delphine Clement, director, Enterprise Data Governance
“It’s very practical for us, because when you lead an employee community like this, especially around topics like sustainability, you want this community to expand,” Clement says. “By using Viva Topics hashtags and @mentions in Viva Engage, the community around our team keeps growing itself with just basic community management.”
The Green Wave represents around 250 to 300 employees in France, which represents a large percentage of the Microsoft workforce in France. Growth has risen lately for the team, with Green Wave events seeing 10 percent new attendees.
“Industry research supports the notion that when sustainability engagement reaches a 10 percent threshold, it becomes a formidable catalyst for transforming the company from within and achieving ambitious sustainability goals,” Clement says. “Microsoft Viva has sparked increased involvement, paving the way for further progress.”
Using Viva Learning to get employees up to speed
While Microsoft Viva Topics is a powerful tool for knowledge discovery, sometimes it’s still helpful to do training on a platform that serves as a learning-prioritized space with in-depth content.
For the Green Wave team, this means using Microsoft Viva Learning in conjunction with Microsoft Viva Topics and Microsoft Viva Engage.
“Viva Learning is also very, very important,” Dubuisson says. “Many times, for training, we have a presentation with a PowerPoint deck. And there will be 10,000 links for training recommendations. It’s hard to get employees to go back to the presentation deck to follow through with those links.”
Instead, Dubuisson suggested that Rossi and Clement create a “collection” within Microsoft Viva Learning to help onboard future members and anyone else interested in learning about sustainability efforts such as Green Wave. In Microsoft Viva Learning, the team was able to curate training materials that include internal resources, and external resources such as LinkedIn Learning sessions.
To create the collection, Clement and Rossi gathered key information and documentation that they felt was relevant for training. The Green Wave collection was then made available to anyone new—instead of sharing 10 links from different locations, everything is in one place.
This made training easier, quicker, and less overwhelming.
There are lots of ways you can use Microsoft Viva—what are some ideas you have? What additional use cases would you like to hear from us around how we use Viva internally at Microsoft. Drop us a note at mdeenews@microsoft.com and we’ll see if we have a related story we can share or check to see if have an idea that we can report on and share on this platform.
Click here to try Microsoft Viva yourself.
- Click here to learn more about our vision for deploying Viva internally at Microsoft.
- Visit our Viva content suite to get more examples on how we’re using Viva internally.
- Go here to learn more about our role as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.
