{"id":15243,"date":"2024-06-27T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=15243"},"modified":"2025-11-14T12:23:26","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T20:23:26","slug":"driving-copilot-for-microsoft-365-adoption-with-an-assist-from-microsoft-viva","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/driving-copilot-for-microsoft-365-adoption-with-an-assist-from-microsoft-viva\/","title":{"rendered":"Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with an assist from Microsoft Viva"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Effective adoption doesn\u2019t happen by accident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes a coordinated effort that includes executive sponsorship, education, engagement, measurement, and more. When you deploy a next-generation AI technology like Microsoft 365 Copilot that introduces whole new ways of working, getting that process right is especially important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fortunately, Microsoft Viva provides a powerful suite of tools that are well-suited to support our internal Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [Discover how Microsoft Viva can serve as a business transformation engine for your organization with our Readiness Guide.]<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft 365 Copilot is an entirely new concept in workplace technology<\/a>. Still, some adoption principles hold true no matter the tool you\u2019re adopting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor any adoption strategy, the first thing we look at is the behavioral change we\u2019re really trying to drive,\u201d says David Laves, a director of business programs in Microsoft Digital, the company\u2019s IT organization. \u201cWe\u2019re looking for the key messages and value-added scenarios that will really stoke excitement for our users.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n From there, we strategize the vectors that will be most effective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It starts with an assessment that identifies the key parameters of the change. That includes several questions. Who\u2019s impacted? How extensive is the change? What are the barriers? What are the benefits? And most importantly, what\u2019s in it for the individual user?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt can be a challenge to get access to our entire user base because of competing priorities,\u201d says Kevin Wooldridge, a senior director of Experiences and Devices in Microsoft Digital. \u201cEveryone has their own business goals and metrics they need to hit, and they need to know how Copilot will specifically improve their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The sheer size of our Copilot adoption efforts\u2014early this year we completed a company-wide rollout stretching across all 300,000 Microsoft employees and vendors\u2014meant that any change management efforts needed to operate at a massive scale while accounting for a phased approach that included pilot programs and organization-by-organization activations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTake the Greater China region as an example,\u201d says Kai Cheng, business program manager for Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Digital. \u201cWe have around 19,000 employees and vendors in our region, working across thirteen different organizations, so communication is always a big challenge for us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our approach to deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot focuses on three main objectives:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft Viva provides ample opportunities to approach these goals across multiple apps.<\/a> Two different aspects of the suite deliver a powerful advantage for change management at scale. First, Viva\u2019s multimodality accommodates a diverse range of employee preferences for communication and engagement. Second, it offers opportunities for decentralized sponsorship and peer-to-peer support, giving organizational leaders and employee champions the chance to drive role-specific value for their colleagues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCopilot is a very new technology,\u201d Cheng says. \u201cAs an employee, all the people you work with are experimenting at the same time, so it\u2019s very easy for us to use Viva to build a social learning culture where people can grow together.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n We execute against our adoption goals by working according to Prosci\u2019s ADKAR method, which breaks down into the five iterative stages of awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. Different Viva apps have different roles in that model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Connections<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Sharing key news related to deployment and enablement, generating \u201cbuzz,” and tying Copilot to Microsoft culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Viva Amplify<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Producing and efficiently distributing employee communications to build awareness and excitement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Viva Learning<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Courses and training for our employees on how to maximize value from Copilot, inclusive of building effective prompts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Viva Engage<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Actively engaging employees, providing leader updates, listening to feedback, and enabling Champs community.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Viva Insights<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Using the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard to identity actionable insights and usage trends.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Viva Pulse<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Instant feedback from employees on their Copilot experience to fine-tune our landing and adoption approach.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Viva Glint<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Understanding employee sentiment and gauging the overall effectiveness of our Copilot deployment effort.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n A robust communication strategy includes both centralized, company-wide messaging and executive sponsorship. Leadership from within individual business groups, regional subsidiaries, and teams offers employees a familiar, trusted voice and tailors adoption efforts to specific organizational priorities and ways of working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Amplify is the ideal tool for these kinds of communications.<\/a> Internally, we use it to distribute turnkey assets executive sponsors can use to promote awareness and desire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWith Viva Amplify, we can run campaigns using templates,\u201d Wooldridge says. \u201cSo, we save lots of productivity time for executives and their managers because we\u2019ve created pre-packaged communications they can adapt to their organizations\u2019 needs.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This approach has been so effective internally that we\u2019ve created a Copilot Deployment Kit for our customers to use in Viva Amplify<\/a>. It provides a pre-built campaign, a brief to outline of the overall strategy, and tools for reporting and measuring success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building knowledge and ability are crucial, and Viva Learning is our workhorse app for equipping employees with Copilot know-how. <\/a>It\u2019s especially useful for employees who prefer self-directed, asynchronous, or gamified learning over facilitated training. It was an essential inclusion in our initial readiness communications, giving employees an early look at Copilot capabilities and providing preliminary skilling opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cViva Learning made it possible to pick and choose the most frequently viewed or used learning assets across several different categories,\u201d says Ju Bu, business program manager for Microsoft Digital in our Greater China Region. \u201cFor example, you can pull together pieces about working with content in Word, PowerPoint, or Outlook, and package that material into a unified learning path.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ability in Viva Learning to both create instructional modules and pull them in from different sources made assembling a Copilot learning path straightforward and easy to adapt as the technology grew. Out of that internal experience, we constructed the Microsoft Copilot Academy, now available to our customers<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of all the apps in the suite, Viva Engage has been the most impactful by far<\/a>. It taps into the peer-to-peer support and role-based specificity that employees need for Copilot to drive value in their individual work. Like Viva Learning, it enhances employees\u2019 knowledge and ability, just with a more relational, community-driven touch. It also ignites desire by showcasing how power users are saving time and maximizing productivity through AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For our Copilot adoption efforts, we leaned on our Copilot Champs Community<\/a>\u2014a dedicated group of more than 7,000 early adopters, AI enthusiasts, and peer leaders. Through community posts, ongoing conversations, and self-driven knowledge sharing in Viva Engage, their efforts turned into a powerful organic groundswell, with employees sharing prompts and advice on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Engage also gets to the heart of role-specific value. It enables peers who understand their colleagues\u2019 work to share specific content with them that will help them do their jobs. It also eliminates bottlenecks associated with more broad-based communication models\u2014for example, deploying centralized adoption communications to change cohorts containing thousands of employees and receiving overwhelming email responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBetween Viva Amplify and Viva Engage, these multiple touchpoints help employees tailor adoption content to their preferences,\u201d Bu says. \u201cIt puts them at the center of our efforts because they can pick and choose the vectors that are most applicable to them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Keeping our finger on the pulse of the user experience helps us reinforce usage and address any issues. Viva Glint<\/a> and Viva Pulse<\/a> help us uncover qualitative insights from employees through questionnaires and surveys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Glint provides change leaders with organization-wide, dashboard-based insights<\/a> and analytics rooted in people science. Meanwhile, Viva Pulse provides opportunities for more rapid and localized feedback at the manager level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAny business transformation is a process of experimentation,\u201d Laves says. \u201cGlint and Pulse are our most powerful tools for capturing feedback to see how those experiments are progressing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Throughout our Copilot adoption process, we discovered which kinds of data are most valuable for transformation specialists and managers. Through those efforts, we assembled the Microsoft Copilot Impact survey templates for both Viva Pulse and Viva Glint<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These templates helped our internal teams gather user insights, opportunities for employee empowerment, Copilot\u2019s impact on day-to-day work, and success stories. If you\u2019re unsure of which qualitative data is most important or how to gather it, they\u2019re a fantastic place to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Effective adoption relies on robust measurement. When you combine qualitative and quantitative data, you get powerful results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat we try to do is marry what the user says through qualitative feedback with what they do through usage data and other metrics,\u201d Laves says. \u201cIf users say they\u2019re having pain, we want to see how that affects usage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viva Insights enables this kind of visibility for both company-wide change leaders and more localized managers. At Microsoft, we\u2019ve mostly used this tool to track usage across different apps like Word or Outlook. From there, we can return to Glint and Pulse to dig deeper into what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our internal efforts helped inform the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard powered by Viva Insights<\/a>. This out-of-the-box feature provides privacy-protected data throughout every stage of your Copilot transformation journey and can help you understand its impact across meetings, email, chat, documents, search, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bringing Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot together has been a potent combination for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMicrosoft Viva is a powerful tool for fueling Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption,\u201d says Kirk Koenigsbauer, chief operating officer of the Microsoft Experiences and Devices Group. \u201cIt gets to the core of AI adoption: enhancing people\u2019s ability to work in new ways through genuine digital transformation that ensures you\u2019re getting the return on investment you want.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Getting a little meta with our Copilot adoption efforts, our change management professionals have been able to use Copilot in Viva to boost their Copilot adoption efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our team frequently leans on Copilot for help writing Viva Amplify and Viva Engage posts. Its translation abilities also make it much easier to disseminate communications to different disciplines or regions on a global scale<\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing support is just the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The skill of Copilot as an assistant with intelligent access to company data and repositories makes searching and summarization a breeze. In Viva Learning, change leaders can ask Copilot for tailored content suggestions. And when reviewing Viva Glint and Viva Pulse results, Copilot can pick out common themes or trends to help researchers understand usage and feedback more easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUtilizing Copilot within Viva Engage helps employees uplevel their communications and increase their reach and impact. It encourages those who are more reluctant to post as now they have Copilot to help,\u201d says Tanya Roberts, a PM in Microsoft Digital. \u201cSome people don’t gravitate toward engagement forums, so bringing Copilot in to brainstorm different ways of activating employees is a real help.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n As a result, the engagement level within our Viva Engage Copilot Community has increased, and as such, is subsequently increasing the adoption of Copilot by embracing Copilot throughout Microsoft 365.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Different aspects of Microsoft Viva will be best suited for different employees, but the most important lesson has been that it isn\u2019t just an HR or employee engagement suite. It\u2019s a way to meet people where they work to drive organizational goals in the modality that works best for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The results for our Copilot adoption have been incredibly powerful. During a one-month Microsoft Viva campaign in the Greater China Region, we saw usage expand by as much as 20%. And that\u2019s just one portion of our global workforce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you’re really serious about Copilot usage in your company and environment, Viva is a powerful tool for accelerating adoption,\u201d Koenigsbauer says. \u201cIt gets to the core of AI adoption: enhancing people\u2019s ability to work in new ways through genuine digital transformation that ensures you\u2019re getting the return on investment you want.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Here are some tips on how to get started with using Microsoft Viva to help you deploy and drive adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ready to experience Microsoft 365 Copilot? Get started here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption using Microsoft Viva<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Getting meta: Using Copilot to help us use Viva to drive Copilot adoption<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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