{"id":8396,"date":"2023-11-21T07:01:08","date_gmt":"2023-11-21T15:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=8396"},"modified":"2023-11-21T12:44:04","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T20:44:04","slug":"driving-adoption-of-microsoft-viva-at-microsoft-lessons-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/driving-adoption-of-microsoft-viva-at-microsoft-lessons-learned\/","title":{"rendered":"Driving adoption of Microsoft Viva at Microsoft: Lessons learned"},"content":{"rendered":"
In Microsoft Digital (MSD), our job is to accelerate Microsoft\u2019s own digital transformation through world-class employee experiences. We were thrilled when Microsoft Viva was announced in 2021 as a modern platform dedicated to employee growth, wellbeing, and productivity.<\/p>\n
Microsoft Viva was developed based on research showing:<\/p>\n
During the last year, we\u2019ve had the opportunity to lead the adoption program for Microsoft\u2019s 220,000-plus global employees.\u00a0 Each of us focused on an assigned set of business units within the company, where our goals were to activate sponsorship of Microsoft Viva, drive employee awareness of its benefits, and collect feedback for the product and IT teams to make the experience even better. Here\u2019s what we learned.<\/p>\n
We know from experience that visible sponsorship from senior leaders is one of the most important factors enabling successful change management. Employees look to their leaders for direction and are pretty good at sensing their level of genuine commitment. When sponsors are active and visible, it sends a clear message that they are committed to the change, and when sponsors go even further and lead by example, their teams adopt the change at an accelerated pace. For these reasons, we start with senior leaders when we mobilize a new adoption program.<\/p>\n
Our approach was to understand the leader\u2019s goals, then help them learn where Microsoft Viva could support their goals. There are two themes that were commonly shared: Employees felt they had too many meetings and not enough time for learning. Hearing these challenges, we shared how Viva can support employees with time management. For example, the Microsoft Viva Insights \u201cWellbeing\u201d feature helps individuals make more time for focused work, and manager insights help managers understand how employees are working so they can better support and coach them. Similarly, to address the desire to foster their employees\u2019 time for learning, we illustrated the benefits of Microsoft Viva Learning, like intelligently creating calendar blocks to complete specific courses.<\/p>\n
Once we obtained buy-in, we asked leaders to nominate someone on their team we could work with on a regular basis as a primary point of contact. This made it easier to tee up activities in the business unit since these individuals had a pulse on their team\u2019s rhythm, including all-hands meetings, team newsletters, manager calls, and other mechanisms used for communication. That helped us ensure follow-through when we needed direct sponsor activity, such as inserting Microsoft Viva messaging into talking points at an internal town hall or embedding Viva into a leader\u2019s message sent via Viva Engage, Microsoft Teams, or email. In addition, the primary point of contact helped to identify additional champions in their organization.<\/p>\n
The impact of these efforts is compelling: business units where we\u2019ve successfully activated senior sponsors have seen 25 percent greater adoption of Microsoft Viva so far.<\/p>\n