As hybrid work becomes the norm, employee experience and engagement are more important than ever. The way that people work and connect with their coworkers has shifted, and research shows that flexible work is here to stay.
Employee engagement is now critical to business success. Survey data from Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index revealed that 41 percent of employees are considering leaving their current employer this year. This level of turnover has big implications for how companies recruit, onboard, retain talent, and support overall development and employee wellbeing. It’s a new game of talent acquisition and retention in which employee engagement and the overall employee experience play a critical role.
Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that brings together employee engagement, learning and training, wellbeing experiences, and knowledge discovery directly in the flow of work. Employee engagement entails keeping people up to date on company news, making company resources readily accessible, and enabling people to connect across the organisation to create communities and share knowledge.
Yammer usage doubled year-over-year and now supports tens of millions of monthly active users worldwide. New integrations and capabilities will bring these community experiences and scale directly into Viva, offering immediate value and growth opportunities. Microsoft is bringing the superpowers of Yammer, including communities, open conversation, and discovery experiences into Viva. In the coming months, you’ll see communities surface in a number of ways across Microsoft 365 and Viva:
Communities arose out of Yammer, which is now bringing community experiences across Microsoft 365 into the apps you use every day, including Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint. Global brands leaned heavily on Yammer communities in the last year to create a sense of community, build culture, and engage employees.
The Communities app for Microsoft Teams helps you stay connected to what’s happening in your communities, tap into knowledge across teams and departments, and crowdsource solutions and best practices from frontline workers.
Learn more about using the Communities app for Teams and adding it to the Teams mobile experience.
A new experience for questions and answers in meetings with the Q&A app, which allows meeting organisers and presenters to add open or moderated Q&As to any Teams meeting. The Q&A app enables attendees to ask and reply to questions before and during a meeting. Organisers and designated presenters can mark best answers, filter responses, moderate and dismiss questions, and pin posts. Responses to questions are threaded in a conversation with the original question. Designated presenters can act as co-moderators to help screen questions.
Q&A is ideally suited for large and more structured meetings, such as leadership presentations, webinars, classroom training, all-hands meetings, and community events. The Q&A app is currently in private preview and will be rolling out soon.
New capabilities that make it easier to connect and communicate across the organisation.
Follow conversations by topic. To help you stay in touch with conversations around a topic of interest, Yammer now has new topic capabilities. When you visit a topic page, you will be able to follow the topic and see who else is following the topic. This helps you find experts and collaborators and helps knowledge managers gauge interest in topics.
Post on behalf of another user. After approval is granted, internal communicators can use this feature to share news and updates as well as reply to comments on behalf of leaders and their teams. This new capability is not limited to Yammer admins—any user can choose to delegate access to any other person.
With hybrid work becoming the norm, it will be more important than ever for businesses to keep employees connected and engaged. New Microsoft Viva and Microsoft Teams apps can help businesses create new employee experiences and bring their communities together. To get started contact sales@spanishpoint.ie
