The world has gone through many changes over the past year, and one of the most significant has been a dramatic trend towards remote work.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic’s arrival, many had been resistant to this change for several reasons, but they have since discovered its benefits through forced use of remote work. It is likely that it will now remain to a significant degree.
On Thursday, Microsoft announced its release of Viva, an “employee experience platform” intended to assist with this new world.
Viva will help unify employee and employer experiences for those who are mostly connected with each other via the internet and may never meet their co-workers, supervisors or staff in person.
Its focus will be on improving the intranet – internal sites and tools – that tend to be used in these situations. Simply put, Viva is designed to help those who are remote feel just as much a part of the company as others do.
This platform is separated into four main parts.
Viva Connections provides internal communications, such as policies and resource groups.
Viva Insights is intended to give those at these companies insights into how everyone can thrive while protecting employees’ privacy.
Viva Learning provides learning courses, primarily designed to help employees develop themselves.
Viva Topis is similar but focuses more on company-wide information sharing.
Those at Microsoft likely saw how companies such as Limeade and Qualtrics have started offering these types of tools to employers and employees and wanted to ensure that it was not left behind and would be able to offer something themselves, something that, in their mind, would also be an improvement on those earlier offerings by their competitors.
Viva has not been rolled out completely, but it will be made available in phases, the first of which were released on Thursday. It should be available in its entirety over the coming months.
Microsoft is a company that has benefited greatly on a financial scale from this pandemic as so many have turned to its already existing resources to help them work from home and oversee employees who are doing so. For example, its profits increased 33% during the final quarter of the 2020 calendar year. However, it also knows that it is going to continue to experience competitiveness within its industry.
Many of the reasons why employees and employers have both started to embrace working from home, meaning including once this pandemic is not impacting our lives to the degree that it has, is due to how productive employees tend to continue to be. By some reports, they are even more productive in these settings. Meanwhile, employees are also enjoying aspects such as greater levels of flexibility.