New applications were announced for Microsoft Viva earlier this month. This includes the general availability of Viva Amplify and the introduction of a new Skills product. Keep reading to find out more about this recent update.
Viva Amplify
After extensive research by Microsoft the team has once again identified communication and community as a critical aspect of an engaged and high-performance workforce, which is where Viva Amplify comes in. Viva Amplify is a tool to help organisations with internal communications publishing to create consistent and effective messages across all platforms.
It centralises campaign management, publishing and analytics so business leaders and corporate communicators can connect and engage with all employees. Using multichannel publishing, communicators can publish across the apps and devices for specific employees and can create/manage organisation-wide or targeted campaigns to help inform everyone, create alignment and inspire action from one place. Also, organisations get “robust reporting and analytics” on message campaigns according to this Viva Amplify announcement.
Skills in Viva
Then we have Skills in Viva. Skills in Viva is a new AI-enhanced product for assessing employee skills that “will be included in the Microsoft Viva Suite license at no additional cost and will enter into private preview by the end of 2023,” according to the Microsoft announcement. It’s a product that will help organisations understand workforce skills and gaps, and deliver personalised skills-based experiences throughout Microsoft 365 and Viva applications for employees, business leaders and HR.
Skills in Viva leverages Microsoft Graph data that’s associated with the use of Microsoft 365 applications (such as documents, chats etc.). It also uses the Skills Graph data from the LinkedIn careers site. Microsoft described the LinkedIn Skill Graph as “a dynamic model that leverages real-time signals from 148 industries and over 200 countries to map the global skills landscape, including how 39,000 unique skills relate to each other, to jobs and to learning content.”
Skills in Viva also works with the existing Viva Learning module to show AI-based recommendations to employees. It has a user-confirmed skills capability for employees. These user-confirmed skills show up in the employee’s Microsoft 365 profile card in Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.
Since its launch in 2021, Viva has influenced the employee experience platform category with innovative new technologies. These latest advancements of Skills in Viva and Viva Amplify will provide organisations with a new way to understand workforce culture and take actions to improve engagement and performance while measuring the impact of those actions on business outcomes to create a cycle of continuous improvement.
To find out more about Viva or if you have any questions about the recent announcements, get in touch with the team.
