Once the pandemic is over, many companies plan to keep remote teams. This will enable them to stay resilient and benefit from the cost savings and other advantages.
There have been some challenges with the move to work-from-home (WFH) teams. The struggle to keep employees from feeling isolated and cut off has been a tough one. Another issue is the tendency to work longer hours. In fact, 22% of surveyed employees say that they have trouble “unplugging” after work.
Cloud services have made this telecommuting transition possible and they are also being used to improve the employee experience to power both remote and in-office teams.
On the forefront of improved employee experience is Microsoft Viva. This Teams add-in was announced on February 4, 2021 and is described as “The first employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery directly into the flow of people’s work.”
Improving Employee Experience with Microsoft Viva
Microsoft Viva has four components that are designed to work together to enhance an employee’s experience and boost wellbeing and productivity.
The components are:
- Viva Topics: Makes it easier to find and harness company knowledge without long searches through older documents.
- Viva Connections: Improves communication by giving employees a company-branded portal to receive news and other personalized information and resources.
- Viva Insights: Helps prevent overwork and WFH employee burnout through reminders about good work habits and manager insights on how their team is doing.
- Viva Learning: Improves skill development and ongoing learning by consolidating learning opportunities inside Microsoft Teams.
Viva Connections, Personalized Employee Information Portal
Here are some of the ways that Connecticut business owners and managers can use Microsoft Viva to enhance productivity and wellbeing through an improved employee experience.
Bring Company Knowledge to Employees Intuitively
People can spend an average of 1.8 hours every day just searching for information. Some company resources may go underutilized because people just can’t find them or don’t know that they are there.
Viva Topics acts like a proactive librarian for all of your company’s knowledge resources. It can find documents based upon keywords, create topics pages and gather similar resources together. It can then serve those page links up to employees as they need them. For example, if a company policy is mentioned in a Teams chat conversation, that link will be sent to the employees.
This reduces the time spent searching for digital documents and enriches employees with your company’s hard-won collective knowledge.
Strengthen & Streamline Company Communication
When you have a new cloud app policy or project initiative happening, how do you communicate the information to all of your employees?
Only 26% of employees feel that they are up to date on internal company news. This means that many companies are struggling with how to get information distributed in an effective way.
Using Viva Connections, employers can easily push out timely and relevant information to employees in a format that they are used to from social media and online news portals.
Employees get a curated feed from inside Teams with important news, company conversations and other helpful resources.
Promote Healthier & Less Stressed Employees
Many employees that are new to remote working will find themselves working longer hours after switching to a home office. It can be more difficult to stop working at the end of the day and some employees may feel that they need to work more hours to prove that they are working just as hard as when they were in the office.
However, stress and overwork are not good for productivity. Helping employees to be aware that they still need to take breaks and giving them tips about doing a “mental commute” between home and work can help ward off burnout.
This is exactly what Viva Insights does. It provides regular tips and reminders about work-life balance and wellbeing to help employees destress throughout the day.
The tool also has insights specifically for managers and leaders that provide details on how the team is doing as far as work-life balance and provides suggestions for improvements to enhance team wellbeing.
Make Training a Natural Part of the Day
Employees that don’t feel that their company invests in their career development may end up leaving a company because they feel stuck or unappreciated. Many small businesses would like to have some type of employee development program but are not sure what that looks like or how to begin.
Viva Learning makes the process of ongoing training and development much less complicated by bringing courses and learning tools into Teams and making it simple for managers to share resources with employees and employees to find those that they are interested in.
The tool can consolidate courses from multiple learning management systems and platforms, including LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, SAP SuccessFactors and many others.
Put Together a Productive Team With the Right Technology Tools
Sound Computers can help your Connecticut business foster an efficient and productive remote workforce using the right technology tools.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Call 860-577-8060 or reach us online.