Microsoft unveils new employee experience platform

MICROSOFT has launched the first employee experience platform, Viva, to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery directly into the flow of people’s work.

The announcement comes as economic and social trends are driving durable changes in workforce engagement. Amid the shift to an increasingly distributed and digital work environment, demand has grown for solutions that support corporate culture, knowledge discovery, on-the-job learning and employee wellbeing.

Analysts size the nascent Employee Experience Platforms (EXP) category at $300 billion in annual spend. It spans what is today a fragmented market of services, infrastructure and hundreds of tools, many that go undiscovered and underutilized by employees at the companies that have invested in them.

According to the Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft, Satya Nadella, Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow and thrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity and collaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

Nadella, further noted that:”We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience.

“Every organisation will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth.

“Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams.”

Corporate vice president, Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro, said:”As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and wellbeing so organisations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity.

“Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organisations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders.”

Microsoft is announcing an initial set of modules in Viva that will provide built-in capabilities, integrations from a strong and growing ecosystem of Viva partners, and platform extensibility that will enable customers to integrate their existing employee experience systems and tools with Viva to make them more accessible and discoverable to employees