How Viva Engage drives employee engagement

Viva Engage may sound familiar to you. In fact, many companies have already begun transitioning from Yammer to Microsoft’s new internal social networking platform. But, what is it really? And how is it changing the way colleagues collaborate with each other?

Viva Engage is integrated into Teams and is similar to Yammer in many ways. When set up effectively, the platform provides employees with a digital place to connect and collaborate. Employees can communicate with each other through Viva Engage in a convenient way like they may do already on social media. Colleagues can easily update each other by posting messages, photos and videos of their work, which can be liked by others. To support this, for example, you could consider sharing an instructional video on how to use smart boards in a conference room. With this feature, employees can easily provide live feedback, reducing the need for email exchanges or note taking during meetings.

A new feature of Viva Engage is Storylines. With Storylines, employees can give an insight into their work life in an authentic and human way. This feature lets users create, upload and share stories (images or videos of up to three minutes), similar to Instagram Stories. Colleagues can ‘follow’ each other just like on social media. For example, managers can show the rest of their team what projects they are working on, and colleagues can easily update each other on external events they are attending. This can help make employees feel more involved in the company.

Viva Engage also caters to measurement fans (like us!). In fact, the platform offers better analytics and insights than Yammer. For example, it is possible to analyze network reach and engagement based on the comments and likes on a post. Viva Engage also offers insights on the sentiment of messages and topics being discussed. This makes it possible to optimize your content and approach to further enhance employee engagement in a way that couldn’t be done on Yammer.

A channel that allows for efficient communication and collaboration, such as Viva Engage, can lead to better engaged employees. And this is of great value to a company, as engaged employees are more efficient, productive, motivated and loyal.

As always, the success of any platform is dependent on a deliberate and strategic approach for rollout and implementation. This approach must enthuse authentic storytellers within the organization to get involved. If you want to know how, or have any other questions about employee engagement, get in touch.