Microsoft Viva is an integrated employee experience platform built within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams that gives you the ability to support connection, insight, purpose, and growth in your organization using your existing infrastructure. 

There are four viva experiences: 

  • Connection: Keep everyone informed, included, and inspired (Viva Connections and Viva Engage, Viva Amplify) 
  • Insight: Improve productivity and well-being with actionable insights (Viva Insights and Viva Pulse) 
  • Purpose: Align people's work to the team's or organization's goals (Viva Goals)
  • Growth: Help employees learn, grow and succeed (Viva Learning and Viva Topics) 

Viva Connections 

Viva Connections is a Microsoft Teams app that is positioned as the "home" for Viva. It provides users a personalised and interactive experience by curating from SharePoint sites, Viva Engage discussions, and Stream. It's also the hub for other Viva apps and Microsoft 365 integrations.  

It's made up of three components: 

  • Dashboard – This is where you can create a customised dashboard for your employees with cards that make it easy for them to access popular resources and complete daily tasks - e.g., reporting time, expense approvals.
  • Feed – Allows you to deliver content like news and announcements directly to employees within Teams. The content is dynamic and is displayed based on which sites and Viva engage communities they follow.
  • Resources – This is the place employees can go to access helpful forms, websites, policies, tools, and any other links to destinations believe are useful to your company.  

Viva Connections allows users to access all the tools, conversations, and resources they need without needing to leave Teams.  


Viva Engage 

Viva Engage is that platform where employees can connect and have conversations - it brings the social element to Viva. You can use the Viva engage platform to have conversations with your colleagues, ask questions, host virtual events, make announcements, create storylines etc. 

It is essentially just a rebrand of Yammer, which some additional premium features now available: 

  • Leadership corner – See and participate in activities from leaders, take surveys, join the discussion with hashtag campaigns and AMAs, and connect with new leaders across the organization. 
  • Answers in Viva – Find answers through a combination of semantic search and crowdsourced responses. Harness expertise, crowdsource answers, and capture and preserve knowledge. 
  • Advanced storylines – this is where you can publish storyline posts and stories on behalf of another user, to amplify topics that are top-of-mind for leaders and employees. 
  • Community campaigns – Create and manage organization-wide campaigns with dedicated campaign pages that aggregate posts from across your network into a unified view. Analytics make it easier to set goals and improve your reach. 

In summary, Viva Connections and Viva Engage are both for the purpose for connecting and informing people, but in different ways. Connections is the 'home' for Viva and the acts as the gateway to your employee experience and provides a curated workspaces with resources and information for each employee. Viva Engage provides the social layer to Viva & M365, where employees can post, ask questions, share learnings, build their network etc. 


Viva Insights 

Provides data-driven insights and recommendations to improve employee productivity and wellbeing. It has Personal Insights, which are only visible to you, which is the briefing emails in Outlook of the personal Viva Insights app users can access via a web browser or Teams. The Personal Insights app reveals insights to the way in which work and provides recommendations for improvements such as booking focus time sessions. 

Viva Insights has Team and Organisation insights that are available to managers. The Teams Insights help provide insight into what employee habits and behaviours, such as regular after-hours work, may lead to burnout or stress. The Organisations Insights help leaders to see how their work culture is impacting employee welling and includes reports and recommendations to show how changes can improve business outcomes. There is also advanced insights, which is very similar to organisation insights, and enables leaders to address critical questions about organisation resiliency and work culture am how it may be impacting their staff and business.  


Viva Goals  

Viva Goals is a goal setting and management solution that leverages "Objectives and Key Results" (OKRs), a proven goal setting framework used to define measurable goals, create alignment, and track outcomes. Organisations can create OKRs at an organisation level, and then specific teams will then create OKRs at the team level that are taken from and support the organisation objectives. As teams make progress on their objectives, they are contributing to the overall progression of the associated higher-level objectives. You can also allow users to set up their own OKRs.  

Viva Goals is an empowering experience for employees and helps them form a clear understanding of how their work fits into the greater business and enable teams to manage and keep of the progress of their own goals.  


Viva Learning 

Viva Learning brings enterprise learning into the flow of work by connecting content from your organisation, Learning Management Systems, third-party providers, and Microsoft. It curates learning content, such as courses videos, eBooks, and audio from various sources and brings it together into one place in Microsoft Teams, the Viva Learning app, for the learning content to be consumed by employees. By default, and with the Viva Learning features that are included in the M365 and O365 licenses, you can access courses from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and Microsoft 365 Training. The premium features allow customers to add content from third-party providers, their SharePoint, and other learning management systems, and give managers the ability to recommend content to their team and track their progress completing the content. 

The Viva Learning platform is a helpful tool for onboarding employees as it makes it easy for new employees to find and access training content, and for existing employees to learn new skills and refresh their knowledge. 


Viva Topics 

Viva Topics uses AI to curate information topics specific to your organisation. As you read content stored in M365, topics will be highlighted inline, and when you hover over the topic name, you'll see more information shown in a topic card.  

It can be particularly help for new employees who have to learn the new terms and acronyms used by the company and may have trouble finding project files and the right people to contact for questions or more information - so Viva Topics takes care of this automatically collecting and providing access to it. 

The Microsoft Viva Topic Center can be accessed by opening the Viva Topics app directly in Teams, however the AI curated topics are displayed in many places including: 

  • Topics highlighted on SharePoint pages 
  • Topic answers in search results 
  • Search in office applications 
  • Topic center 

Both Viva Learning and Viva Topics support learning and growth, but in different ways. Viva Learning leverages formal learning content from multiple sources, external and internal, to provide social learning with tracked progress, whereas Viva Topics uses AI to curate content on topics in your organisation and leverages only internal content to provide information inline in the M365 apps.  


Viva Amplify 

Viva Amplify is a tool that provides centralised campaign management, multi-channel publishing and reporting capabilities to help streamline and centralise corporate communications, helping leaders reach and engage their employees. It gives you a single view where you can plan and execute campaigns and can see insights as to how the communication landed with the audience with the reporting and analytics features. 

There is a catalogue with the following seven campaign templates:

  • New employee onboarding 
  • Benefits enrolment 
  • Project Updates
  • Charitable giving
  • Training
  • New technology changes
  • Letters from executives 

Each of these templates outline the full campaign brief, setup, communication channels, objectives, and key messages.  

With Amplify, you can one place to manage the entire lifecycle of your campaigns, schedule posts, manage approvals, and use the sentiment analysis to help adjust publications and continuously improve your messaging.  


Viva Glint 

Viva Glint is a platform that provides visibility into the organisational health, and by enabling organisations to measure and improve employee engagement and capture feedback with survey programs that cover engagement, lifecycle, culture, diversity, development, and manager and team effectiveness. It uses AI to analysis feedback and make connections between work and employee sentiment and provides improvement actions and suggest focus areas.   

With Viva Glint you can run organisation wide surveys or surveys for specific business units, and the programs are available for different cadences with recurring surveys, ad hoc surveys, and always on feedback surveys.  


Viva Pulse 

Viva Pulse enables managers and project leads to request regular and confidential feedback from their team, using preset research-validated or custom surveys in Microsoft Teams. Equipping managers to request ad-hoc feedback enables them to better understand their Teams unique needs, and have insight into the team sentiment, so they can better support and manage them.  

The key difference between Glint and Pulse is that Glint surveys are usually championed by company headers and facilitated by HR and are often run on a quarterly, biannual, or annual basis. Whereas Pulse surveys are run by managers and project team leads and can be run whenever needed to get feedback in-between the org-wide surveys run through Glint.  

With Pulse, it's intended to give managers and project leads private insight to help them address their team needs in the moment and enable them to request continuous feedback so they can understand what their unique team needs at it changes over time, and support managerial growth. Whereas Glint is more looking at the big picture with org-wide surveys that are run to help improve the overall company culture and provide insights to the employee experience across the employee journey so they can understand the employee voice.