Company reimagines fragmented $300 billion market to bring tools for employee communications, wellbeing, learning and knowledge discovery into the flow of work

SINGAPORE- Media OutReach - 5 February 2021 - Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announcedMicrosoft Viva, the first employee experience platform to bring tools foremployee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly intothe flow of people's work. Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow andthrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity andcollaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

"We have participated in the largest at-scaleremote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact onthe employee experience," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. "Everyorganization will require a unified employee experience from onboarding andcollaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings togethereverything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single,integrated experience directly in Teams."

The announcement comes as economic and socialtrends are driving durable changes in workforce engagement. Amid the shift toan increasingly distributed and digital work environment, demand has grown forsolutions that support corporate culture, knowledge discovery, on-the-joblearning and employee wellbeing. Analysts size the nascent Employee ExperiencePlatforms (EXP) category at $300 billion in annual spend. It spans what istoday a fragmented market of services, infrastructure and hundreds of tools,many that go undiscovered and underutilized by employees at the companies thathave invested in them.

"As the world of work changes, the nexthorizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement andwellbeing so organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity,"said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. "Our vision is todeliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations createa thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders."

Microsoft Viva builds on the power of Teamsand Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas --Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning and Knowledge -- in an integrated experiencethat empowers people to be their best. Today, Microsoft is announcing aninitial set of modules in Viva that will provide built-in capabilities,integrations from a strong and growing ecosystem of Viva partners, and platformextensibility that will enable customers to integrate their existing employeeexperience systems and tools with Viva to make them more accessible anddiscoverable to employees:

• Viva Connections providesa personalized gateway to your digital workplace where employees can accessinternal communications and company resources like policies and benefits andparticipate in communities like employee resource groups, all from a singlecustomizable app in Microsoft Teams. The Connections app for Teams will beavailable on desktop in public preview the first half of 2021 with a mobile appcoming later this year.
• Viva Insights givesindividuals, managers and leaders personalized and actionable insights thathelp everyone in an organization thrive. Personal experiences and insights,visible only to the employee, help individuals protect time for regular breaks,focused work and learning, as well as strengthen relationships with theircolleagues. Managers and leaders can see trends at team and organization level,as well as recommendations to better balance productivity and wellbeing. Theinsights are aggregated and deidentified by default to maintain personalprivacy. In addition, a new dashboard allows organizations to combine employeefeedback from LinkedIn's Glint with collaboration data from Viva Insights,enabling leaders to more accurately identify where teams may be struggling,proactively adjust work norms, and then quantify the impact of those changesover time. In addition to using data and signals from Microsoft apps, customerswill also be able to incorporate data from third-party services like Zoom,Slack, Workday and SAP SuccessFactors. The Viva Insights app in Teams and thenew Glint and Viva Insights dashboard are now available in public preview.
• Viva Learning makestraining and professional development opportunities more discoverable andaccessible in the flow of work. It aggregates all the learning resourcesavailable to an organization in one place, including content from LinkedInLearning; Microsoft Learn; third-party providers including Skillsoft, Coursera,Pluralsight and edX; as well as an organization's own content library. Fromtraditional learning courses to microlearning content, users can discover,share, assign and track a wide variety of learning as a natural part of theworkday. The Viva Learning app is now available in private preview, andstarting later this year Viva Learning will offer integrations with leadinglearning management systems, including Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba and SAPSuccessFactors.
• Viva Topics deliversa knowledge discovery experience that helps people connect to information andexperts across the company. Using AI to reason over a customer's Microsoft 365data, and with the ability to integrate knowledge from a variety of third-partyservices such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, Viva Topics automatically surfacestopic cards within conversations and documents across Microsoft 365 and Teams.Clicking on a card opens a topic page with related documents, conversations,videos and people. Viva Topics is now generally available as an add-on toMicrosoft 365 commercial plans.

"Microsoft Viva is a groundbreaking EmployeeExperience Platform, ushering in a new enterprise software category thatfocuses entirely on the daily needs of employees at work," said Josh Bersin,research analyst and noted expert on employee experience technology. "Viva willenable companies to integrate their fragmented workplace tools and provide themin the flow of work."

A global network of services partners,including Accenture, Avanade, PwC and EY will provide consulting and advisoryservices to help customers optimize their existing employee experienceinvestments by bringing them together with Microsoft Viva.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables digitaltransformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Itsmission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achievemore.