Microsoft Viva Insights represents the work-related aspects based on well-being and productivity of an individual in the company.

It provides people, managers and leaders with personalized information which enables them to help everyone in the organization grow. In addition to the new productivity and health experiences, Viva Insight will also integrate features from “Microsoft Workplace Analytics” and “Microsoft MyAnalytics” over time.

One of the main goals of Viva Insights is to protect privacy. Personal information of an employee is only visible to him-/herself. In this way, users can rely on security measures by default (such as de-identification, aggregation or privacy).

How does Viva Insights work?

Beside of new features, Microsoft Viva Insights integrates features of two other M365-Products: MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics.

The main purpose of these two tools is to evaluate the user’s interaction during his daily life with Microsoft 365 tools. A notably amount of data gets stored and is used for example to see how many e-mails are received, how long a person spends writing emails, how much time is spent in meetings, etc. All these elements are presented in two different ways:

• Personal Insights – where a person can see how he/she is using Microsoft 365, manage his agenda and block timeblocks to focus on activities (focus-time)
• Aggregated information from Workplace Analytics which allows managers and leaders to have a high-level view on the daily productivity of workers. Viva Insights is available for the Desktop- and Mobile version of MS-Teams.

Main Features

The most interesting feature-set is the one for individuals (Personal Insights). However, Microsoft Viva also offers Dashboards for Managers (e.g. Teamleaders, Head of Department) and Leaders (Leadership-Team Members).

Personal Insights

This app has three features: “Home(page)”, “stay connected” tab and “protect time”

Viva Insights Home(page)

The Homepage (just called “Home” in the App) is the first area you see when you open Viva Insights in MS-Teams. On the Viva Insights homepage you can find some useful quick actions for interacting with people and for managing your daily work activities. For example, you can quickly access your tasks, organize moments of Focus for yourself or share information with the company anonymously about your well-being.

###Stay Connected The “stay connected” is one of three tabs in the Viva Insights app. It allows you to stay connected with colleagues, checks your e-mails and calendar and suggests you suitable time-slots to organize one-to-one with your colleagues. This is intended to engage everyone and especially to keep up conversation avoiding that people in the organization feel alone or excluded. Staying in touch with colleagues helps people to maintain strong relationships and fosters the team-spirit.

Protect Time

On the “protect time”-tab, you can find the possibility to book available timeslots to focus on your activities. The available time-slots are proposed based on your calendar information.

The time protection feature allows individuals to easily schedule concentration time so that they can work without interruptions and distractions, before the day (or the week) is filled with meetings and tasks.

Manager Insights

As already mentioned, there are three types of people who can interact with the data collected by Viva Insights. Besides of individual users, managers are also among these three.

When a manager logs into Viva Insights (license is required) he/she will have the opportunity to see reports containing the data relating to his team and direct-workers.

Through the visibility of work models, managers can support and optimize the well-being of their team members. These models are intent to highlight conditions which can result in an employee having a burnout or simply stress. Meeting overload, lack of time to focus on activities or time worked outside business-hours chosen by individuals can be such conditions.

Supported and brought into context by best-practices and research-results of the past years, these insights help managers identify the challenges they mostly face, while supporting the vast work needs and flexibility of employees.

Specifically this aspect of Viva Insights will grow over time with opportunities for managers to create team action plans. Team members receive advices and best-practices which support them in prioritize well-being and increase productivity and managers can gauge progress against team goals over time.

Leader Insights

Last but not least, also leaders do have the chance to interact with the data collected by Viva Insights. Leaders are those who have visibility over the entire company .They are able to see the engagement of people by taking advantages of the amount of Analytics data that comes from the use of Microsoft 365.

A leader can see the use of meetings, the engagement of people, collaboration in the company and consequently, where needed, actions can be taken to intervene.

Microsoft Viva Insights also proposes suggested actions which a company can decide whether to follow or not.

Conclusion

Microsoft Viva Insights shows us how we work, assists us in staying connected with people and reminds us to set regularly focus-time. The idea behind Viva Insight is great. I know some people which may misunderstand Viva Insights with some sort of surveillance-tool, but that’s part of a game called “mindset-change”.

I personally started using Viva Insight just “for fun” and after now 4 weeks I use it without really noticing it. Of course, some of you may just think that clicking on an emoticon every day or being reminded to setup a 1:1 with a colleague may not be a big deal. But exactly because these things are so small, people tend to forget about them.

Also the possibilities for Managers and Leaders to have insights about teams and the entire organisation is a great solution. For me it’s a clear sign of empowerment. With Viva Insight, every hierarchy-level get’s the chance to learn from actual data. So basically if there are any issues, they can be identified at the right level and measures can be put in place quicker.

I am looking forward to see how Viva Insight will become more popular and how which features will be added in the future.