Copilot in Microsoft Viva – Engagement and Performance

Introducing Copilot in Microsoft Viva—A new way to boost employee engagement and performance.

Building on last month’s announcement of Microsoft 365 Copilot,¹ we’re excited to announce Copilot in Microsoft Viva, along with the introduction of Microsoft Viva Glint, to help organizations create a more engaged and productive workforce.

In today’s fast-paced business world, employee productivity is seen as key to driving performance—and that’s certainly true. But it’s important to remember that productivity alone cannot lead to sustained success. In fact, relying solely on productivity stifles creativity, limits teamwork, and increases employee burnout. Our latest research² reveals the most successful organizations are those that prioritize both productivity and employee engagement—businesses with an engaged workforce performed twice as well financially compared to those with a disengaged workforce.³

With Copilot, Microsoft Viva takes advantage of next-generation AI to accelerate this new performance equation, where engagement and productivity lead to better business outcomes and success. Copilot in Viva is built on the Microsoft 365 Copilot System, which combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Viva apps to give leaders an entirely new way to understand and engage their workforce.

Drive clarity and alignment across your workforce with Copilot in Viva

While hybrid work has given us more flexibility, it has also made it harder to create clarity and alignment around company and team priorities. In our recent 2023 State of Goal Setting Report conducted by Forrester Consulting, 50 percent of surveyed practitioners stated that having more clarity around their goals gives them a greater sense of purpose and motivates them to work harder. But offering this clarity continues to be a challenge—only 39 percent of practitioners understand organization-level goals.⁴

Copilot in Microsoft Viva Goals simplifies goal setting by guiding leaders through the process of creating objectives and key results (OKRs) as well as simplifying goal management across the organization. Copilot can suggest draft OKR recommendations based on existing Word documents, such as an annual business plan or a product strategy paper. Once created, Copilot saves employees time by summarizing the status of OKRs, identifying blockers, and suggesting next steps. Lastly, Copilot can consolidate existing data to generate more comprehensive check-ins so teams can leverage a breadth of knowledge across different sources of truth.

Uplevel communication and equip employees for success

Our latest research also suggests that high-performing organizations benefit from strong leadership communications and engagement with employees. In the new hybrid world, leaders need to connect across remote and in-person employees, inspire and inform them, and create listening engines to assess workforce sentiment. In fact, 96 percent of leaders say effective communication is the most critical skill they’ll need in the year ahead.⁵

Copilot in Microsoft Viva Engage helps leaders create compelling and inspiring posts from simple prompts or trending topics within workplace communities and storyline conversations. Copilot offers suggestions to personalize messages with options to adjust tone and length and to suggest relevant images, all to help drive authenticity and engagement. Further, leaders can utilize Copilot to analyze engagement metrics, assess sentiment, and recommend responses.

In addition to ensuring great communications, it’s critical that the workforce has the skills and learning needed to stay engaged and productive. Copilot in Microsoft Viva Learning suggests curated learning collections and concise knowledge summaries tailored to specific roles or development needs—making it easier and more effortless for leaders to help skill and train the workforce.

With Copilot in Microsoft Viva Topics, employees can use a conversational interface to learn more about important topics as well as see related topics and projects. Copilot in Answers helps users construct questions with the appropriate specificity and completeness as well as extracts the pertinent topics to help categorize the question. Copilot in Answers also assists experts in constructing complete answers by citing and including the appropriate references, resources, and experts.

Use data to measure and continuously improve your business with Viva Glint

Our research also suggests that the most successful organizations are those that embrace a model of continuous data-driven analytics and insights to drive improvements in organizational productivity and workforce engagement. However, 75 percent of employees (and 80 percent of managers) think their company does not solicit feedback often enough.⁵

We announced last year that Glint would join the Viva family.⁶ Glint helps leading organizations measure and improve employee engagement to drive business outcomes. Today, we’re announcing Viva Glint will formally join the Viva Suite in July 2023. Additionally, we’re excited to share that Copilot will come to Viva Glint, helping to summarize and analyze thousands of employee comments and providing leaders with a fresh way to explore feedback by asking questions through natural language. Further, Viva Glint will help leaders accelerate and deepen organizational understanding by bringing together aggregated employee engagement data coupled with behavioral and collaboration data from Viva Insights and the Microsoft Graph.

Responsible AI

Just like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot in Viva is built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to Responsible AI. Copilot automatically inherits your organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies for Microsoft 365, so you know it’s enterprise-ready. Our work is guided by decades of research on AI, grounding and privacy-preserving machine learning as well as our Responsible AI Standard and a core set of AI principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.

Looking ahead at Copilot in Microsoft Viva

Copilot in Microsoft Viva will begin rolling out to customers later in 2023. You can take a look at our overview videos and sign up to stay informed about Copilot in Viva.

Viva Glint will start rolling out to customers in July 2023.