How Microsoft Leverages Viva for Successful Business Transformation
Business transformation is a complex, ongoing process that’s deeply rooted in an organization’s culture. This makes effective change management essential, especially when introducing new technologies. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT arm, we’ve spent decades leading technological change to enhance innovation and improve employee experiences. To ensure that our technology implementations align with our culture, we utilize a powerful suite of tools designed to meet employees where they are and how they work. The core of our business transformation efforts? Microsoft Viva.
Viva is more than just a collection of employee experience applications. While we use these tools for everyday tasks and team connectivity, Viva’s connected, integrated, and human-focused features are especially effective in helping teams, leaders, and employees transform their work at a fundamental level. In 2024, we implemented these tools to support a groundbreaking business transformation: the integration of AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot. This experience provided us with valuable lessons that can help any organization use Viva to guide change effectively.
Transformation Starts with Culture
At Microsoft, we foster a strong culture that embraces a growth mindset, achievement, and inclusivity. When driving transformation and adopting new technologies like Copilot, we build upon these cultural values. “Everything we do links back to our culture,” says David Laves, Director of Business Programs at Microsoft. “This means we focus on the people side of change and adopt a human-centered approach that prioritizes the user’s experience.”
In practice, people-centric transformation relies on open, two-way communication that always emphasizes the ‘why’ behind any change. It requires organizational leaders to champion the culture. We continually ask ourselves how to engage and support our employees:
- How do we generate awareness and motivation in scalable ways?
- How do we understand employee sentiment before, during, and after the transformation, and how can we track our progress effectively?
- How do we build the knowledge, skills, and confidence to maximize impact across our workforce?
“Having a learn-it-all rather than know-it-all culture implies that we need to listen to our users,” states Kirk Gregersen, Corporate Vice President leading product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences. “We recognize that technology alone can’t solve everything, and we need to align transformation with people’s needs.”
Human-Centric Transformation at Scale
Microsoft’s size amplifies transformation challenges. With operations spanning numerous geographies and business units, each with its own priorities, finding a common thread requires significant effort. We navigate a multitude of languages, regulatory frameworks, and even holidays. Truly transforming an organization also involves managing the interplay between broad strategic shifts and tactical change management. Individual mind shifts, motivation, and cultural buy-in are essential for a successful implementation.
“It’s about ensuring every employee knows there’s a transition happening, understands why, and feels included in our long-term goals,” Laves says. Alongside these transformation efforts, there’s the ongoing need to support teams and maintain focus on objectives.
“People have their daily tasks, with demands on their time beyond adopting new technologies,” says Kevin Wooldridge, Senior Director within Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Operations Officer. “Therefore, we must provide access to relevant content and experiences tailored to their work and timelines.”
Furthermore, the continuous nature of business change means that strategy must be both robust and flexible to avoid becoming irrelevant or causing employee burnout.
“Change is constant at the business-wide, team, and personal levels,” says Dee Brake, strategic planning lead and principal program manager for Microsoft Viva Customer Experience. “Change always originates in the minds of individuals before it manifests as behavior or organizational transformation.”
Driving Change with Microsoft Viva
Business transformation needs a clear, enduring vision. From there, collaboration between technical and change management experts is essential to create strategic alignment and a holistic plan. This is where Microsoft Viva becomes particularly valuable.
“Understanding how an organization operates and the motivations behind it, then aligning employees’ aspirations with the company’s objectives is the basis of our discovery process,” says Prerna Ajmera, General Manager of HR Digital Strategy and Innovation at Microsoft. “Our role is enable these organizational changes with technology. Viva’s focus on understanding needs combined with promoting personalized adoption is crucial in achieving our goals.”
Microsoft Adoption Framework
Our Microsoft adoption framework helps us organize business transformation efforts into four key stages:
- Get Ready: Identify opportunities, secure sponsorship, and apply insights to the planning process.
- Onboard and Engage: Drive awareness, provide opportunities for knowledge and skill building, and scale across communities.
- Deliver Impact: Build communities of practice, highlight wins, and address knowledge or skill gaps.
- Extend and Optimize: Conduct employee listening, measure outcomes, and explore opportunities for further maturity.
We launched our organization-wide adoption initiative for Microsoft 365 Copilot, our first major internal technology transformation using Microsoft Viva, in early 2024. This wasn’t just a product rollout; it was embracing an AI-first approach to reimagine how we work.
Microsoft Viva operates seamlessly within existing workspaces and workflows, which was vital for enabling widespread and significant change. “It’s a natural fit because the components for awareness, engagement, and insight are built-in,” asserts Wooldridge. “Instead of employees receiving disjointed information for each change management goal, they embark on a structured journey that change management leaders can monitor and adjust as needed.”
Get Ready
The first stage of transformation focuses on measurement, planning, and setting goals. For our Copilot rollout, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint were critical for establishing baseline usage data and initial employee sentiment. The Copilot Dashboard within Viva Insights provided essential usage data and allowed us to align our change efforts with our employees’ individual aspects, their roles, and usage data organization methods. This dashboard also provided change leaders and managers with relevant information to guide the transformation.
Meanwhile, team surveys in Viva Pulse and organization-wide questionnaires in Viva Glint gave prospective users a voice. Together, these provided change leaders with an understanding of employees’ needs and how they felt. From this internal experience, we gained insights into sentiments that are useful for organizations implementing AI transformation, and we’ve packaged them into templates that can be used to assess your own organization’s Copilot readiness or sentiment.
During this phase, we established our change charter, defined objectives, identified essential team members, and created the success components. These metrics included the percentage of adopters, the number of users trained, and the number of communications delivered. Lastly, Viva Amplify greatly aided change management professionals in communicating with leaders and securing executive sponsorship. This high-level support was essential for driving ongoing change. The collaborative campaign creation and flexible audiences within Amplify facilitated the crafting and delivery of messages for potential leadership sponsors and their communication teams.
Onboard and Engage
Onboarding and engaging employees during our Copilot transformation involved communication, skilling, and community development. Viva Amplify was at the center of our communication strategies. Its ability to distribute campaigns from multiple sources across channels, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Engage, made it instrumental in providing different touchpoints for adoption communications. These communications largely contained product documentation, provided tips for quick wins, and highlighted skilling opportunities.
To facilitate that skilling, we tailored the curriculum in Viva Learning to our employees’ needs. The app’s flexibility allowed for multiple learning formats, from self-directed courses to videos and live sessions, culminating in the Copilot Academy. As our Copilot implementation has grown alongside the product’s rapid evolution, we have adapted these learnings to match with the evolving needs of our employees, delivering significant results. Internally, employees who accessed the Copilot Academy saw twice as many days of Copilot usage, 5% more engagement, and better Copilot adoption within Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 applications. Because Microsoft values its culture, community-driven adoption was essential to the Copilot transformation. Viva Engage provided a place for community leaders to hone their skills as Copilot leaders in our Copilot Champs Community while also enabling the sharing of tips, inspiration, and learning content across line-of-business communities and other groups. As a personalized news feed, Viva Connections complemented our communications and community efforts. It helped us land the community by surfacing leadership communications and other crucial engagements, such as Camp Copilot, in one place. This multi-week series of hands-on peer-to-peer activations helped employees engage with AI capabilities within the community.
Deliver Impact
Deepening the impact of the Copilot rollout involved collecting employee signals across different areas. We tracked progress against individual and team objectives using the parameters that we established in our readiness phase. Collating analytics and employee sentiment from Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint provided crucial insights that are useful for governing and guiding the transformation. For example, Pulse surveys alerted our team that employees felt overwhelmed by onboarding sessions. In response, we conducted focus groups that helped us build department-specific scenarios and guidance to reveal how our employees could adopt Copilot in their everyday work. Additionally, we conduct regular, organization-wide Glint surveys that include questions about whether employees feel energized and empowered at work (what we call “thriving metrics”). By collating these signals with Copilot usage, our HR team has found that employees who use Copilot at least once every week are more likely to say they’re thriving and take initiative to be more productive.
Communication and community applications have a crucial role in this stage of adoption. Our change managers carefully monitor consumption metrics in Viva Amplify and Viva Engage to determine which approach is most helpful for employees. In a competitive environment, we tested adoption communications through email versus campaigns through Amplify and Engage. Over the course of the trial, conventional communications resulted in a 2.9% increase in monthly active usage. In contrast, the team benefiting from the adoption campaigns through Amplify and Engage saw monthly active usage increase by 6.6%.
Extend and Optimize
Extending and optimizing business transformation creates a cycle, where we harvest insights to refine change management practices and improve with technology. That level of impact requires visibility and effective measurement. Once more, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint collaborated to give a complete picture of the Copilot transformation journey. Those tools were particularly useful for comparing sentiment against behavior data. For example, change leaders observed a jump in Copilot usage after adopting sessions with our engineering team, which was followed by a drop-off. Using Pulse surveys deployed to the relevant teams we realized that the dip in Copilot use correlated with a period of Microsoft 365 usage patterns in the engineers’ use of the product. Therefore, the teams needed to lead adoption work in that area. Through Microsoft 365 adoption drives, we were able to increase the daily active usage of Copilot by 48% on those teams. Viva Amplify and Viva Engage also provided opportunities to deepen our Copilot maturity. Amplify’s messaging centered on transformation progress and further growth opportunities, such as becoming a peer leader or including customer-facing engagements. Engage created a forum for the emerging peer leaders to share their expertise and also helped our change leaders solidify adoption by creating a repository of conversations and knowledge. Leveraging this resource allows users to guide their progress or consult trusted colleagues when seeking help.
Microsoft Viva: A Primary Vehicle for Business Transformation
Real business transformation involves every person in an organization. Microsoft Viva accelerates how we fulfill diverse needs and provide value to employees and the organization as a whole. “Microsoft Viva is one of the few tools that has different levers to pull across the entire change management framework,” states Laves. “Regardless of the change you’re trying to implement, Viva increases the time to see value.” For our change practitioners, the suite enables connections with users. For our employees, it provides support in places where they work every day, such as Microsoft Teams. Managers and directors gain insights and visibility to recognize behaviors and make course corrections. For senior leadership at Microsoft, Viva encourages meaningful sponsorship by connecting directly with employees while monitoring the ROI of the transformation. Those results have shown the power of the applications during our Copilot transformation. In a region where we used Viva to support our rollout, the daily active usage of Copilot increased by 39.6%. In a similar period in a comparable region that did not use Viva during that time, that metric increased by only 4.1%. Usage is only part of the story. Another impact that we measured includes Copilot-assisted hours. The region that did not use Viva saw 5,090 hours. However, the region that did use Viva saw 9,143, demonstrating real time-savings for employees and value to the organization. It shows how Viva is greater than the sum of the individual capabilities. This is a connected, human-centered tool that empowers businesses to transform the experience for both leaders and employees.
“Viva’s all about helping people thrive amidst transformation,” says Gregersen. “At the intersection of how people communicate with each other and how companies communicate with employees, at the junction of how people feel at work with how they do their work, that’s where Viva makes an impact.”
To use Viva as a transformation engine at your company:
- Start with your desired organizational culture, then look at Microsoft Viva’s capabilities to see how they apply.
- Understand that transformation begins and centers on people—so be open to feedback throughout the process.
- Ensure your goals are clear and keep them in mind.
- Viva Engage is one of the most flexible and powerful apps in the suite. It’s a natural place to build awareness and generate desire.
- Pay attention to communication measurements and community tools, which work with other Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook and Teams, to provide insights.
- Measurement is key: Determine and monitor key metrics to understand where you’re getting traction and then adjust to address pockets of resistance or lag.
Are you curious about what Microsoft Viva can do to help drive your business transformation? Try it free today.
