Microsoft introduces Copilot in Microsoft Viva to boost employee engagement

Kevin Okemwa

Microsoft Viva Goals

Today, Microsoft announced the launch of Copilot in Microsoft Viva alongside Microsoft Viva Glint. Both are designed to help enhance effectiveness, engagement, and productivity at the workplace.

While productivity is a key element in the workplace, by itself alone it’s impossible to achieve success. Instead, it limits creativity, promotes burnout, and disrupts creativity. Per Microsoft’s findings, organizations that pay close to employee engagement tend to “perform twice as well financially.”

With Copilot making its way to Microsoft Viva, it will be possible to leverage its AI capabilities to strike a balance between productivity and employee engagement with the goal of running a successful enterprise.

According to Microsoft:

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.

The company has also discovered that a lot of organizations are finding it difficult to establish clarity as well as alignment when it comes to goal setting, especially after taking on hybrid work.

Microsoft’s 2023 State of Goal Setting Report disclosed that “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.”

However, with Copilot in Microsoft Viva Goals, the goal setting process has been simplified. Leaders will now be guided through the process thus making it easier for them to create objectives and key results (OKRs). What’s more, Copilot ships with a capability that suggests draft OKR recommendations based on existing Word documents.

Additionally, the feature will help save time and resources as it is able to summarize the status of OKRs, identify blockers, and suggest the next steps. It’s also worth noting that it can also consolidate existing data and use it to generate more comprehensive check-ins.

Copilot has also made its way to Microsoft Viva Engage to enhance communication practices at the workplace. Microsoft has indicated that some of the best-performing businesses and organizations exhibit impeccably strong leadership communications and engagement with employees.

As such, heads in organizations can leverage Copilot’s capabilities in Viva Engage to come up with “compelling and inspiring posts from simple prompts or trending topics within workplace communities and storyline conversations.” Furthermore, it can also be used to come up with personalized messages with the ability to adjust the tone depending on the setting or where you are sending the message.

The tool can also be used to analyze engagement metrics, assess sentiment, as well as, recommend responses. As for Viva Learning, users can leverage Copilot’s capabilities to curate learning collections that are tailored to meet each employee’s needs. This way, it’ll be easier to remain engaged and productive.

Copilot is also making its way to Answers and Microsoft Viva Topics, this way employees can learn more about important topics and also have access to complete answers that are fully furnished with appropriate references.

In related news, Microsoft has also announced Viva Glint that’s set to join the Viva suite in July 2023. The tool is designed to help measure and improve employee engagement with the aim of promoting the organization’s success. The company has also indicated that Copilot will make its way to Glint to help summarize the thousands of employee comments thus providing leaders with a new way of interacting with feedback.