The Work Trend Index Pulse report: Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong? just released by Microsoft shows a growing disconnect between employers and employees. The tech giant also announced new capabilities in Microsoft Viva, its employee experience platform, designed to help empower and energize employees in a time of economic uncertainty.
The data makes clear that hybrid work has created a growing disconnect between employees and leaders. They’re at odds about what constitutes productivity, how to maintain autonomy while ensuring accountability, the benefits of flexibility and the role of the office. To bridge this gap, a new approach is needed that recognizes work is no longer just a place but an experience that needs to transcend time and space so employees can stay engaged and connected no matter where they are working.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft, noted, “Thriving employees are what will give organizations a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic economic environment. Today, we’re announcing new innovations across our employee experience platform Microsoft Viva to help leaders end productivity paranoia, rebuild social capital, and re-recruit and re-energize their employees.”
To help leaders navigate the new realities of work, the Work Trend Index Pulse report points to three urgent pivots every leader should make:
- End productivity paranoia
- Embrace that people come in for each other
- Re-skill to re-recruit your employees
To address these challenges, Microsoft is expanding its employee experience platform Microsoft Viva to help companies deliver an employee experience optimised for the way people now work. Today, Microsoft is announcing several new and enhanced capabilities coming to Viva:
- Viva Pulse is a new app that will enable managers and team leads to seek regular and confidential feedback on their team’s experience. Viva Pulse uses smart templates and research-backed questions to help managers pinpoint what’s working well and where to focus, and also provides suggested learning and actions to address team needs.
- Viva Amplify is a new app that will empower leaders and communicators to elevate their message and reach employees where they are with consistency and impact. The app centralizes communications campaigns, offers writing guidance to improve message resonance, enables publishing across multiple channels and distribution groups in Microsoft 365, and provides metrics for improvement.
- Microsoft recently launched Viva Engage, which fosters digital community building through conversations and self-expression tools with stories and storylines. Leadership Corner is coming to Viva Engage as a space to invite employees to interact directly with leadership, share ideas and perspectives, participate in organization initiatives, and more.
- Viva Goals helps organisations align employee work to business outcomes. New integrations in Viva Goals will bring goals into the flow of work including a richer integration with Microsoft Teams to check in on OKRs, an extension in Azure DevOps to complete work items, a connection to Power BI datasets to track KPIs and Key Results, and integrations with Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project for automatic project management updates
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
