Microsoft Viva, beyond the hype

My social media channels blew up yesterday, after Microsoft introduced Viva, “an employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, well being, and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work”.

I don’t think that suddenly Microsoft owns the employee experience – with everyone working in Teams, they already set the standard. Neither do I think this is the end of HR Technology or the employee experience that comes with that. There are pros and cons to adopting Viva and its potential for success, so let’s examine it more closely.

I put my thoughts out on Twitter – so here goes:

This was a long time coming – Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing, and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s workhttps://t.co/ba5Ur6w3yj
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

HRTech vendors’ efforts to own the employee experience usually made life more complex. There is no standard. Every vendor has their own ideas about what experience works best.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

Employees had to learn how to navigate these different experiences, but how often do you really use an HR system? And why should you know which back office function handles your request? @ServiceNow and others to the rescue.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

I’ve said for a long time that HR systems are for HR people and they make employees not more but less productive – and argued Microsoft should own the EXP, because that's where people work, so no surprise there.https://t.co/VwUxHm6lYA
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

Microsoft Viva will provide the unified experience layer and corporate systems can integrate. That might make life easier but let’s be realistic:
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

Sales people spend 80% of time in a CRM. Finance people work in a finance system. That will not change. You can’t offer that functionality in an app.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

This is a solution for knowledge workers who spend the majority of their time in Teams. It covers a considerable amount of employees, but not everyone.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

With the Microsoft announcement came a stream of press releases of vendors like @successfactors and @CornerstoneInc announcing integrations. A very smart publicity move, and one that will guarantee success and adoption.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

If you’ve invested in setting up your L&D environment, with all the info it tracks, are you going to leave it? Probably not. Will you integrate it? Maybe.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

But, corporates will need to do the work. And they’ll need to pay these companies for the integration. And they need to roll out a new experience to their people. Is that project the highest priority today?
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

Having said that, Microsoft has a firm grasp on corporate systems, so they will surely succeed in moving customers to Viva quickly. There’s a lot to like.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

Companies can learn what type of employee engagements works best for their people or what behaviors provide the best results – that’s a huge step forward from the disparate systems and insights of today.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

The opportunity to integrate expansive amounts of behavioral employee data with perception data and provide deep insights is big – and also guaranteed to attract the attention of privacy advocates as well employees (can you opt out?)
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

But this also relies on the content and data of other HR systems and apps, that Microsoft doesn’t not offer – think about mental health, skills repositories etc. And data repositories, history and insights stored elsewhere in different formats.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

Which means for best insights, all that data must be integrated, and that only works if data definitions are unified between all systems. if you’ve ever worked in integration, you know that’s already a huge effort between 2 systems, let alone company-wide.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

Announcing the demise of HR systems, as I’ve seen in some articles, just because of Viva is highly premature. But focused employee experience vendors need to be on alert.
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

And PS: the video? I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Mila as her project progressed. And then it all culminated in a zen moment. How I wish work is like that. https://t.co/AzUlrqnEbs
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021

And PS2: I like where Microsoft is headed – I just don’t like the hype. What do you think?
/end of thread#hrtech #worktech #futureofwork
— Anita Lettink (@Let_Anita) February 5, 2021