Microsoft Viva: The Challenges of Governance, Strategy and Adoption

Introduction to MS Viva Governance | Predictions for MS Viva Governance | MS Viva Governance Challenges

FourSquare Training Article

Predictions for the Adoption of Microsoft Viva

With the release of Microsoft Viva, Microsoft is providing a game-changing platform in the ways in which we engage with our workforces in terms of nurturing and monitoring their development and wellbeing. But Microsoft is also making a huge ask of us. Microsoft Viva is built on the assumption that SMEs and enterprises are 'chomping at the bit' for a seismic epistemological paradigm shift in their company practices and how they manage Human Resources and workforces at one of the most challenging times in their history. This is a huge gamble in the short term which will almost certainly pay off in the medium to long term.

Comparison of the history of SharePoint Adoption with the future of Microsoft Viva Adoption and Governance

Without introducing clear governance policies, strategy and enthusiastic championing, the adoption of Microsoft Viva is not going to be as fast or as smooth as it would otherwise be and Enterprises and SMEs will be less quick to harness its potential and benefits.

Perhaps the best comparison to make in order to explain what I mean would be to look at the earlier years of SharePoint. Companies invested huge sums of money into the software and into SharePoint training, but when it came to the adoption of SharePoint, investment in this was (in the early days) often little more than a 'wing and a prayer' that employees would switch to performing their daily tasks through the medium of SharePoint.

The transition to SharePoint was quite a long road before it hit critical mass in the workplace and became a de facto solution for workforce collaboration and information management.

The difference between the two is to be found in investment and planning. Companies had paid significant amounts of money for SharePoint, had invested in the rollout of the software across organisations and then were reliant upon their employees to use it in order to get value back from it. Most companies that invested in training still didn't have a SharePoint strategy in place or a strategy for championing adoption. Consequently, even with the significant budget investments in Sharepoint, turning the curve to wholesale adoption was a slow process and from SharePoint Portal in 2001 it took until SharePoint 2010 before the software really started to gain significant traction. It was only roughly around the time of SharePoint 2016 when it began to feel like it was reaching a degree of universality.

By contrast, the Microsoft Viva platform has been parachuted into businesses overnight as an integrated add-on for Microsoft 365 nested within Microsoft Teams. In short, organisations have not been through the same planning and procurement process as they had for SharePoint. Organisations had already culturally invested themselves in SharePoint before it landed on anyone's desktop. From initial top-level meetings to decide upon adopting the software, through to the procurement process and rollout process (which already brought SharePoint into the forefront of the minds of a significant proportion of the workforce), none of this has happened with Microsoft Viva.

In short, businesses had a considerable incentive to make Sharepoint work for them in order to justify their investment. By contrast, this will not be the situation when it comes to the adoption of Microsoft Viva and adoption must be almost purely benefit driven which is incentivised through effective championing.

It is going to firstly take a spark of enlightenment amongst HR managers and middle managers as to the value of Microsoft Viva which is then going to need pushing up the management chain for approval for adoption and an organisation-wide approach. Then comes the challenge of disseminating the message amongst the workplace. Since many organisations are already using a blend of EEXP solutions from a variety of technology vendors they are also going to need prising away from these, or at least from the ones that aren't compatible with Viva. This not only entails a potential degree of software license redundancy across the software estate (and consequent written-off losses), it entails a significant shift in the working culture.

Comparison of the history of OpenOffice Adoption with the future of Microsoft Viva Adoption and Governance

Whilst Microsoft Viva is not strictly speaking free software (as part of a subscription package), it nonetheless comes with some of the potential disadvantages of free software. No company has made a deliberate or conscious purchasing decision to procure Microsoft Viva, and as such perhaps it will suffer from the same drawback as free Open Source platforms such as OpenOffice. If you haven't consciously procured a software package then it needs to be incredibly sticky indeed to grow in its adoption to any level of significant penetration. What's more (as with OpenOffice), the availability of training resource and training experts for Microsoft Viva risks being behind the curve. For one thing, no one knew that it was coming and for another it risks not being seen as a top level App bearing in mind that it is predominantly nested within Microsoft Teams.

This is going to create a huge demand for Microsoft Viva governance, strategy and championing before organisations start to fully harness and embrace the platform. The scarcity of training resource was a significant contributing factor towards the death knell of OpenOffice, but this need not be the case with Microsoft Viva since it is already deeply embedded and integrated in our business productivity resources and thus is not going anywhere. Nonetheless a lot will depend upon the extent and enthusiasm of its championing and the response of training providers to the imperatives of governance and strategy training in terms of determining the penetration and reach of its adoption.

This calls to mind one organisation that was proactive in sending a strong message to its workforce regarding SharePoint adoption during 2010. They appointed SharePoint champions in each of their teams and engaged in a poster campaign throughout their buildings before they rolled out their SharePoint training. In short, this was very much a bricks and mortar word-of-mouth campaign. In a digital culture the adoption of Microsoft Viva is going to have to look very different indeed. Viva champions are going to need to put in place effective digital strategies to promote the adoption of Viva amongst their co-workers in the new era of remote working.

Challenges for Microsoft Viva Champions, Governance and Administration

Viva Learning Governance

Microsoft Viva champions are inevitably going to have obstacles to overcome. When it comes to learning and development resources in Viva Learning, for instance, we need to recognise that not all of our colleagues are naturally independant learners who are best suited to a video-on-demand style of learning. It will require a degree of nurturing to help them transition to a higher proportion of personal independant learning and a lower proportion of face-to-face, classroom-based training. This will co-exist with the process of acclimatisation to virtual classroom training which is already taking place. Many learners clung on desperately to the notion that they would wait indefinitely for their training to be available face-to-face again before they embarked upon it and we anticipate that at least some of this reluctance will spill over into the personal learning available through the Viva Learning hub. Microsoft Viva champions will have the task of overseeing a learning culture shift which will need to be enshrined in Viva governance policies with an emphasis upon promoting both the benefits of virtual classroom training and personal, independant learning as replacements for the familiar physical classroom environment. There is further reading available in our article covering the benefits of virtual classroom training here.

It is to be suspected that there is also quite a bold assumption built into Viva Learning that companies will be prepared to take up recommendations made by Viva Learning and then buy staff subscriptions to on-demand video learning services such as LinkedIn Learning. This raises questions as to whether organisations would invest in this for just some of the 'chosen' staff or all of their staff, presenting an ethical quandry of whether to introduce inequitable systems of knowledge winners and knowledge losers within the business and consigning certain sections of the workforce to information poverty and inequity. The other option would be a wholesale adoption of subscription to on-demand video learning for all employees, thereby burning a significant chunk of any training budget.

Such wholesale subscriptions to on-demand video learning to-date has been more the inclination of academic institutions within which the volume of accomplished and motivated independant learners ensures value for money. In the commercial world though the balance is frequently tipped much more towards those who benefit more from live, interactive and instructor-led training.

At the moment it is difficult to anticipate precisely how these Viva Learning course recommendations will play out in the real world but one thing for sure is that organisations will have to make governance decisions upon if and how these services are used, to what extent and how they will undertake blended approaches to workforce learning requirements.

One further consideration here is that of how paid-for subscription content in Viva Learning will compete against equivalent free on-demand learning content from services such as YouTube. Microsoft are betting heavily here that most corporate governance policies will probihit accessing YouTube because of its entertainment content. However, in the world of remote working there is nothing to stop employees accessing such free content on personal devices; something which could also disrupt the accuracy of work / life balance data collected by Viva Insights (see below). As a prediction, it is not impossible to imagine Google breaking up YouTube into YouTube Entertainment and YouTube Learning as a means of maniupulating corporate governance decisions as to whether workforces should be able to access its content on company devices and thus creating a gateway to a vast corporate audience of home workers and displacing Viva Learning's bias towards Microsoft-owned learning platforms.

Note: For eLearning authoring DTP courses see our Adobe Captivate, Articulate 360 and TechSmith Camtasia courses.

Viva Insights Governance

By far the most governance intensive hub in the Microsoft Viva platform is going to be Viva Insights. When it comes to monitoring wellbeing alone, it is going to take considerable and sensitive interventions for a majority of colleagues to feel comfortable with giving regular 'touchy-feely' updates on how they are doing through Viva Insights.

And then what do you do if Viva Insights analytics evidences that remote staff, teams and departments are not happy, suffering from stress, fatigue or feelings of isolation and loneliness? A Teams call and a couple of emojis are not going to cut it. With the adoption of Viva InSights companies are going to need well-thought-out governance policies and workflows which trigger positive interventions and actions when such results come to light. These might often be already in place within larger organisations but for smaller organisations this is going to present challenges and possibly worrying bottlenecks when you are first presented with staff data which obviously requires a sensitive, timely and effective intervention but with no clear workflow or process to take you in the direction of positive resolution. Notifications to take action such as switching off alerts, prioritising workloads or ring-fencing calendars are afterall all only limited mechanical interventions to reduce pressure on staff and no real substitute for more personal intervention. With the knowledge provided by Insights' wellbeing analytics comes the responsibility for a very hands-on and human approach.

It is also reasonable to assume that since Microsoft Viva is new, many of its team administrators will be newly appointed to the role too, and they are going to need to be able to act upon staff well-being analytics in a manner that is simultaneously standardised and personal. This is going to force companies to address staff wellbeing in ways that they might not previously have considered as it is pushed further to the fore of managerial attention. Add on to this the emerging challenges of mass remote working and the new challenges for workforce wellbeing that it poses, the magnitude of the task of taking positive actions from Viva Insights analytics data becomes all the more apparent.

In fact, in the era of digital working, a question just as relevant to the question 'how do you feel?' is probably 'what do you need?'. Having the right hardware, technology and working environment when away from the office is something that many organisations never got the opportunity to think through with the speed of the sudden exodus from company premises in early 2020. Viva Insights should provide an opportunity to redress this in instances where this has not already been done. The answers could require unforseen investment. For instance, how many remote workers would benefit significantly from having a decent-sized screen and a proper office chair when they are currently working on a small laptop from a coffee table? With the real challenges of home working, noise cancelling headsets might even be the solution to drawing a meaningful line between work life and home life and nurturing an effective work/ life balance. Viva Insights will need to incorporate such practical analytics into its wellbeing governance in order to bring real positive change and workforce benefit.

Yet again, Microsoft Viva Insights has privacy and data protection built in, but this message will need to get out to workforces in an effective and reassuring way. Viva Champions are going to need to be able to effectively build trust over such issues.

Governance decisions will play a strong role in how accurate, useful and relevant Viva Insights analytics data proves to be. For instance, if staff are using business devices for personal use and personal devices for work then any work / life balance data which is collected is going to be immediately misleading. For that matter, we might anticipate that a considerable amount of school homework is being done on business devices every day. Governance stakeholders will need to address such issues carefully but also effectively and sympathetically as part of their approach to implementing Microsoft Viva Insights.

Viva Topics Governance

Viva Topics also represents some challenges when it comes to adoption. As a machine learning, AI curated information and knowledge repository, its success could largely depend upon the volume and quality of in-house information resources rather than generic knowledge resources. A lot is going to depend upon how heavily organisations have invested in this previously and integrated it into their Microsoft information resources. With Viva Topics its not just a matter of adoption but also putting relevant information resources in place to ensure that people don't surf down information rabbit-holes which end up being displacement activities rather than having direct in-house productivity relevance.

Viva Connections Governance

When it comes to Viva Connections, this is going to present many of the same challenges as a conventional intranet and as SharePoint itself. Standardised branding and careful curation is going to be required at all levels from top-level company wide, down to departments and teams. This will require the appointment of administrators to oversee and manage the experience of user groups at a granular level.

Microsoft Viva Governance Conclusion

In conclusion, a strong culture of governance and championing is going to need to exist alongside Microsoft Viva in order to ensure effective and positive adoption in a way that brings true value to business. And, the arrival of Microsoft Viva represents the very beginning of a long cultural journey for business as a whole before user engagement is fully mature across a significant proportion of organisations.

To speak to us about your Microsoft Viva training requirements

call 0844 493 3699,
or email training@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

and we will gladly arrange a discussion with a trainer for you.