Microsoft Viva celebrates 1 year: transforming the employee experience

The pandemic has fundamentally changed how people value where they work, how they work, and most importantly-why they work. Both the Hybrid Work Paradox and the Great Reshuffle have made it a strategic priority for organizations large and small to transform their culture, values, and operating models to foster human connection, align on a sense of mission, ensure employee wellbeing, and retain their best people.¹ Now more than ever, companies need effective tools that put their people first. One year ago today, we announced Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform (EXP) built for the hybrid era to help accelerate this transformation.

Microsoft Viva empowers organizations to foster a culture where people thrive

In just a year, Viva now has more than 10 million monthly active users. Over 1,000 paying customers-including Blum, Nationwide, Old Mutual, PayPal, REI, and Unilever -are using Microsoft Viva to build a better employee experience, from promoting growth and wellbeing in the digital office to building a connected culture for frontline workers.

Since our initial announcement a year ago, Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning are all generally available. Later this year, Viva customers will also benefit from a new Viva-based objective and key results (OKRs) service powered by our acquisition of Ally.io.

Together with our partners

To help customers realize value from Viva, we've recruited more than 200 Viva solution partners, including global firms like Accenture/Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC, and Tata Consultancy Services, and we've trained more than 5,000 partner individuals-both business consultants and technical architects. We're committed to growing our Viva partner capacity and capabilities in the years to come.

Microsoft Viva is an open and extensible platform that integrates with and enhances your existing HR systems, learning management systems, content providers, and employee workflows. We have established a broad range of partnerships including ServiceNow, Qualtrics, Headspace, Cornerstone OnDemand, Workday, Espressive, OpenSesame, and EdCast, and will continue to bring new partners to the platform. In addition, we are working closely with our LinkedIn colleagues to integrate LinkedIn Learning and Glint into Viva.

At Microsoft, we're on the same journey as our customers in adopting Viva for our own use. In our blog series about the development of Viva, we describe our early envisioning of an EXP as well as the recent progress on our own deployment here at Microsoft. It's our hope that these experiences, which we'll continue to share, will help you discover new ways to empower and support your people.

Looking to the future

Today, as we reflect on our first anniversary, we're both inspired and humbled to see so much passion and enthusiasm from customers as they invest in their own employee experiences-and how Microsoft Viva is playing a pivotal role to help them transform as the world's employee experience platform for the hybrid era.

¹Microsoft and LinkedIn share latest data and innovation for hybrid work, Jared Spataro, Microsoft. September 9, 2021.