Microsoft Viva Employee Experience Enterprise (2026)

The modern intranet inside Microsoft Teams

Viva Connections is the curated employee landing experience that surfaces the corporate intranet, news, resources, and personalised content directly inside Microsoft Teams. It is the front door to the digital workplace — a single pinned tab the entire workforce sees on sign-in, regardless of device or role. Connections is built on top of SharePoint Online, so the content investment customers have already made carries forward without rework.

• Personalised feed combining corporate news, leader posts, recommended resources, and audience-targeted announcements.
• Dashboards with role-targeted cards — payslips for hourly workers, key-account dashboards for sales, incident-tracker cards for IT operations.
• Resources section that surfaces the SharePoint hub structure, frequently used apps, and approved third-party tools.
• Mobile-first design supports frontline workers on iOS and Android with the same content surface as desktop knowledge workers.
• Audience targeting through Microsoft Entra ID groups means every employee sees what is relevant to their role and location.

Enterprise social, communities, and leadership conversation

Viva Engage is the rebranded and expanded successor to Yammer — the enterprise social layer where communities, leadership broadcasts, storyline posts, AMA sessions, and crowd-sourced answers live. Engage is built for the conversations that span functional silos and that benefit from being public to the whole organisation rather than confined to a Teams channel. The Engage app surfaces in Microsoft Teams as a tab and stands alone on web and mobile.

• Communities for cross-functional groups — affinity networks, professional practice areas, regional employee circles.
• Storyline — personal posts for every employee, with a particular focus on leadership communication and executive presence.
• Leadership Corner and Answers in Viva for executive AMAs and crowd-sourced Q&A at organisational scale.
• Campaigns for orchestrated multi-week initiatives — launches, all-hands cycles, wellbeing programmes.
• Native Microsoft Teams integration with channel pinning, embedded conversations, and unified notifications.

Productivity and wellbeing analytics grounded in Microsoft 365 telemetry

Viva Insights gives individuals, managers, and leaders Microsoft 365-grounded analytics about how time is being spent — meetings, focus time, after-hours work, collaboration patterns, manager one-on-one cadence. Insights ships in three tiers: personal insights surfaced to every Microsoft 365 user, manager insights for team leads, and organisational insights for executive sponsors and HR business partners. The analytics are designed around productivity and wellbeing outcomes, not surveillance.

• Personal insights — focus-time recommendations, meeting overload warnings, after-hours work patterns, recovery suggestions.
• Manager insights — team meeting load, one-on-one consistency, collaboration coverage, identification of overloaded team members.
• Leader and advanced insights — organisational network analysis, cross-team collaboration patterns, change-impact monitoring.
• Privacy by design — minimum aggregation thresholds, no manager visibility into individual employee data.
• Integration with Outlook for focus-time booking, virtual commute, and meeting effectiveness nudges.

AI-powered knowledge discovery across Microsoft 365 content

Viva Topics uses AI to surface organisational knowledge by automatically identifying topics from Microsoft 365 content and assembling Topic Pages with definitions, experts, related resources, and supporting documents. Topics highlights occurrences of those subjects across SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, and Office documents so employees discover context in flow. Topics is the knowledge-management complement to Microsoft 365 Copilot — and increasingly the substrate Copilot draws on for grounded organisational answers.

• Automatic topic mining from SharePoint sites, OneDrive, Teams channels, and Outlook with AI-assisted classification.
• Topic Pages with curated definitions, identified experts, related people, and linked documents.
• Topic highlights in Microsoft 365 apps — hover for a topic card while reading any SharePoint page, Word document, or Outlook email.
• Knowledge curator and contributor roles let SMEs validate, edit, and govern the AI-generated topic suggestions.
• Pairs with Microsoft 365 Copilot — Topics provides the curated knowledge layer Copilot grounds against for high-confidence answers.

Unified learning surface across LMS providers and Microsoft 365

Viva Learning is the single learning entry point inside Microsoft Teams that aggregates content from Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning, third-party LMS providers (Cornerstone, SAP SuccessFactors, Saba, EdCast, Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight), and the customer SharePoint-hosted learning library. Learners discover, save, share, and complete training without switching contexts. Managers can recommend or assign learning paths directly inside the Teams workflow.

• Federated catalogue across Microsoft Learn, LinkedIn Learning, partner LMS providers, and SharePoint learning content.
• Manager recommendations and assignments with completion tracking against the customer LMS of record.
• Learning tabs in Teams channels for team-specific curated training programs.
• Mobile parity for frontline learner workflows and just-in-time training on the floor.
• Single sign-on through Microsoft Entra ID into every connected learning provider.

OKR platform unified with Microsoft 365 collaboration

Viva Goals is the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) platform built into Microsoft 365, supporting the goal-setting cadence that most modern enterprises run quarterly. Goals lets organisations cascade objectives from the CEO down to individual contributor key results, surface progress automatically by integrating with Azure DevOps, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Project, Power BI, and external systems, and run OKR reviews inside Teams without an off-platform tool such as Workboard, Ally.io, or Gtmhub.

• Hierarchical OKR cascade from organisation-level objectives to team and individual key results.
• Automatic progress updates from connected data sources — Azure DevOps work items, Planner tasks, Power BI metrics, custom integrations.
• Check-in cadence with weekly progress notes, confidence scoring, and at-risk indicators.
• Review dashboards and analytics that surface at-risk objectives, top performers, and cross-team dependencies.
• Native Teams integration — Goals tab in channels, bot notifications, and inline check-ins inside Teams chat.

Enterprise engagement surveys and people analytics

Viva Glint is the enterprise engagement and employee lifecycle survey platform Microsoft acquired in 2018, now integrated into the Viva suite. Glint runs the engagement, onboarding, exit, and pulse surveys most enterprise HR organisations rely on, with the kind of AI-driven analysis, manager dashboards, and action-planning workflows that drive measurable culture change. Glint is the enterprise-grade complement to the lighter-touch Viva Pulse.

• Engagement, lifecycle (onboarding, exit, stay), and ad-hoc surveys with the AI-driven narrative report library.
• Manager dashboards with team-level results, AI-recommended focus areas, and action-planning templates.
• Engagement Index and benchmark library with industry, geography, and company-size cuts.
• Workforce analytics integrations for downstream people analytics — Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, UKG, Oracle HCM.
• EU and global data residency options for GDPR-compliant employee data handling.

Fast, manager-led pulse surveys for in-flight team feedback

Viva Pulse is the lightweight manager-driven pulse-survey tool, complementary to Glint. Pulse lets any people manager run a quick 5-15 question survey of their direct team in under 60 seconds of setup, with AI-recommended question templates and aggregated, anonymised responses delivered straight back into Teams. Pulse is for the in-flight check-in — a project mid-point, a post-reorg temperature read, a hybrid-work pattern review — not the formal annual engagement survey that Glint runs.

• Manager-initiated surveys with AI-suggested templates based on the topic — change, workload, hybrid, team dynamics.
• Anonymised aggregation enforced by minimum response thresholds to protect respondent identity.
• Results inside Teams within 24 hours of survey close with AI-summarised themes and recommended follow-up actions.
• No HR or admin gate required — managers run pulses on their own teams without filing a request.
• Coexists with Glint — Pulse for tactical mid-flight reads, Glint for the formal annual and lifecycle programmes.

Scenario. A 25,000-employee enterprise running a manager-effectiveness program sees the same handful of teams accumulate the highest engagement scores while peer teams stagnate. HR has spent two years trying to identify the differentiator without a clean instrument.

Pattern. Viva Insights manager dashboards expose meeting load, one-on-one cadence, and collaboration coverage. Viva Glint adds quarterly engagement and 360 feedback. Viva Goals embeds the same managers in a quarterly OKR rhythm. Pulse runs mid-quarter temperature reads. The combined signal is the manager effectiveness instrument HR never had.

Payoff. Within two quarters, HR identifies the behavioural patterns separating high-engagement managers from the rest and ships a manager-development program grounded in actual behavioural data rather than self-reported survey impressions. EPC Group rollouts show 15-25 percent engagement-score lift for the bottom-quartile manager cohort once interventions are targeted.

Scenario. A healthcare system with 18,000 nurses, CNAs, and clinical support staff has historically been excluded from the corporate communication and engagement programs the knowledge-worker headquarters runs. The frontline workforce has no inbox, no SharePoint history, and a shared device pool on the unit.

Pattern. Viva Connections becomes the single mobile entry point on the shared device — payslips, schedule, news, leader video, learning modules. Viva Engage hosts cross-unit communities for clinical specialities. Viva Learning surfaces just-in-time training from the customer LMS to the same mobile surface. Viva Pulse lets unit managers run lightweight pulses without HR involvement.

Payoff. Frontline workforce engagement metrics finally exist. Nurses receive the leader message before the local newspaper does. Training compliance rates rise because the surface is in the unit and on shift, not at a desktop the worker visits twice a month. EPC Group has delivered this pattern for several US health systems with measurable retention impact in the year following rollout.

Scenario. A 12,000-employee professional services firm rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot wants Copilot to ground answers against the firm's organisational knowledge — methodologies, client industry expertise, internal SMEs — not just the public web and the user's personal mailbox.

Pattern. Viva Topics mines SharePoint, Teams channels, and Outlook for topic candidates. Knowledge curators validate the top 500 topics covering practice areas, methodologies, client industries, and internal capabilities. Topic Pages identify SMEs and link supporting documents. Microsoft 365 Copilot grounds against the curated topic graph as one of its retrieval surfaces.

Payoff. Copilot answers are grounded in firm knowledge rather than generic public content. SMEs are findable by junior staff who previously had no map of the firm. The Topics curation effort becomes a managed organisational asset rather than a one-off SharePoint cleanup project. This is the knowledge-management dividend that makes Copilot worth the licence.

Scenario. A scale-up at 2,500 employees has outgrown the quarterly all-hands spreadsheet that used to track OKRs. The CEO wants real-time visibility into objective progress across eight business units without a $200K/year third-party OKR platform.

Pattern. Viva Goals cascades the organisation-level OKRs to BU, team, and individual contributor key results. Integrations pull Azure DevOps work items, Power BI revenue metrics, Planner tasks, and a custom REST integration with the financial planning system into progress updates. Weekly check-ins run inside Teams. Quarterly OKR reviews use the Goals dashboard live.

Payoff. OKR data is current without a manual update cycle, the executive review is a 30-minute meeting instead of two weeks of pre-work, and the firm saves the third-party OKR platform licence by leveraging the Microsoft 365 E3 entitlement they already pay for. EPC Group has migrated multiple customers from Workboard and Ally.io onto Viva Goals.

Scenario. A global manufacturer is reskilling 4,000 plant operators into digital-twin and IoT support roles across an 18-month modernisation program. The training spans Microsoft Learn, internal SharePoint courseware, the customer LMS, and LinkedIn Learning, with managers needing to approve and track learner progress.

Pattern. Viva Learning federates the catalogue across all four providers. Curated learning paths map to the new digital roles. Managers assign paths in Teams, learners complete content on mobile during shift breaks, completion data flows back into the SuccessFactors LMS of record. Glint pulse surveys read learner sentiment monthly. Goals tracks the per-cohort completion KPI as a corporate OKR.

Payoff. Reskilling moves from a fragmented experience across multiple URLs to a single Teams-embedded workflow. Manager approval and tracking finally exist in the place managers already work. The reskilling KPI is part of the executive OKR review, not a one-off HR report. Multi-source learning paths get tracked once, not three times.

Scenario. A financial services firm is rolling out a multi-year hybrid-work model change. Leadership needs to monitor employee sentiment through the transition without waiting for the annual engagement survey to reveal damage 12 months too late.

Pattern. Viva Glint runs the formal annual engagement survey with hybrid-work specific items. Lifecycle surveys cover new hires and exits to detect transition-related departures. Quarterly mid-cycle pulses through Pulse track temperature mid-flight. Insights organisational analytics measure cross-team collaboration patterns. Engage Leadership Corner gives the CEO a direct response surface for employee questions.

Payoff. Leadership sees a continuous sentiment signal rather than a once-a-year snapshot. Glint flags emerging hot spots two quarters before they become attrition events. The transition story becomes data-driven and surface-able to the board. EPC Group has shipped this pattern for financial services, professional services, and healthcare customers.