Microsoft Viva Employee Experience Enterprise (2026)

The modern intranet inside Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Viva employee experience: Connections, Engage, Topics, Learning, Insights, Pulse — intranet + culture inside Microsoft Teams.

• 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 organization 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 organizational 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 organizational 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 — organizational 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.

Retired February 22, 2025 — knowledge discovery moved to SharePoint, Microsoft Search and Copilot

Viva Topics was retired on February 22, 2025. Published Topic Pages became standard SharePoint pages, the Topic Center became a standard SharePoint site, and AI-generated topics are no longer available. Microsoft now directs knowledge management at SharePoint: publish and organise knowledge there so Microsoft Search can find it and Microsoft 365 Copilot can ground on it.

• Retired February 22, 2025 — no new licenses, no AI topic mining, no topic highlights in Microsoft 365 apps.
• Published Topic Pages persist as ordinary SharePoint pages that owners can keep editing; the Topic Center is now a standard SharePoint site.
• Replacement pattern: SharePoint knowledge sites with term-store taxonomy, Microsoft Search verticals and bookmarks, and Copilot grounding on that content.
• Knowledge-owner roles still matter — SMEs own the SharePoint knowledge pages that Search and Copilot surface.

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.

Retired December 31, 2025 — OKRs now need a third-party tool

Viva Goals was the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) platform in Microsoft 365. Microsoft retired it on December 31, 2025 — no new features after December 5, 2024, no successor module — and points customers to third-party OKR tools; OKR data had to be exported before the shutdown.

• Viva Goals was retired by Microsoft on December 31, 2025; Microsoft offers no successor module and points customers to third-party OKR tools.
• OKR data had to be exported (API, Excel, PowerPoint) before the shutdown; Teams and Azure DevOps integrations ceased with it.
• EPC Group scopes the replacement OKR tool inside the Viva programme — Teams-connected, Azure DevOps- and Power BI-fed — rather than as a Viva module.
• Review dashboards and analytics that surface at-risk objectives, top performers, and cross-team dependencies.
• The Teams tab, bot notifications and inline check-ins ceased with the retirement; replacement OKR tools surface check-ins as Teams tabs and bots.

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 organizations 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. A third-party OKR tool (Viva Goals was retired on December 31, 2025) 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 behavioral patterns separating high-engagement managers from the rest and ships a manager-development program grounded in actual behavioral 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 organizational knowledge — methodologies, client industry expertise, internal SMEs — not just the public web and the user's personal mailbox.

Pattern. Knowledge owners publish curated SharePoint knowledge pages covering practice areas, methodologies, client industries, and internal capabilities, each naming its SMEs and linking supporting documents; the term store carries the taxonomy and Microsoft Search verticals expose it. Microsoft 365 Copilot grounds against that SharePoint content through Microsoft Search (Viva Topics, which once mined topics automatically, was retired on February 22, 2025).

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 knowledge-page curation effort becomes a managed organizational asset rather than a one-off SharePoint cleanup project. This is the knowledge-management dividend that makes Copilot worth the license.

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. A Teams-connected OKR tool (Viva Goals was retired on December 31, 2025) cascades the organization-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 OKR tool 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 OKR tool is chosen for its Teams and Azure DevOps integration. EPC Group migrated multiple customers from Workboard and Ally.io onto Viva Goals before Microsoft retired it on December 31, 2025.

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. The OKR tool tracks the per-cohort completion KPI as a corporate OKR (Viva Goals was retired December 31, 2025).

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 organizational 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.