This article answers the question, what is Microsoft Viva?
Employee engagement has often taken a backseat in corporate strategy, despite its clear impact on productivity and retention. For years, experts warned of the costs of disengagement and offered solutions to boost morale. Then came the shift to remote and hybrid work, bringing new challenges that demanded smarter, tech-driven approaches to connection and culture.
Microsoft Viva emerged as a modern response to these needs. Designed for the hybrid workplace, Viva enhances the employee experience across key dimensions, engagement, wellbeing, learning, and knowledge, by integrating seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and Teams.
So what exactly is Viva, and why is it reshaping how organizations think about work?
What is Microsoft Viva?
Microsoft Viva is a modern employee experience platform designed for the realities of hybrid work. Built into Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, Viva helps organizations foster connection, growth, and wellbeing, right within the flow of work.
Viva now includes a suite of modules that support key areas of employee experience:
- Viva Connections – Strengthens communication and culture through personalized dashboards and company updates.
- Viva Topics – Uses AI to surface knowledge and expertise across the organization.
- Viva Insights – Promotes wellbeing and productivity with data-driven recommendations and Copilot-powered guidance.
- Viva Learning – Centralizes learning content to support continuous development and upskilling.
These tools are designed to help employees stay aligned with their goals, remain engaged in their roles, and feel connected to their organization’s mission, whether they’re in sales, engineering, or support.
Let’s explore how Viva is reshaping the employee experience in today’s workplace.
Microsoft Viva Connections
As Microsoft Teams became the central hub for collaboration, traditional intranets, often built on SharePoint, started to fade into the background. Employees were spending entire workweeks in Teams without ever visiting their company’s intranet, missing out on important updates, announcements, and cultural touchpoints.
Viva Connections bridges that gap. It brings the intranet experience directly into Teams, allowing organizations to create a branded, personalized app that delivers company news, resources, and internal communications, all without leaving the flow of work.
With mobile access and a responsive design, Viva Connections ensures employees stay informed and engaged whether they’re in the office, working remotely, or on the go. It’s a modern solution for keeping everyone connected to the heartbeat of the organization.
Microsoft Viva Engage
As organizations embraced hybrid work, the need for social connection in the workplace became more important than ever. Viva Engage was introduced to meet that need, bringing a familiar, social-media-style experience into Microsoft Teams.
Designed to foster community and conversation, Viva Engage allows employees to share updates, photos, videos, and stories that go beyond daily tasks. Profile pages, interest-based groups, and interactive posts help build relationships across departments and geographies.
Viva Engage has fully replaced the Communities app in Teams, while continuing to support Yammer content and connections. It’s now a central hub for culture-building, leadership engagement, and peer-to-peer interaction, helping employees feel seen, heard, and connected in a digital-first workplace.
Viva Engage: Leadership Corner
The Leadership Corner in Viva Engage creates a dedicated space for meaningful connection between employees and company leaders. Executives and managers can build authentic, personalized profiles that highlight their values, experiences, and areas of focus, humanizing leadership in a digital workplace.
The platform now supports two-way communication at scale. Leaders can post updates, host virtual events, launch surveys, and respond to employee feedback, all within Teams. Real-time dashboards provide insights into engagement levels, helping leaders understand what resonates and where to take action.
Leadership Corner is more than a broadcast tool, it’s a bridge that fosters transparency, trust, and a sense of shared purpose across the organization.
Microsoft Viva Topics
In today’s fast-paced, distributed workplace, knowledge loss can be costly, and community thrives when information is easy to find and share. Viva Topics uses AI to organize content and highlight expertise across the organization. It helps employees find what they need without sifting through files or emails
Powered by machine learning and natural language processing, Viva Topics scans documents, conversations, and collaboration threads to identify patterns and relationships. When it detects a recurring theme, it generates a topic page, complete with relevant files, conversations, and expert contributors.
These topic cards appear contextually across Microsoft 365 apps, extending the reach of internal knowledge and making it accessible in the moment of need. Organizations can curate and refine these pages, ensuring accuracy and relevance while maintaining existing permissions and data sensitivity.
Viva Topics transforms scattered information into structured, searchable knowledge, keeping teams informed, aligned, and empowered.
Microsoft Viva Insights
Employee wellbeing remains a critical concern in the modern workplace. Studies continue to show that burnout , digital overload, and blurred work-life boundaries are driving disengagement and attrition. Viva Insights is Microsoft’s answer to this challenge, offering data-driven, privacy-protected insights to help individuals and organizations thrive.
- Employees receive personalized, AI-powered recommendations to build healthier work habits, like taking focus time, setting boundaries, and disconnecting after hours.
- Managers gain visibility into team dynamics, identifying patterns such as meeting overload, after-hours work, or collaboration bottlenecks.
- Leaders access organizational-level insights to monitor cultural health, productivity trends, and areas of risk, empowering them to take proactive action.
With built-in safeguards for data privacy and compliance, Viva Insights helps organizations foster resilience, balance, and sustainable performance in the hybrid era.
Microsoft Viva Learning
In today’s fast-moving workplace, continuous learning is essential, not just for career growth, but for employee retention and engagement. Viva Learning brings learning into the flow of work by embedding personalized development opportunities directly within Microsoft Teams.
The platform integrates with major learning providers like LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, Skillsoft, Coursera, and internal LMS systems. Employees receive tailored course recommendations based on their role, interests, and learning history, and can easily search for content across Microsoft 365 using Microsoft Search.
Viva Learning supports flexible sharing and collaboration. Users can send learning content via Teams chat, email, or channel tabs, while managers can assign courses and track progress. Notifications and personalized dashboards help employees stay on top of their learning journey.
As a strategic growth tool, Viva Learning enables organizations to build curated learning paths that align with individual goals and business needs, helping employees stay engaged, skilled, and future-ready.
Other Features
Microsoft continues to expand the Viva platform with specialized modules that help employees connect their daily work to broader business outcomes, reinforcing purpose, clarity, and impact.
Viva Goals
Viva Goals uses the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework to align individual and team efforts with company-wide priorities. It embeds goal tracking into the daily workflow through integrations with Microsoft Teams, Power BI, and Microsoft 365.
Employees receive updates, reminders, and visibility into how their work contributes to strategic objectives, keeping purpose front and center. While Viva Goals has been a powerful alignment tool, Microsoft is gradually retiring the standalone module by the end of 2025, with its core features being absorbed into other Microsoft platforms.
Viva Sales
Viva Sales is Microsoft’s first role-based Viva module, tailored specifically for sales professionals. It streamlines the sales cycle by integrating CRM platforms like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce with Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, Word, and Excel.
Using AI, Viva Sales automates data entry, surfaces customer insights, and delivers personalized recommendations, freeing up time for sellers to focus on building relationships and closing deals. With real-time dashboards and seamless access across devices, it empowers sales teams to stay productive, informed, and engaged from anywhere.
What is Microsoft Viva’s Future?
Microsoft continues to expand Viva’s capabilities as part of its evolving roadmap for employee experience. New modules like Viva Pulse empower managers and team leaders to gather confidential feedback using curated question libraries and real-time analytics, helping teams stay aligned and responsive.
Features like Viva Amplify and Answers in Viva improve communication and knowledge-sharing. They provide actionable insights that boost engagement and organizational performance.
Viva remains a comprehensive platform deeply integrated with Microsoft 365 and Teams. Its seamless access to Microsoft applications ensures employees stay connected and productive throughout their workday, without switching tools or disrupting their workflow.
Designed for the hybrid workplace, Viva helps organizations tackle engagement challenges by offering tools that support learning, growth, connection, and purpose, all within the Microsoft ecosystem.
IncWorx provides expert Microsoft consulting services to help clients unlock the full potential of Microsoft technologies. Whether you’re implementing Microsoft Viva or upgrading your Microsoft 365 environment, our team has the experience and insight to guide your journey.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation and explore how Viva can transform your employee experience. Or visit our blog to learn more about our services and success stories.
