Microsoft Viva Increasing its Branding to More ‘Personal Insights’ for Microsoft 365 Users

Over the coming months, Microsoft will be re-branding some of what Microsoft calls ‘personal insights’ into your daily flow in Outlook. These include the Daily Briefing email that arrives in your Outlook Inbox every weekday morning, the MyAnalytics digest emails, and the Insights Outlook add-in. They will all receive updates to reflect the Microsoft Viva brand. I imagine you aren’t too familiar with that relatively new marketing product – Microsoft Viva. What exactly is it? Well, now that you mention it, Viva is the employee experience platform that assists people and teams in companies reach across the aisle, become more efficient, and discover new ways to be empowered in their individual roles. Helping to balance productivity and wellbeing with useful dashboard-like data analytics. I personally love these types of services. Let’s get some more details.

The Briefing Email

The (weekday) daily email shows you important reminders from Cortana, your trusty Clippy…no, your personal digital assistant. This will soon include employee experience insights. As before, it will be delivered to your Inbox every morning, but it will be coming from Microsoft Viva. The key features include:

• Connecting you to personal productivity and wellbeing insights
• More learning recommendations. This helps you set aside 1-2 hours in your next work week to learn something new that will benefit your role, your efficiency, your technical expertise, etc. This can also include blocking off 15 minutes twice a day to ‘take a [needed] break’
• These sometimes include suggestions to create tasks for the upcoming day

The MyAnalytics digest email

This slightly reengineered email will be delivered at the start of every month, offering users important insights to help them understand and improve their work habits. The new subject line: ‘Your monthly digest’. Sweet. 🙂 This email helps users to identify potential issues with work/life balance. One feature I particularly like to know is how often I respond to new emails in my Inbox. I often see the reminder that I answer almost EVERY email delivered in my Inbox within 30 minutes. Is that good, from my job’s point of view? Sure. Is that particularly helpful in keeping me focused on a particular task? Not really.

Every employee has an agreement with their supervisor/manager about how ‘available’ they need to be. However, this is just the sort of analytics employees can discuss with their managers. “I would probably finish tasks more efficiently if I didn’t have to keep an eye on my Inbox so often,” as an example.

The Insights Outlook add-in

This offers actionable suggestions to help users stay on top of their tasks and emails. It also strengthens their work relationships, plans time away from the workplace, and achieves that ever-so-popular work/life balance! This new add-in will be renamed “Viva Insights” to coincide with the Viva Insights app in Microsoft Teams.

Also, a new Viva Insights homepage will be discoverable via the Microsoft 365 app launcher on Office.com in place of MyAnalytics. This will give a lovely dashboard view of key data-driven, privacy-protected insights initially given from MyAnalytics. Over time, Workplace Analytics will also be incorporated to give individuals, managers, and company leaders access to personalized, role-based recommendations at a glance.

Personalized insights for a better work-life balance

I for one am looking forward to these enhancements coming down the road. These personalized insights have helped me keep my work daily flow a little more balanced, a little more defined. It helps to know when I’m burning out, or if I need to make sure I don’t forget that question from my supervisor last Friday.

Feel free to watch this YouTube video on how the many features of Microsoft Viva can benefit your users.