Microsoft Viva Insights – new productivity and wellbeing experiences coming soon
Published Oct 12 2022 09:00 AM 12.6K Views
Microsoft

Today as we kick off Microsoft Ignite 2022, we’re excited to highlight new productivity and wellbeing experiences coming this quarter to Viva Insights in Microsoft Teams.   

 

Data from the September 2022 Work Trend Index (WTI) Pulse Report – a study of 20,000 people in 11 countries - indicated that the rise of hybrid work and flexibility has come with new challenges. Nearly one in two employees feel burnt out at work and now more than ever, it’s the job of every leader to balance employee interests with what it takes to make the organization successful moving forward. 

 

Viva Insights offers leaders, managers, and employees data-driven, privacy-protected insights and actionable recommendations to build healthy work habits and supports the creation of a culture where people and business can thrive. 

 

Schedule send suggestions in Teams chat 

The rise of flexible work has made it easier to balance work and life, but an increase in after-hours messages has led to a feeling of being always-on. Whether you’re working on a schedule that doesn’t match the rest of your colleagues or from a location in a different time zone, it is important to model healthy collaboration habits and minimize work-related notifications during personal time. 

 

By the end of the year, Viva Insights will introduce schedule send suggestions in Teams chat. These will be displayed to users who compose 1:1 chat messages after-hours. With one click, users can schedule the message delivery to be at the start of the recipient’s work hours. Schedule send suggestions to postpone after-hours email deliveries are already available with Viva Insights in Outlook for Windows and on the web. 

Schedule send suggestions coming soon in Teams chatSchedule send suggestions coming soon in Teams chat

Effective meetings: feedback surveys, meeting category insights, shared plans 

Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, our WTI data showed that the number of meetings per week had increased by 153% globally for the average Microsoft Teams user, and there is still no indication that this trend has reversed, suggesting this peak could become the new baseline. Meetings take up a lot of time, and meeting habits can impact organizational efficiency, employee engagement, connectedness, and external relationships. Simple changes to meeting culture can have meaningful impact across your organization, and incremental changes can translate into cost savings and efficiency gains. 

 

To help promote effective meeting habits such as including agendas and ending with clear next steps, the Viva Insights app in Teams now offers data-driven recommendations for meeting organizers. The recommendations are based on research-backed best practices and aggregate results from meeting effectiveness surveys which are displayed during the end of select Teams meetings with 5+ attendees to gather feedback on what made the meeting a success and what could have made it better. We’re also making meeting habits from the Microsoft Viva Insights dashboard (formerly known as MyAnalytics) available in the Viva Insights app in Teams to provide insights about your practices in meetings over the past four weeks as you reflect on opportunities to improve meeting effectiveness. 

 

And with meeting category insights designed to help you align time spent in meetings with your goals, you can now see how your meeting time distribution has changed over the last 3 months, the last 4 weeks, and the next 4 weeks under meeting trends. Additionally, you can view the list of meetings in each category, with details that will soon help you take actions to shorten, decline or modify the meeting to more closely align to your goals. A summary of your meeting category insights will also be available in your digest email from Microsoft Viva. 

 

In addition to providing behavioral, qualitative, and quantitative data to improve meeting effectiveness, Viva Insights now also supports the creation of shared meeting plans to help foster an inclusive meeting culture for hybrid work, accommodating for breaks between meetings, and automatically including Microsoft Teams links for all meetings.  

Data-driven recommendations coming in Viva Insights based on meeting effectiveness surveysData-driven recommendations coming in Viva Insights based on meeting effectiveness surveys

Focus mode in Teams: focus timers, tasks integration, mindfulness breaks 

The strain of a high meeting load is clear: the September 2022 WTI data shows in an average week, 42% of participants multitask during meetings by actively sending an email or ping—and that doesn’t include practices like reading incoming emails and pings, working in non-meeting files, or web activity. It can be hard to go deep on challenging work if you only have small chunks of time to focus in between meetings or are easily distracted by incoming emails and chats. Viva Insights already helps you set aside regular focus time for deep work before your calendar fills up with meetings and now, we’re building on that capability.  

 

This month, we’re rolling out a new focus mode experience to help you make progress on important projects during the workday by dividing your pre-scheduled focus time into short bursts of productivity followed by short breaks. At the start of focus time, users with Viva Insights subscriptions will receive a Teams notification to enter focus mode, with the option to set timers so they can work on tasks for a specified interval of time, with breaks planned in between. Focus mode will also offer the option to click into a curated set of mindfulness exercises from Headspace to reset between focus intervals. 

New focus mode experience with timers, tasks, and mindfulness exercisesNew focus mode experience with timers, tasks, and mindfulness exercises

Praise in Teams: new composer with sharing, praise page with trends 

Praise in Microsoft Teams enables you to express appreciation for your colleagues and create a more positive team culture.  

The praise composer - accessible through the messaging extension pinned to the Teams messaging bar or through the Viva Insights app in Teams - is being refreshed to replace praise badges with emojis, introduce the ability to select gradient backgrounds, and include an option to share the praise to notify additional people about a colleague’s effort. Additionally, in the Viva Insights app in Teams, praise trends are being introduced, privately surfacing analytics such as counts of praise sent and received, your top fans and top praises received.   

New praise compose experience with sharingNew praise compose experience with sharing

Quiet time end-user and IT-admin settings   

To help create better boundaries between personal life and work life, Viva Insights now offers quiet time settings. With this feature, users can configure quiet time to silence mobile notifications from Outlook and Teams outside of working hours as well as provide personalized insights on how consistently users are disconnecting. Users can adjust their quiet time settings any time from Viva Insights or from Teams and Outlook mobile. Additionally, with new controls coming in Microsoft Endpoint Manager, IT administrators can create org-level policies to mute after-hours notifications. This will provide organizations a way to encourage their employees to disconnect and recharge during their personal time, as well as support compliance with regulations that limit use of work applications outside of working hours. Along with setting up quiet time, users can use the virtual commute experience available in the Viva Insights Teams app to be intentional about unplugging after-hours. 

Quiet time settings to silence after-hours mobile notifications from Teams and OutlookQuiet time settings to silence after-hours mobile notifications from Teams and Outlook

Learn more 

For more on getting started with the Viva Insights app in Teams, visit aka.ms/InsightsDocumentation. 

 

And to take a closer look at the Viva Insights personal productivity and wellbeing experiences available now or coming soon in Teams and Outlook, walk through this personal insights interactive demo. 

 

To learn more about other Viva news and announcements for Ignite, watch the Ignite session Microsoft Viva: Latest innovations and roadmap for the new digital employee experience and read the blog post by Seth Patton. 

3 Comments
Co-Authors
Version history
Last update:
‎Oct 10 2022 04:35 PM
Updated by: