Use Viva to keep everyone informed, included, and inspired
Identify the scenario
Lamna Healthcare is a large chain of regional hospitals. The hospitals operate with support from various employees, including nurses on shifts, doctors, people managers, IT information professionals, and more. With the unprecedented pressure on the medical systems, the hospital needs effective ways to communicate its policies and procedures, and to engage its employees with positive stories and activities. This year, Lamna Healthcare's leadership creates organizational objectives and key results (OKRs) in Viva Goals. One of their OKRs is to provide better support to inform, include, and inspire Lamna Healthcare employees.
Lamna leadership asks the Office of Information Technology to identify the solution of using the Viva suite as the technical infrastructure to support this OKR of informing, including and inspiring employees.
The Office of Information Technology works with stakeholders inside the organization, such as leadership teams and the Human Resources team to identify the best way to connect employees and boost engagement. They set up meetings to discuss the common pain points that they've seen at work. In addition, they use information from Viva Insights and other data to help identify employee communication trends and habits, and where there are opportunities to drive alignment and change.
Summary of the findings from stakeholders:
- Most employees at Lamna Healthcare check updates and news from their emails and messages in Teams channels. Their usage data is telling them that fewer employees go to the organization’s SharePoint home site to get news and information.
- Employees like nurses, clinic doctors and janitor staff are constantly on the move. So having mobile access to news, resources, and tools to complete their daily tasks is essential. Many employees also like to use Viva Engage discussion forum to connect and share with their colleagues.
- Some workflows can be streamlined with the Dashboard cards within Viva Connections, such as approval, time reporting, shifts management, and customer ticket management.
Based on these findings, it became clear that Lamna Healthcare needs a way to communicate organizational updates, events, and announcements that employees can easily discover and use. Lamna Healthcare also needs to provide a place for employees to share ideas, ask questions, and build relationships with their colleagues.
After examining features of both Viva Connections and Viva Engage using the following table, the team has decided to use the combination of Viva Connections, Viva Engage and some other Viva experiences to meet these needs.
The Office of Information Technology works with the Viva Adoption Taskforce to set up Viva Connections, Viva Engage, and configure both experiences to connect and engage employees.
Set up Viva Connections
First, they plan, build, and launch the new home site for Lamna Healthcare. They add the frequently accessed forms and webpages to the global navigation, such as information on benefits, reimbursement forms, and medical insurance. They then add Dashboard cards based on the needs assessments, to streamline employees’ daily tasks such as clocking in and out, assigning tasks, time reports, and service ticket management. The news will be automatically populated to the Feed from various resources, such as SharePoint sites and pages, Viva Engage, and video stream. Once set up, Lamna Healthcare can use Viva Connections to push organization-wide and curated content, and resources to the targeted audience. For example, Lamna Healthcare announces recent changes in building security measures. This announcement is then pushed to employees whose jobs are related to building facility and maintenance, security staff and building managers.
Set up Viva Engage
To set up Viva Engage, The Office of Information Technology works with the team to first install the Viva Engage app for Teams. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, the global admin assigns the role of Engage admin. The Engage admin then sets up Viva Engage in the Engage admin center (within the Teams app). Things can be set up including security and privacy settings, managing corporate communicators, identifying keywords for appropriate use, configuring the features they want employees to interact with, and managing data retention policies. The Office of Information Technology also works with Lamna's leadership, the Communications office, and various employee resource groups to create and foster active and lively communities in Viva Engage. Meanwhile, employees can discover communities or create their own communities in Viva Engage across the organization based on their interests:
Combine Viva Connections and Viva Engage to inform and engage employees
Now that Viva Connections and Viva Engage have been set up and rolled out, let’s look at how Lamna Healthcare uses them to connect and engage employees with their October month-long campaign ”Bringing smiles to the customers”.
First, the organization announces the campaign on the organization’s SharePoint communication site. All employees in the organization receive this announcement in the Viva Connections news Feed.
People from different departments start posting questions and sharing ideas in Viva Engage on how to improve customer experiences that are related to their jobs. Some interesting ideas have surfaced during these discussions on Viva Engage. People with the same interests collaborate on these ideas and turn them into a series of customer experience campaign events to support customer experiences. Later, these events are announced to the targeted employee groups, either organization-wide or in some specific units as the Feed in Viva Connections.
As the campaign continues, people keep posting their ideas and success stories of supporting customers on Viva Engage. These stories and ideas are then featured by the organization’s communication manager on the top row of the Viva Connections news Feed so that more employees become aware of and inspired by their colleagues’ success stories.
Use Microsoft 365 data to track employee engagement in Viva Goals
After implementing Viva Connections and Engage, Lamna leadership continues using Microsoft 365 Analytics to get informative insights into trends in employee communications and engagement. Additionally, they use Viva Connections analytics to learn more about when users access the app, and how users engage with the dashboard, the feed, and resources. These data and insights help leadership to track the progress with Viva Goals on the OKR of providing better support to inform, include, and inspire Lamna Healthcare employees.