Use Viva to help employees learn, grow, and succeed

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Identify the scenario

Like many other industries, employees in the healthcare industry need to update their knowledge and skills continuously. According to recent Microsoft research, 76% of employees say they’d stay longer at a company if they could benefit from learning and development support. Lamna Healthcare wants to ensure its employees are fully supported with their needs to learn and grow, to avoid preventable turnover. Lamna leadership asks the Office of Chief Learning Officer to work with the Office of Information Technology and other stakeholders to provide the solution.

The Office of Chief Learning Officer works with stakeholders across the organization such as learning and design specialists in each unit, and the Human Resources team to identify employee learning needs. They analyze employees’ common knowledge gaps, popular learning topics, and employees’ preferences for learning.

The team has identified the common learning needs of the employees:

• Developing new skills (upskilling)
• Employee onboarding
• Regular training processes (like technical, and compliance training)

The analysis also shows that Lamna employees prefer to have learning embedded in their daily work. They want to have a place where they can quickly find learning content and keep track on it. A common pain point for lots of employees is to quickly find information when they come across a new topic at work. The team has decided to combine Viva Learning, Topics, and other Viva experiences to support these needs.

Set up Viva Learning

The first step is to set up Viva Learning. The Office of Information Technology works with the Office of Human Resources, the Office of Chief Learning Officer , and business leaders from all Lamna Healthcare units, to obtain a thorough understanding of Lamna Healthcare’s training. They gather information such as training requirements for employees, existing learning content, and training delivery infrastructures. By default, employees have access to all Microsoft Learn training modules, Microsoft 365 training, and 125 LinkedIn courses. In addition, if Lamna Healthcare has contracts with third-party content providers who are among the growing list of supported third party content providers , then the Office of Information Technology will connect the third party content to Viva Learning. Similarly, if Lamna Healthcare currently has a supported Learning Management System (LMS), then this LMS can be set up to connect to Viva Learning. Lastly, if each unit in Lamna Healthcare has its in-house training content, this content can be set up on a SharePoint content list and connected to Viva Learning.

Some sample questions to ask during this process may include:

• What learning resources and content does each Lamna Healthcare unit have?
• Does Lamna Healthcare have any contracts with third-party content providers? If so, what are those?
• How does Lamna Healthcare currently deliver its self-paced learning content?
• What Learning Management Systems does Lamna Healthcare currently use? If so, what are those?
• What are the most common learning needs of Lamna Healthcare employees?

The team has gathered information from each unit. They've learned that Lamna Healthcare has a license with LinkedIn Learning and Coursera to provide employees access to numerous professional skill and knowledge-learning courses. In addition, Lamna Healthcare uses SuccessFactor as its Learning Management System to deliver its compliance training. Additionally, many units have their learning materials in PowerPoint, videos, and word documents.

With all the information discovered, the Office of Information Technology now works with the team to connect LinkedIn Learning and Coursera to Viva Learning. The team also sets up SuccessFactor so that employees can select courses from its course catalog from within Viva Learning and take courses.

Next, the Microsoft 365 global admin works with the team to identify people who will be assigned various roles in Viva Learning. Once Viva Learning has been set up, the Office of Information Technology works with managers to identify subject matter experts who can create new content. The Knowledge admins can add this new content to the SharePoint learning content folder. Managers also support the rollout by speaking to their teams and recommending they explore and share content.

After rollout, Microsoft Viva Learning will be available as an app directly in Microsoft Teams. Staff at Lamna Healthcare will find personalized learning content derived from internal sources, external sources, and learning management systems. Here's what that could look like:

Lamna can now combine Viva Learning, Topics, and other Viva apps to support staff members in their professional skills development, compliance training, work knowledge development, team learning, and more. Let's look at what this could mean for people at Lamna.

Use Viva Learning to Develop new skills (upskilling)

The clinical Operations Manager at Lamna Healthcare advocates for people’s personal development in their department. The clinical Operations Manager has regular conversations with staff across the department and has noted that there are many cleaning staff who are interested in moving to nursing-related roles. To them, it makes sense. Cleaning staff often work closely with the nursing staff to help ensure the nurse teams have a clean and hygienic environment to do their jobs. Therefore, they may already have some nursing knowledge. However, to become a nurse, they'll have to take formal training and get certified. Many of these interested people, however, don’t know where to start in terms of education, certification, and training.

With the introduction of Viva Learning, the clinical Operations Manager works with the nurse teams to curate a series of courses for people who aspire to nurse roles. The clinical Operations Manager also works with HR and the IT team to promote this learning opportunity across the organization using Viva Connections. Additionally, the clinical Operations Manager works with the nursing team to create a Viva Engage community for people who want to get training in nursing. People use this Viva Engage community to ask questions, discuss best practices, and share their general experiences. Using Viva Learning, Connections, and Engage together, the team not only provides a central place to access learning but also builds a community to engage employees in social learning and help each other.

Set up Topics

Lamna can also combine the capabilities of Viva Learning and Topics to onboard new employees or employees who switch to new roles. Let’s first look at what the Office of Information Technology does to set up Topics.

The Office of Information Technology will work with a team of stakeholders to first understand the needs. They gather information such as topics to be created, different user groups and roles, and each group’s needs and permission levels. These stakeholders may include communication specialists, business process owners, and champions.

First, a SharePoint admin sets up Topics, and configures its settings via the Microsoft 365 admin center. The SharePoint admin will also assign Topic contributors, who are a select group of users who will be able to create, edit, and manage topics across the organization.

Once Topics has been rolled out, people will see highlighted topics while they read within Microsoft 365 apps, such as:

• Outlook
• Microsoft Teams
• Search in Word
• PowerPoint
• SharePoint modern pages

Note

Topic contributors and knowledge admins manage and curate the topics that are automatically identified for the organization by Topics. They can create, edit, and remove topics.

Combine Viva Learning and Topics to onboard employees

Now that Topics is set up, Lamna can couple Viva Learning and Topics for employee onboarding. Let's, for example, take the case of a new IT support specialist at the Office of Information Technology.

New IT support specialists have joined the organization. Their manager uses Viva Learning to recommend a series of training courses to them through Viva Learning, as part of the first week of onboarding. They finish all the courses by the end of the first week and mark them as completed in Viva Learning. The manager knows that the new IT support specialists now have received the training for this job and are ready to dive in. In their first few months, they keep encountering unfamiliar terms and names, such as acronyms, projects, and events.

Fortunately, Topics has been rolled out right before they start at Lamna. These terms and names are all highlighted for them as topics whenever they're mentioned, directly inside Microsoft Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint, and other places. The new IT specialist would just hover over any topic and get access to a topic card that shows:

• A description of the topic
• The people who are the subject matter experts on the topic
• Key documents and files related to the topic

Use Viva Engage to build community for learning and growth

In addition, the Office of Information Technology has already created a community in Viva Engage for IT team members. The community has links to content and discussion threads focused on and around helping new team members get up to speed. In this Viva Engage community, the new IT customer support specialist and other new team members can post questions in a public and open setting. The community also enables them to make new friends and social relationships through discussions about common interests with people in and outside of their team and department.

Use Viva Insights to inform learning outcomes

Lamna Healthcare also uses other experiences like Viva Insights to further support learning and development for Lamna employees. For example, Lamna can use Viva Insights to see how learning and knowledge development resources are improving the well-being and productivity of employees. The data about employee work habits and trends is visible to them through the Organization trends tab in Viva Insights which provides aggregated, organization-wide insights on well-being and productivity: