To ensure a successful launch of  Viva Engage within your organisation, it’s crucial to create a strong and clear strategy that engages users and helps them understand how  Viva Engage can enhance connectivity and productivity. You also need metrics to help you get there.

If you’re currently scratching your head thinking; “I don’t really know where to start”, here are some ideas to get you going.

Viva Engage goals

In speaking with many corporate communications and digital workplace executives and practitioners over the past eight years, I have heard the following two key goals expressed time and again. Therefore, I’ll boldly suggest you consider them too:

Breaking down silos: A place for our colleagues to connect and share knowledge across hierarchical boundaries, to ask questions that will help them get their work done better and/or faster.
Better engagement between employees and senior leaders: A place for our colleagues to connect with senior leaders and engage in two-way conversation.

During conversations, I always ask; “If we fast forward 12 months and I ask you to describe what a really successful implementation of Viva Engage looks like, what would you say?”. The answers are mostly along these lines:

Our leaders are actively contributing to conversations. Colleagues feel they know executives better.

Communities feel vibrant and there is valuable sharing of knowledge. Business problems are being solved.
Colleagues are connecting across the organisation. They feel more connected. They have met colleagues they otherwise would not have met.

With those goals in mind, let’s have a look at what this will look like in Viva Engage.

How do I get started?

Breaking down silos

First, you will need to decide on a set of relevant business or non-business-related topics for colleagues to connect around. Non-business-related topics such as photography, food and pets are universally popular and present an easy way for colleagues to get comfortable with participating.

Business-related topics could be anything that you believe is important to your organisation. Pick one or two most people care about, or something that represents a big challenge/problem/opportunity. If you’re blank on this, then think about what your organisation's core capabilities are, or think about business activities a lot of colleagues get involved in. It could be project management, people management, marketing, sales etc. Find colleagues in your organisation who are passionate about breaking down silos in those areas and enlist them as your community managers.

In all the conversations we have had with people over the years, there is one common characteristic shared by those who find these communities valuable: The conversations and perspectives colleagues bring. In other words, Viva Engage is fundamentally different to your SharePoint intranet. The intranet is about reading content (often referred to as the “single source of truth”). Viva Engage is about conversations.

Here are a few points about what “good” and “bad” look like:

Good:

Ask open questions. Tag colleagues you think could bring a perspective, or might know someone who can.

Reply on others where you can. Tag a colleague if you think they might know the answer, or can otherwise assist.
Hit the “like” button to show that you have read the post and that you are interested in the topic.

Bad:

Post content which provides little real value for others (vanity posts).

Don’t open up for conversation.
Never ask any questions.
Never react to posts or replies.

Always consider the 1-2-3 rule when you are on Viva Engage: For every 1 post, write 2 replies and contribute 3 reactions. It helps you position Viva Engage as a place for conversation over broadcasting. There is a reason we have two ears and one mouth!

Case studies to further inspire you:

Senior leader engagement

As any corporate communicator will tell you, business outcomes critically hinge on strong two-way communication. Senior leaders are all about implementing the overall business strategy. Ensuring their colleagues know what to do, are motivated and engaged, is fundamentally important.

Viva Engage is arguably the best tool in the entire Microsoft 365 suite of communication and collaboration tools for senior leaders to communicate. Unlike just about any other communication channel, Viva Engage enables leaders to have two-way conversations. It very effectively enables senior leaders to listen to what colleagues are talking about, and it enables them to ask questions. Positioning Viva Engage as a “hearing aid” will generate more value than a “megaphone”.

For instance, let’s say you have recently implemented a new strategy. Senior leaders can ask questions like; “How do you think our new strategy will impact your day-to-day work? What might get in the way?”. Rarely do strategies fail because they are poor. They fail because our colleagues don’t know what do to, haven’t got the skills, or just didn’t think it was important.

We often hear corporate communicators being instrumental coaches for senior leaders, helping surface conversations that would be relevant for the leaders to engage with, and helping them consider questions they can ask. The most important aspect here is that senior leaders see Viva Engage as an extremely effective tool that enables them to meet their business goals.

Research SWOOP Analytics has conducted shows that participation rates are significantly increased after people have received reactions or replies from a senior leader, and a post with a question attracts 150% more replies.

When senior leaders excel at using Viva Engage you will see they will post messages, reply to other colleagues and will click a reaction button to show others they have read their message. As a result of this, colleagues will also reply to the senior leaders and react to their messages. It is this balance in interactions that is a hallmark of success.

One last point relates to technology. Senior leaders are in more meetings than most others, and are often on the go. Therefore, getting them to use Viva Engage on their mobile device will be very important. If required, help them get it set up correctly so the barrier for using Viva Engage is as low as possible.

Case studies to further inspire you:

Measurable Goals

Based on the above goals we can start to set some measurable goals. SWOOP Analytics will be an invaluable tool for you. This is what we will cover:

Breaking down silos
Conversations over Broadcasting
Leadership engagement
General adoption

Breaking Down Silos

Look at the Segment Activity report in SWOOP Analytics for your core communities. Depending on the topic, you should find it easy to determine which audience is most relevant.

In this example, you can see this community is dominated by Marketing but Operations and Customer Success is not far behind. It could suggest you have, in fact, achieved your goal, at least for this community.

In addition to the Segment Activity report also have a look at the Community Network Map. It will show you how the colleagues in the community are interacting with each other. We can see that it is a very tightly connected community, so we have achieved our goal to break down silos.

2. Conversations Over Broadcasting

Look at the Key Statistics report. As mentioned further above, aim for the number of posts, replies and reactions to follow the 1-2-3 rule.

Although the reactions in the example above are only slightly above the number of replies I’m excited there are more than three times the replies. That really shows our colleagues are replying to each other.

Look at the Response Rate report below. Aim for at least 50% of posts to get a reply. The further you fall below 50% the closer the community is to being broadcasting.

Getting to a rate of 80% is very good. You can imagine how a new colleague who has just joined the community will feel. They ask a question or have something to share and the community will almost certainly respond.

The Response Rate report will also highlight posts that have not received any replies or reactions. In the example above it is 7%. Make sure you review these and then tag colleagues who might be able to help where relevant.

Finally, look at the Curiosity Index report. Aim for 10-15% of your message to include a question.

In the example above only 4% of messages include a question, so you could run a couple of campaigns where you encourage colleagues to ask questions.

You can see the tremendous impact it has too. Messages that include a question get 1.9 replies, while those without a question get only 0.52 replies. Each community can expect different ratios, but overall our research has shown that, on average, you can expect 150% more replies when you ask a question.

2. Senior Leader Engagement

Do an individual benchmark table of your senior leadership team.

This will show you how many posts, replies and reactions each of your senior leaders has done, but also how many they have received.

SWOOP Analytics dashboards default to “last 3 months” as the date range. A useful target for each senior leader is:

24 posts (2 per week * 12 weeks)
48 replies (4 per week * 12 weeks)
72 reactions (6 per week * 12 weeks)

Check that they are also receiving replies and reactions.

The Curiosity Index is also available in the benchmark table, so you can see how often leaders are using Viva Engage to ask questions. Some leaders might require gentle coaching and assistance to shift from a traditional broadcast mindset to focus on conversations.

4. General Adoption

SWOOP Analytics’ global benchmarking of Viva Engage networks shows the average (2022-2023) percentage of Interactive Users was 27%. Interactive means that a colleague has posted, replied to, or reacted to a message. The data range is 3 months.

If you want to be ambitious the best organisations (i.e. the top 20%) have achieved an average of 37%, so we suggest that should be your goal.

With Viva Engage discussions now appearing in Outlook, and many organisations displaying Viva Engage communities on their intranet homepage, readership has greatly increased. You can expect 85% of colleagues are reading (or maybe more realistically are at being presented with) discussions on Viva Engage.

Typical points of confusion and questioning

As you get stuck into this, here are some typical points of confusion, or at least things you’ll be asked to explain.

Isn’t email fine? We also stream townhall meetings. Isn’t that enough?

Email is a broadcasting tool. It’s not for two-way conversation. Remember that by far the most effective communication is two-way. Townhalls (physical or virtual) often enable a Q&A aspect, but these events are infrequent. People prefer shorter and more frequent engagement, and Viva Engage enables senior leaders to engage colleagues in conversation before and after the townhall meeting.

I’m used to Microsoft Teams. Why don’t we use that instead?

Yes, you can indeed post a message on Microsoft Teams, and colleagues can reply or react. However, years of research about how Teams is used in practice clearly shows that Teams is used for small groups of colleagues to have a private place to collaborate on their work activities.

Viva Engage communities are, in contrast, mostly public and have many more members and the platform includes conversation moderation features that you don’t have in Microsoft Teams.

Our leaders are too busy. And if they had time, they didn’t know what to write. Even if they had time, they’d worry that people don’t engage with them.

If you get that question, it's a sign that you have not managed to explain the business rationale. Viva Engage enables transparent and open two-way conversation. Employee communication and employee engagement are like Siamese twins, and both have been proven to be critical for achieving business outcomes. Need proof? Check out Gallup’s meta analysis (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/321725/gallup-q12-meta-analysis-report.aspx) and/or The Effects Of Employee Communication And Engagement On Organisational Performance: A Conceptual Study available from http://www.ijafb.com/PDF/IJAFB-2023-46-03-17.pdf

SWOOP Analytics is all about helping people and organisations become better at communicating and collaborating. Check out our events and download our benchmarking report and you’ll have a treasure trove of case-studies to be inspired by and learn from.

If you need analytics to help you set goals and track progress get in contact.

Setting Goals and Measuring Success – A Practical Guide to Viva Engage

Viva Engage goals