What is Viva Goals?

“Having clear goals and measures of success at the highest levels of the organization helps everyone understand what’s important and align their work to the organizations most valued priorities. It sets the context for the work of the team and creates a shared vision, which is especially important when working in a hybrid environment today” – Vetri Vellore Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Viva Goals

With this in mind, Microsoft have developed Viva Goals to help align teams to an organization’s strategic priorities and unite them around the mission and purpose.

At the beginning of August, Microsoft announced that Viva Goals was generally available for customers worldwide, so I thought I would take a look and provide a very brief overview of what Viva Goals is about..

Microsoft Viva Goals is (as it says on the tin) a goal-setting and management solution that aligns teams to your organization’s strategic priorities. It was designed to help business leaders build higher performing teams, HR leaders improve employee experience, and employees feel a sense of purpose and belonging at work.

So How does it do it?

Viva Goals leverages “Objectives and Key Results” (OKRs), a proven goal-setting framework for creating alignment, focus, and a highly engaged work culture to drive business outcomes.

OKRs connect the mission and values of your business, your business’s priorities, and your employee experience – the work that you and your team do every day.

With one centralized source for setting goals, monitoring progress, and assessing success across your organization, you create clarity for your team, connect daily work to outcomes and ensure alignment at all levels. Viva Goals allows you to shift focus from effort and activity to impact and outcomes, share progress across your organization with customizable dashboards and stay agile ​at scale.   

Define Success!

Using OKR’s Viva Goals allows you to define what success will look like within your organization or team and track its progress.

OKR approval workflows, Organizational, Team, and Individual goal pages, and Chart View help to understand your team’s goals in the context of goals up, down, and across your organization.

Customizable dashboards and automations help leaders keep goals top-of-mind at town halls and team meetings and offer insight into real-time progress towards your goals.

Communicate your success with shareable links. This will allow you to keep every employee engaged in team goal setting and progress. 

Licensing!!!

You can start using the full set of features in Viva Goals with the purchase of one of the following SKUs:  

• Microsoft Viva Goals SKU 
• Microsoft Viva Suite SKU 

Viva Goals is available as an application in Microsoft Teams and as a web application. The Viva Goals web application has no prerequisites; customers can purchase and use Viva Goals with the web application without any other Microsoft product or subscription. 

A Microsoft Teams product license is a prerequisite to use the Viva Goals application in Teams. Teams can be licensed with Microsoft 365 F1, F3, E3, A3, E5, A5; Office 365 F3, E1, A1, E3, A3, E5, A5; Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium; or Microsoft SharePoint K, Plan 1, or Plan 2 license. 

There are more features and integrations within Viva Goals that I have not listed in this article and for further information the Microsoft documentation can be found HERE

Click HERE to watch the Microsoft Inspire session by Lucy Hitz from Microsoft Viva Marketing.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by!