We’re entering a new age of work, one that requires clarity, alignment, and a sense of purpose to employees and organizations. By centering actionable goals in our work, we address many of the challenges we’re hearing from customers like:
- Only 39% of employees fully understand their company goals which makes it impossible to connect the work they are doing every day to the work that drives business impact
- Employees want more visibility into progress towards goals at the team and organization level. The #1 thing practitioners would change about the goal-setting and management process is having more frequent updates on their goal progress.
- Leaders are looking for a quicker goal-setting process to present goals to employees earlier.
How is Viva Goals supporting our customers in coming up with goals more quickly and efficiently, connecting daily work to top-level goals, and increasing visibility into goal progress? We are thrilled to announce several features today including AI capabilities with Copilot for Viva Goals, new and enhanced integrations, and stronger admin functionality.
New AI Capabilities with Copilot in Viva Goals - Coming later this year
We’re excited to announce that Copilot in Viva Goals will be coming soon! Copilot in Viva Goals leverages next-generation AI capabilities to work hand in hand with you to unlock productivity by creating and refining your goals in meaningful and outcome-driven ways, while also removing the manual work around check- ins and progress.
Authoring your goals with Copilot
Defining and writing new organizational goals can be daunting. Many organizations and leaders will plan and set goals for their teams and organizations by writing vision or strategy documents. Copilot in Viva Goals can help translate your vision and planning documents into Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), helping you identify and create actionable goals within Viva.
You can also use Copilot’s assistive chat experience to request help in generating new OKRs or initiatives to support these larger objectives. Copilot uses organizational and team context, OKR best practices, sample OKRs and expert recommendations to suggest OKRs for your organization. From there, you can partner with Copilot to refine your team’s OKRs to better address your priorities and desired outcomes.
For example, with a few simple commands, Copilot in Viva Goals can transform your OKRs to become more aspirational or conservative or propose Key Results for objectives you’ve already written. Using conversational AI or inline editing, you can tailor your OKRs to fit the goals that work best for you.
Summarizing your progress with Copilot
Creating goals is a fundamental first step in aligning teams and driving clarity, but keeping track of progress and providing regular updates is how organizations successfully move from strategy to execution.
Copilot in Viva Goals summarizes your progress on OKRs, identifies areas to focus, and suggests next steps, streamlining the update and check-in process. By summarizing your progress within your Viva Goals dashboard, Copilot helps reduce overhead for teams conducting executive business reviews, team meetings, sharing progress, and more.
Copilot also helps individual users to generate more comprehensive check-ins by consolidating existing relevant data, making it even easier and faster to provide updates on how you are tracking towards your team goals.
In-product guidance with Copilot
As you create, track, and share your goals, it’s important to ensure that none of your top priorities are ignored. Copilot will help highlight OKRs that need your attention, by identifying the top items that are at risk and surface them in Viva Goals or Microsoft Teams. This helps leaders to focus on OKR gaps to achieve better outcomes.
Copilot also helps individual users to generate more comprehensive check-ins by consolidating existing relevant data, making it even easier and faster to provide updates on how you are tracking towards your team goals.
A More Personalized Viva Goals Experience- Coming Soon
In addition to the exciting new functionality of Copilot in Viva Goals, Viva Goals will be releasing new features for a more curated experience by Q2 CY2023. With the Personalized Activity Feed, all users, including non-OKR owners, have clear visibility on the progress of their most relevant goals, all in a single landing page. This feature includes status updates from leaders and relevant stakeholders, as well as the ability to react and comment directly from the activity feed.
With Customized Views coming soon, users will also have new filtering capabilities, along with the ability to save and pin their most used views. With this functionality, leaders will be able to streamline reviews, highlight gaps in progress and quickly access views most relevant to them to drive a high quality goal-management process.
Enhanced Administrator Functionality – Available Now
Last quarter, we announced the launch of the Analytics Dashboard which provides visualizations and insights around OKR adoption, engagement, and overall OKR health.
Now we’re excited to announce new enhancements to the dashboard that provide increased granularity on team level analytics, rather than just an aggregation of the organization level data, and the ability for admins to drill down to multiple levels of teams. The dashboard will also include metrics broken down by Objectives and Key Results. Lastly, teams will be able to filter the data through tags which can align with strategic initiatives or lines of business.
Can’t wait for some of the new admin features? Now generally available, we have two additional admin capabilities. With the New Admin Center Console, admins have a designated page to enable and disable integrations, configure organization permissions and manage organizations access. Admins can also now streamline the process of adding teams members through the bulk provisioning teams via Azure Active Directory.
Improving Interoperability with the Microsoft 365 Stack
As Viva Goals continues to grow, we’ve made a commitment to become more embedded within the functionality of the Microsoft platform. In addition to the first party integrations we’ve previously announced, such as the Microsoft Project integration coming this quarter, we’re excited announce a new wave of interoperability across M365.
Easily Paste OKRs from Viva Goals to any Surface- Available Now
The first step to increase native integration by bringing in OKRs to all the tools you use today, like Excel, Word Documents, PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams, is creating a seamless copy paste experience. By easily pasting formatted OKRs and sharing across any surface, you easily share increase visibility and adoption across your organization.
One-click PowerPoint templates and Outlook emails from Viva Goals - Coming Soon
As the next evolution to increase native integration and empower leaders to drive alignment and purpose, users will be able to share OKR views directly with Outlook and PowerPoint.
Coming soon, leaders can support existing ROB mechanisms by leveraging Viva Goals to share OKR updates to Outlook. With one click, leaders can disseminate vital information on OKR progress and top priorities. Team members will also be able to react to an OKR update directly within Outlook, without having to navigate separately Viva Goals.
Additionally, users will also be able to share views through PowerPoint. Here, they can export their OKRs into presentation ready templates which can be leveraged in pre-reads or presented in town halls.
*UX and flow subject to change
Introducing the Profile Cards Experience for Viva Goals- Coming Soon
Furthermore, Viva Goals will soon surface within Profile Cards in Outlook. In addition to seeing where in an organization a peer may sit, users will be able to easily discover team goals, explore alignment across organizations, and scale OKR visibility, all within Outlook.
In addition to viewing Profile Cards in Outlook, Profile Cards are coming directly to Viva Goals! Coming soon, Viva Goals users will be able to harness the benefits of live Profile Cards such as understanding the reporting structure, contact details and LinkedIn highlights of your coworkers all within Viva Goals.
Enhancements to Current Functionality – Coming Soon
Coming soon, Viva Goals users who leverage Microsoft Teams will get real time notifications within their Teams activity feed for mentions or check-in reminders, allowing them to seamlessly act within one workspace.
With the Adaptive Card feature coming soon, URL links that users paste from Viva Goals to Teams chats will now unfurl to a preview card. The cards include specific OKR details from the shared link, such as check-ins, project status, and other updates, so users can view a snapshot of Viva Goals without having to leave the chat.
Increased Azure DevOps Functionality
We’ve previously announced the Viva Goals Azure DevOps integration , which allows you to leverage ADO tooling within your Viva Goals environment. In the first iteration, users could connect ADO work items to a Key Result or initiative through a shared query to see the progress reflected in their KRs and initiatives.
Directly Link ADO Work Items to OKRs- Now Available
With the new ADO integration improvements now generally available, users can directly link ADO work items to KRs and Initiatives, removing the dependency on a shared query, saving both time and effort.
Native ADO Extension- Coming Soon
Coming soon, Viva Goals Extension in ADO will allow users to seamlessly connect the dots between ADO work items and the OKRs and Initiatives they are driving. When a work item in ADO is linked to an initiative in Viva Goals, users will be able to view how that work item aligns in Viva Goals without leaving ADO. The new embedded work item experience enables you to explore alignment, view progress, and check-in OKRs directly within ADO.
New Third-Party Integrations
Along with the investments Viva Goals is making with first party integrations, we’re thrilled to announce new additions to our already extensive and industry leading list of third party integrations
Coming this quarter, the Zapier data integration allows Viva Goals users to automate their KR progress with data from any of the 5,000 apps in the Zapier library. This includes apps like CRM, Marketing, and Project Management, so users automatically update progress and center goals across different workstreams.
In addition to the Jira cloud data integration, Viva Goals is excited to announce that we now integrate with Jira Server and Jira Data Center. Similar to the Jira cloud data integration, the on-prem data integration enables users to automate KR and initiatives progress using data from Jira Server and Data Center.
Want to experience Viva Goals for yourself?
If you’re excited about what’s to come and curious about how Viva Goals can impact your organization, sign up to try Viva Goals for free for 60 days. Organizations looking to trial Viva Goals internally are welcome to sign up for IT Admin-led trials.
We are also excited to announce the launch of self-service trials. These new self-service trials allow business leaders and individuals in existing Azure AD tenants to sign up for a Viva Goals trial and experience team goal-setting and management together. To learn more about best practices when setting up a trial, download the Microsoft Viva Goals Trial Configuration Checklist.