As we move towards the new year, it’s time to reflect back and begin goal planning for 2024. A great goal is…
• Ambitious and inspiring
• Tied to measurable outcomes
• Regularly updated to understand progress
• Tied to the daily work of your employees
Today at Ignite, Microsoft Viva Goals is announcing three ways we’re making all of these pieces of the goal-setting and management process more efficient and impactful for you in 2024.
1. Don’t know where to start? Copilot can help.
Today we are announcing a public preview for Copilot in Viva Goals starting in December 2023, just in time for 2024 goal planning season. Current Viva Goals customers will find Copilot live in their instance of Viva Goals. Organization admins will have the ability to turn Copilot in Viva Goals off for users if needed.
Copilot in Viva Goals will be generally available for all Viva suite customers in Q1 CY2024.
Copilot in Viva Goals uses next-gen AI to improve your goal planning and management in three key ways:
• Helping you create and refine ambitious goals that inspire your team, tied to measurable outcomes and the daily work of employees in less time. For instance, you can ask Copilot in Viva Goals “Help me generate OKRs for my Product team” and work with Copilot to refine them until they make sense for your business. Then simply save your goals to Viva Goals and share with your team. This is also a great way to get team members involved in the goal planning process, creating a collaborative goal-setting process more likely to achieve buy-in and results.
• Translating strategy and vision documents that leadership has been crafting into goals your teams feel prepared to tackle and accountable for. For instance, load a strategy document from leaders or even meeting notes into Copilot in Viva Goals. Copilot will come up with goals tailor-made for your team and business.
• Making it easier and more efficient to share progress updates across teams, from crafting updates for you based on check-ins to refining your updates to sound more professional or more succinct with conversational AI. For instance, when it’s time to report on outcomes, ask Copilot in Viva Goals for goal updates and what quarter-over-quarter progress looks like. Then refine your results to sound shorter or more professional so you can ensure you’re reflecting the work and impact of your team clearly and accurately.
Want to learn more about Copilot in Viva Goals? Watch the recording—including an interactive live demo of Copilot in action—of our recent Viva Goals Office Hours webinar 3 Ways to Improve Your Goal Management Process with Copilot in Viva Goals.
PLUS: Viva Goals comes to Copilot for M365 in private preview starting in Q1 CY2024: Copilot for M365 will be enhanced by the Viva suite, including Viva Goals, starting in private preview in Q1 CY2024 with chat that works across Viva data and apps to support employees, managers and leaders.
2. Engage with your employee community by bringing goals into the conversation
According to our Forrester 2023 State of Goal-Setting Report, the majority of employees at enterprise organizations (61%) do not know what their company-level goals are. If employees aren’t aware of the goals that matter most to your business or progress being made—the top ask from employees when it comes to the goal management process is more frequent progress updates—it’s impossible to know if they are being productive in the right direction.
How can you keep employees focused on the right goals and metrics that matter most to your business—not just at company-wide meetings but in the conversations and communities they are a part of every day?
In our latest feature release to keep goals and goal progress top-of-mind for every employee, Viva Goals and Viva Engage are announcing the first phase of our cross-suite integration.
The Viva Goals/Viva Engage integration brings mission, alignment and results into communities and conversation by helping customers build communities around goals, view goal progress from Viva Goals directly in Viva Engage, and create business communities within Viva Engage designed to help leaders better communicate top-down interactions and initiatives, including delivering praise based on goal progress and achievement.
This integration will be generally available in H1 2024.
Want to learn about all the cross-Viva suite integrations that Microsoft Viva is announcing at Ignite 2023? Check out this blog post.
3. Make tracking goal progress even more precise as a master Planner
With the latest enhancements to the Viva Goals integration with Microsoft Planner, Viva Goals users can now filter Planner tasks by buckets and labels, integrate key results or projects directly with specific tasks, and track progress using checklist items.
Within Microsoft Planner, the tasks in a given plan often cater to multiple projects. Viva Goals users are now able to select which specific tasks they would like to use for progress calculation for their initiative or key result.
This functionality enables more efficient portfolio management and greater flexibility in how organizations connect their planning and processes to business goals, helping better align productivity to business impact in 2024.
As we move forwards into 2024, which product developments and integrations do you want to see on the Viva Goals roadmap to improve your goal planning and management process? Let us know in the comments below.