Viva Goals and OKRs | Everything You Need to Know

Microsoft Viva—dedicated to the employee experience—delivers education, critical company information, and insights right in the flow of work. Now, they’re adding a new application to the suite that helps teams achieve their goals more efficiently. 

Viva Goals’ foundation embraces the OKR framework helping companies align their objectives, measure success, and champion their goals in public. In this blog, we’ll be discussing Viva Goals, OKRs, and how you can leverage them to elevate your employee experience. 

What are OKRs? 

Before we dive into Viva Goals, let’s break down OKRs: Viva Goals lets you track goals using OKRs, but what exactly are OKRs?  

OKR stands for objectives and key results. OKRs are your organization’s targets as well as the metrics that tell you you’re on the right path to meeting your goals. 

•  Objectives are what you want to achieve. For example, an objective could be achieving financial stability.
• Key Results are how you are planning on achieving your objective through benchmarks and measurable progress indicators. An example of a key result that corresponds to our example for objectives is, reducing expenses by 5% by the next fiscal year.  

 Want to learn more about OKRs? Check out OKRs biggest champion, John Doerr’s site, or Microsoft’s documentation.  

“Setting organizational goals is important as it creates our ‘north star’ and what we want to achieve.”– Simran Chaudry, Creospark Chief Engagement Officer 

One of the greatest benefits of OKRs is transparent organizational alignment everyone can see. Employee satisfaction is directly linked to seeing the value of their contributions. According to a study done by Globoforce, 89% of HR leaders agree that ongoing feedback is key for successful outcomes. When an organization shares its goals and metrics, employees can see the direct impact their work has on the organization as a whole demonstrating that everyone is successfully working together in pursuit of overarching goals. 

 

What makes OKR integration into Teams so valuable? 

As professionals, so much of the day is spent in Microsoft Teams. It’s where all our work lives and breathes in this new modern work focused world. Now OKRs are joining that ecosystem where the majority of your work already exists. This makes it more convenient to track and brings OKRs to not only the front of our screens, but also the front of our minds. 

What is Viva Goals? 

Viva Goals is an app within the Viva suite that allows your organization to align goals with strategic priorities. This application allows individuals and organizations to track goals and progress through OKRs. 

How does Viva Goals work? 

 Viva Goals seamlessly integrates into Microsoft Teams to ensure your goals are front and centre. Within the application you can create goals and assign owners in and across teams. Microsoft documents can also be integrated into Viva Goals so that tracking key metrics within the interface is simple.  

Why are we excited about Viva Goals? 

 The Creospark team is very excited about Viva Goals and you should be too: 

Viva Goals gives organizations a solidified management tool that tracks and aligns both organizational and individual goals. When goals are clear within the organization, they will become clearer to your customers as well, giving them a better experience. The increased transparency and visibility also help create a purpose for employees that everyone can rally behind. 

Viva Goals is a fascinating new tool that will allow employees to better align with each other and the organization. Want to learn more about Viva Goals? Watch our Viva Goals webinar to learn more about Viva Goals and Demystify OKRs.

Viva Goals, OKRs, and the employee experience 

As with all the other Viva Suite applications, Viva Goals aims to improve the employee experience; here’s how: 

Viva Goals creates collective accountability and checkpoints to keep you on track and focused on what matters. It also gives individuals a clear direction on what they need to achieve. Clarity and accountability make your team more cohesive and allow you to focus on your tasks at hand. 

Viva Goals brings value and purpose to employees as they can see their direct contributions and the impacts of those contributions. When employees see that they’re positively impacting the organization, they will be more motivated to continue their good work. Creospark CEO even stated that in his experience, “Seeing hard numbers is fulfilling”.  

The employee experience will also be made better through transparency. Visibility into clear OKRs and measurable growth allow employees to see how they can advance their careers while giving them a roadmap for success in the long term. Employees will be more motivated if they know they can improve and that there’s room for growth. 

If everyone is working toward the same goal and results are achieved, naturally employee experience improves through increased positive motivating factors. Viva Goals also allows for those whose values align with those of the organization to thrive as they will be more intrinsically motivated.