Viva Goals helps your company reach its goals

Employees who neither care about the company's goals nor understand how to contribute to them themselves. Teams that work in their own silos without collaborating with other parts of the organisation. That's the stark reality of many companies, and it's not helped by parts of the workforce working from home.  

Do you recognize yourself? Don't worry: the Microsoft 365 tool Viva Goals can help your business set effective goals and steer employees towards them.  

 

What are Viva Goals?

Microsoft Viva Goals is as the name suggests, part of Microsoft Viva, a employee platform for modern hybrid work to use Microsoft's words.

Viva Goals allows you to ensure that all teams are in sync and working towards the same overall objectives.

The solution helps you to set effective business goals and track progress. At all levels: from individual employees, through teams and departments, all the way to the company's strategy, long-term goals and vision.

You could say that Viva Goals is a good way of "forcing" clear priorities within the organisation. User focus towards tasks that are expected to have the greatest impact on the desired outcome.

All efforts are linked to clear goals and objectives that are visible to all. In this way, Viva Goals becomes a catalyst for goal-oriented commitment and cooperation. Managers and employees understand how their own goals are linked to the goals of their colleagues and not least with the end result.

 

 

Viva Goals makes room for open communication and encourages a active discussion of the company's mobjectives and how to achieve them. Something that is especially needed in a hybrid workplace.

This lagain perhaps a little for good, but of course software is not enough. After all, management and staff have to implement a new way of working with objectives.

 

Sight effective targets

Any goal you set with Viva Goals will always be linked to (and contribute to) your company's strategy and long-term goals.

The solution is based on OKR (Objectives and Key Results), a framework for target management used by companies such as LinkedIn and Google. Mmany see it as bbest practice for target management.

 

Here's how it works:

1. Sight a small number of challenging main objectives (objective) and break each down into 3-5 sub-objectives, called key results (key result). A main objective could be a turnover of 100 MSEK in 5 years, broken down into yeartargets and quarterly or monthly targets for the current year.
2. Find out what is needed to achieve the main objective 100 MSEK in turnover. How many products, licences or hours do you need to sell? Do you need fThe company 50 of a particular product, add this product sales as a key result.
3. Identify which tasks required to achieve the key result (50 products sold).
4. Distribute the tasks to the members of the teams concernedwho allocate the necessary time.
5. Key results are evaluated ongoing on how many percent achieved.

 

Methodologies is built into Viva Goals, ensuring that all projects and tasks are linked to objectives and key results.

 

Easy to share, view and communicate

But targets and key activities are not enough. Communicating them is just as importantg.

Viva Goals has custom dashboards that make it easy for every employee and team to report and share their goals and key results.

 

 

They can visualise their progress at meetings through customisable presentations that show graphs or the percentage of goals achieved. This is also a good basis for analyse deviations from the expected development.

The internal dialogue on targets and progress can also be easily done via chat messages in Teams regardless of the channel you are in, without having to switch windows or platforms. Via the integrated Viva Goals button, you can nanytime ask a team member for an update. Updates can also be sent to you automatically, for example before project meetings.

Through daily use of Viva Goals is all continuously updated and can contribute in conversations about what needs to be done to achieve the goals. Where are we falling behind and why? Should we reallocate resources? How can we help each other?

This focuses the conversations pon what is important and concerns everyone. Weekly meetings will be more efficient and the roles of the participants clear.

 

 

Each team and individual employee has a customized view that makes it natural to focus on their most important priorities in their daily work.

Finally, I would like to mention that Viva Goals is integrated with Teams, Azure DevOps, Jira, Asana, Tableau and ZenDesk. So users can update their status, communicate and track the team's goals step by step towards the goals directly in these systems.

 

Want help getting started with Viva Goals?

Hear off!

 

Read our CEO Peter Fritzon's article about goal management.

Read more about our WeSafe Goals offer.