Enhancing employee listening at Microsoft with Viva Glint

At Microsoft, giving our employees every opportunity to thrive is critical.

Now, we have a new but familiar tool to help us do that—our very own Microsoft Viva Glint.

We’re using Viva Glint—which replaces LinkedIn Glint—to check in with our 190,000 employees, and to respond to their feedback accordingly.

We recently finished migrating our centralized, active employee listening capability to Viva Glint. As part of that, we moved our employee sentiment survey programs onto the platform, including our flagship Employee Signals program, our lifecycle surveys, and a key manager feedback survey.

We use Employee Signals to survey our employees twice per year. Our leaders, managers, and HR practitioners use the feedback to improve our work environment, to identify our strengths and improvement opportunities, and ultimately, to help our employees thrive more at work (which to us means helping them feel energized and empowered to do meaningful work).

“Employee Signals is our flagship channel for listening to our employees,” says Dante Myers, a director on the HR Business Insights (HRBI) Employee Listening team. “It’s how we mobilize our entire company to ensure all our employees can thrive.”

In July 2023, LinkedIn Glint officially became Microsoft Viva Glint as part of our Employee Experience Platform. LinkedIn Glint was a leader in the employee feedback category with a robust people-science methodology. Shifting its capabilities to Viva Glint strengthens the insights and recommendations we can deliver to our customers. With this transition, we’re rebuilding and strengthening the product, making it better adhere to our security standards while improving its reporting and admin experiences and its integration with other Microsoft products.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft, it was important for us to migrate to Viva Glint so we could start taking advantage of these enhancements when we send out our Employee Signals surveys and to improve our listening systems overall. In this story, we’ll share how we achieved this technical migration, the benefits we gained, the challenges we faced, and what learnings we can pass on to other companies that want to make the same move.

“Viva Glint helps our managers understand insights at scale,” Myers says. “They can use it to ask questions and to dive into comments that their employees have left for them.”

A boost from Viva Glint

Moving to Viva Glint has given us many advantages, including access to the power of Copilot in Viva Glint, which helps our leaders, managers and HR partners easily understand, interpret, and act on feedback we get from our employees.

Here are just a few of the benefits we’ve gained from Viva Glint and its seamless integration with Copilot and other Microsoft Viva tools:

• Faster analysis: Our employee surveys give us thousands of powerful written insights that used to require heavy amounts of manual review and analysis. Now we’re using Copilot in Viva Glint to instantly analyze these results, saving us weeks of time and increasing the ability of our leaders to draw out useful insights. Almost 5,000 of our managers used Copilot in Viva Glint after our most recent Employee Signals to dig into their results and understand employee comments.
• Deeper understanding: Our employee surveys are a great way to understand our employee sentiment, but that’s not the whole story. How our people work, collaborate, and spend their time also impacts their engagement and productivity. We used Viva Insights alongside Viva Glint to understand how our people work in meetings, after hours, during focus time, and in other specific scenarios.
• Personal growth and development tools: Viva Glint will soon come with 360 surveys that leaders and managers can use for personal growth and development (the targeted release date is August 2024). 360s were previously a separate product with LinkedIn Glint and are now included in Viva Glint.
• Advanced admin capabilities: Better and more controls in Viva Glint means we can change our ongoing survey programs as needed. Some of these new capabilities include better data ownership, question level permissions, display logic questions, and self-serve raw data exports.
• Enhanced security and privacy: Our company runs on trust and security. With the move to Viva Glint, we now have a higher level of security as the product is built on Microsoft 365 compliance standards offering enterprise-grade security, trust, privacy, and accessibility.
• Ongoing product innovation: Features like Copilot in Viva Glint are just the beginning of the innovation we’re excited for in Viva Glint. Future improvements and integrations with other Microsoft products like Viva Insights will give us more opportunities to better understand our employees, take action, and drive impact.

It’s all about giving you more tools to listen to and respond to the feedback your employees give you.

“Viva Glint provides a foundation for measuring employee satisfaction and sentiment,” says Nate Zimmer, a senior product manager on the Unified Employee Experience team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “With the behavioral telemetry of Viva Insights, we can now see broad work patterns and combine that with the employee sentiment data from Viva Glint.”

Benefits of moving to Viva Glint

Experience the benefits of Viva Glint: A platform that provides insights into your organization’s health and helps improve employee engagement and satisfaction.

Migration approach

We accelerated our migration from LinkedIn Glint to Viva Glint so that we could take advantage of the new functionality in private preview and thoroughly test our migration tools and processes for our customers. We learned a lot from being one of the first companies to migrate, and our experience and feedback has been incorporated into the Viva Glint Migration Toolkit.

We drove our migration with a tight partnership across our Viva Glint migration team, our Viva Glint product group, HRBI Employee Listening team, and Microsoft Digital group (our internal IT organization and experts on our internal privacy, security, and Microsoft 365 usage).

“It was important that we engaged our global tenant admins early in the migration process as they had necessary tasks in Microsoft 365 to complete for the migration,” says Erica Shepard, a senior program manager on the HR Business Insights team. “It’s recommended to engage with them four to six weeks in advance.”

Our migration involved migrating four years of survey data for over 190,000 employees. In addition to our twice annual Employee Signals, we have lifecycle surveys that are administered daily. We planned our migration window to minimize the impact on our survey programs, giving ourselves six weeks to plan and four weeks post migration before starting to program our next survey cycle. We completed numerous pre-migration tasks to prepare, including exporting reports for post-migration validation. These preparation tasks are outlined in our Migration Toolkit.

We opted not to communicate to managers and employees that we were migrating because the impact to them would be minimal, we estimated that our system would only be offline for two days. Our engineering team did extensive development and testing on our migration tools to make sure we would be fully ready to migrate our external customers in a timely, secure, and quality manner. This effort paid off for us—we were able to complete our data migration in one day and our validations in one additional day. After that, our instance of Viva Glint was fully functional with all our data migrated, which allowed our managers to start using Viva Glint two days after our migration started.

“The migration exceeded my expectations,” Shepard says. “It was completed faster than expected and we encountered zero data quality issues,” Shepard says.

Post migration, we identified a couple of challenges that we worked with our Viva Glint migration team to resolve. These were mostly resolved with user education and making some system changes. One issue involved emails not being generated and sent, which impacted our ability to send survey invitations. We discovered a custom LinkedIn Glint template that didn’t match the email template in Viva Glint—after we deleted the LinkedIn Glint template, the system reverted to the default Viva Glint email template and the issue was resolved. This solution has been added to our Viva Glint Migration Toolkit.

Another challenge we encountered was related to our survey content. While the survey content migrated, we needed to re-program our survey invitation and reminder mails because the Viva Glint email formatting didn’t allow hyperlinks, markdown syntax, or paragraphs. To solve this, we needed to get creative and adjust our approach—we shortened our overall email text to one paragraph and included vanity URLs as text strings.

Additionally, the product team resolved an issue with the Microsoft logo not downloading in the emails—we use the logo to ensure our emails didn’t look like spam to our employees. The product team also resolved an intermittent access issue where users couldn’t sign in, which was an issue related to an expired token. When we launched our reporting portal, we discovered that our customized resources didn’t migrate, and we needed to re-create them on a tight timeline. This learning has been shared with the Migration team and our solutions are now part of our Migration Toolkit.

Administering our first survey cycle

With our migration to Viva Glint complete, we pivoted to the April cycle of our Employee Signals and Manager and Leader Signals (the latter is our survey where our employees provide feedback about their managers and skip managers). We planned our migration so that we had two months to test our survey builds on Viva Glint, which gave us time to work through the above challenges with the product team.

Overall, we’re very pleased with our successful first survey cycle on Viva Glint, even with the few bumps, especially because we were able to delight our managers by launching our results portal with Copilot in Viva Glint enabled for comment summarization.

Lessons learned

Reflecting on our migration, we were extra careful and planned to revert back to LinkedIn Glint if needed. While this approach helped us plan for a potential similar experience for customers, we don’t think customers need to go that far. “Identifying your migration window and following the Viva Glint Migration Toolkit will make your migration straightforward and easy to complete,” Shepard says.

The experience our employees and managers have with Viva Glint is very similar to what they experienced with LinkedIn Glint, so we didn’t do a lot of change management with the launch. We highlighted the Copilot functionality with managers when we released results. We focused our readiness efforts on making sure our admins were familiar with their new experience in Viva Glint and supporting them through the first survey cycle.

“Give yourself time post migration to explore Viva Glint and review your platform configurations so you are set up for a smooth survey administration,” Shepard says.

We suggest migrating at least four weeks before you need to launch a big program. This allows time for you as a company admin to validate using a test program, to learn about the expanded admin experience, and to understand the new settings. The Microsoft Learn content and the Viva Glint badge program are both great ways to do this.