How Microsoft HR is using Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot to empower our employees

Change and adoption communication is a well-established discipline that relies on both centralized campaigns and more localized, intra-departmental efforts. Above and beyond Microsoft Digital’s company-wide Copilot communications, HR’s internal adoption leaders actively construct campaigns specific to their organization’s needs.

In addition to running these campaigns using Viva Amplify, the Viva suite’s organizational communications app, change leaders can deploy adoption material through HR’s own Copilot sponsors and champions, giving them the opportunity to influence their communities on whatever channels feel most natural: Teams, Outlook, or Viva Engage. This approach captures the benefits of an organizationally aligned, carefully crafted narrative while capitalizing on the reach and trust that employees’ leaders and peers inspire.

The ongoing HR AI Roundup is one example of a Viva Amplify campaign. It provides a monthly update on HR’s goals and progress with Copilot adoption, shares new features and capabilities, and offers clear actions employees can take to further their usage.

As this work continues, the HR adoption team is learning from their initial experiments with Viva Amplify. The goal is to collaborate with sponsors and champions to disseminate customized campaigns that provide precise analytics, contributing to continuous improvement.

“Everyone can be an effective communicator with Viva Amplify,” says Laura Luethe, a director of communications on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “It combines the capabilities of corporate communicators with the ability to tailor messaging to uniquely relevant audiences.”

There isn’t one right way to learn, so HR accommodates a diverse array of learning styles. Viva Learning provides opportunities for both self-directed and group learning as components of their Copilot skilling offerings.

Aside from providing multiple paths to learning and development, one of the principal upskilling challenges is the location and discoverability of content. In that context, Viva Learning’s flexibility and ability to pull learning material from multiple sources is a major asset.

“People are hungry for skilling opportunities for their specific disciplines. Viva Learning supports that desire by providing one central location for all their learning needs.”

The HR team assembled a set of discipline-specific learning materials to create the AI for HR Academy. It contains the mainstay AI for HR learning path, as well as other modules that include discipline-specific content, material on systems thinking, and more. For people who learn best alongside their peers, there are also opportunities for collaborative skilling activities like group trainings, community teams, or forums.

With this academy, HR change leaders have a shareable core of learning material they can deploy alongside enablement communications, community blasts, or other activations.

A human-centric approach to adoption respects that change is often community-based and meets people where they are—and that it works best when it’s fun. In an organization as large as Microsoft HR, with many people working in different locations or functioning on a hybrid model, a digital solution for community-based engagement is essential.

“There’s no watercooler big enough for our global community to gather around,” says Chris Owen, a senior program manager on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “In that environment, Viva Engage becomes the one and only space where all of HR can meet regularly and exchange ideas.”

As a grassroots employee community app, Viva Engage enables peer-to-peer guidance and communication about Copilot. It also unlocks synergies between different Viva apps. Change leaders can introduce campaigns into Viva Engage by rallying employees to share pre-populated posts distributed through Viva Amplify.

HR’s Copilot Champs Community, a subset of our wider HR AI Community of Practice, is an essential part of those peer-to-peer change management initiatives. They share best practices for local outreach and support each other’s efforts to drive adoption within their specific disciplines, often through Viva Engage.

Although Viva Engage relies on community members to drive conversations forward, it also allows guidance from change leaders and community managers tasked with supporting the adoption. The tool provides just the right elevation for leaders to introduce change initiatives into the community, which members can adapt and socialize throughout their peer groups.

In one instance, the HR adoption team created a digital Copilot escape room designed to gamify learning about prompts for their HR AI Community of Practice members. Community members found the initiative so helpful that they recommended making it available to the wider organization, encouraging others to replicate the experience within their local teams.

One of most valuable aspects of Viva Engage is the way it decentralizes the responsibility for leading change. By letting conversations unwind organically, it becomes a repository for knowledge-sharing, content, and ongoing conversations about the best ways to use Copilot.

When employees learn together, share best practices, and ask questions, collective conversations unfold and people build valuable connections, which are especially helpful in a hybrid environment. That isn’t just a powerful adoption practice. It also boosts a sense of community and improves morale.

The numbers illustrate how effective and connective this channel can be. Just nine months after the launch of the HR AI Community of practice, almost 900 new members have joined the community, creating more than 230 posts that have collectively earned nearly 50,000 views.

As one of the most effective vehicles for change management in HR, Viva Engage illustrates how social connections can be a powerful force for good.

Orderly data and the ability to process insights are essential to applying people science principles practically. We aren’t just interested in understanding what people are doing, but how they feel about it—uncovering the “why” behind adoption behavior. Employee signals are central to that goal.

As part of HR’s enterprise employee strategy, the team deploys biannual, organization-wide Signals surveys through Viva Glint to gauge sentiment across different topics. With the introduction of Copilot, they included questions about engagement with the new technology. HR’s AI adoption leaders work alongside the HR Business Intelligence team to use select data from that survey to understand sentiment about AI and fine-tune their adoption approach.

Recently, they’ve been working to correlate results from questions about AI usage and employees’ thriving metrics, the main outcome we use at Microsoft to understand the employee experience. To thrive is to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work, and based on recent survey results, the HR team is beginning to understand trends and sentiments around Copilot adoption and its impact on employees’ experiences.

By collating thriving metrics acquired through Viva Glint surveys with Copilot usage, the HR team has found that employees who use Copilot at least once every week are more likely to say they’re thriving and take initiative to be productive.

That insight accomplishes two things: It validates further investment in Copilot adoption efforts and simultaneously demonstrates its value to users.

“It’s all about energy, empowerment, and whether work is meaningful to employees,” says David Spahr, a director on the Microsoft HR AI Transformation team. “We aren’t just trying to understand the productivity and efficiency gains of AI—we want to see the ways it’s helping humans become more human.”

Clear and structured progress toward goals is a key motivator for employees. Viva Goals provides the benefit of tracking and clarity around OKRs to help deliver that motivation. The HR Services team uses this tool to track progress on Copilot-supported productivity and job satisfaction.

This year, one of the team’s major projects is determining whether using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to handle HR inquiries correlates with an increase in productivity and job satisfaction for HR agents. In addition to tracking these elements and establishing a correlation, Viva Goals helped HR align these objectives and their benefits with their organization’s strategy.

Now that the team has correlated Copilot usage, productivity, and job satisfaction, their next step will be to set targets for each of these three areas and track them effectively. Viva goals will be essential to their work by providing visible, verifiable insights into the team’s progress and how the benefits they realize contribute to their goals.

“We’re very intentional about defining our objectives, anticipating their benefits, and establishing OKRs to track those pieces,” Friedman says. “From there, we can verifiably demonstrate progress.”

One of the most important learnings from HR’s Copilot adoption experience has been that no OKR is ever static. Instead, these metrics help change leaders to answer questions about their current progress, ask new questions about how to adjust work, then revise their measurements into more perfectly calibrated OKRs as needed.

This kind of progressive goal setting moves organizations away from simplistic pass-or-fail thinking and toward dynamic, progress-centered ways of tracking success.