How Microsoft does IT
Apr 21, 2023 | Jason Kellington 
We’re using Microsoft Viva Learning to foster a learning culture, empower our learners, and fuel innovation and growth at Microsoft. Our Microsoft learning teams can enable learning in the flow of work and make it easy for our employees to find the type of learning content that they need. We can centralize and enhance the learning experience for all Microsoft employees. We’re helping our employees learn, grow, and succeed as they develop and foster skills that drive innovation in a competitive marketplace, ensuring that Microsoft will be better positioned to attract, engage, and retain talented people.
At Microsoft, we’re fostering an environment that creates time and space for learning that is flexible, where the desire to learn and grow comes before the need to know. Our learning culture celebrates creativity and ingenuity; our employees learn not only from successes, but also from experiments, mistakes, failures, and especially each other. We want our employees to be free to ask “why not” and “what if,” empowering them to be consistently curious and continuously learning.
We believe deeply in the importance of a growth mindset. Growth mindset is all about continuously learning and being aware. We’re evolving our culture of learning from being know-it-alls to being learn-it-alls.
—Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president, Talent, Learning, and Insights, Microsoft Human Resources
Learning is a celebrated part of Microsoft’s culture, and we treat learning as a core capability. At Microsoft, we reward employees for their growth mindset and curiosity, traits that help drive business outcomes. We want to empower learners who are invested in and motivated to take control of their learning journey—with personalized recommendations, consistent experiences, and relevant, easily discoverable resources. For Microsoft employees, learning is a career-long endeavor, with learners continuously building and sharpening skills and capabilities.
“We believe deeply in the importance of a growth mindset,” says Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president for Talent, Learning, and Insights in Microsoft Human Resources. “Growth mindset is all about continuously learning and being aware. We’re evolving our culture of learning from being know-it-alls to being learn-it-alls.”
[Read this Customer Zero story on how we’re upgrading our employee learning experience with Viva Learning. | See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. | Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.]
Viva Learning is accelerating the transformation of our learning culture and helping us provide employees with high-value learning opportunities within the Microsoft Teams experience. Positioned as the streamlined learning component of Viva, Microsoft’s employee experience platform (EXP), Viva Learning brings personalized and relevant learning experiences into the flow of work. Viva Learning serves as a front door for employee learning at Microsoft.
We believe that learners should take ownership of their individual growth and development. Viva Learning helps us equip learners with what they, as individuals, need to learn. Our users receive a personalized, adaptive learning experience that provides meaningful, timely, and relevant resources and recommendations natively integrated into the tools they already use throughout the workday. We want learning experiences to be relevant to each person. As such, Viva Learning is designed to understand who each learner is, including needs such as location, goals and ambitions, and learners’ previous experiences and existing skills.
Our employees start their day in Teams and work much of the day within the Teams interface. Viva Learning integrates with multiple Teams features and contributes to learning in the flow of work. We didn’t need to invest in a platform to host the front-end. We simply took advantage of our existing investment in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and Teams.
—Christopher Mead, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience
With Viva Learning, learners can easily discover resources through search and browsing. They receive personalized resource recommendations and have access to an abundant set of third-party resources. However, we help guide the learning experience by being intentional about how we curate content and make it discoverable.
Viva Learning is structured as a hub that enables learning in the flow of work. The Viva Learning tab in Teams gives our employees access to all available learning resources in an easily navigable single view. Our learning management teams can surface content from our own internal training catalogs, third-party content providers, and existing learning management systems (LMS) across desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Christopher Mead, principal program manager for Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, summarizes the benefit of Viva Learning’s Teams integration. “Our employees start their day in Teams and work much of the day within the Teams interface. Viva Learning integrates with multiple Teams features and contributes to learning in the flow of work.” Mead adds, “We didn’t need to invest in a platform to host the front-end. We simply took advantage of our existing investment in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and Teams.”
Learning resources can be delivered through Teams in a one-on-one chat, a group chat, or a meeting. Our employees can infuse learning into the conversations already happening at work by sharing learning content and courses with a single-click. Our employees get the training they need and even the training they didn’t know they needed through a curated and managed experience. Our Learning teams can place easily discoverable learning content within Teams where employees can track completed learning items across training content providers and manage their individual learning journeys. This content includes assigned learning, featured content, and peer recommended learning, all of which contribute to a targeted learner experience and help grow the culture of learning at Microsoft.
A culture of learning centers on our people, so it’s only natural that adopting Viva Learning begins with the most people-centric part of our organization, Microsoft HR, in collaboration with Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. Our deployment and implementation teams have partnered with Microsoft HR from the very beginning of our journey toward Viva Learning. Early on, we invited our HR and Learning teams to ask themselves, “How could Viva Learning enhance the service I deliver?”
Partnering with Microsoft HR and our Learning teams provides our implementation teams with the organizational influence to ensure that employees are encouraged to adopt Viva Learning. With Microsoft HR’s support, we can ensure that employees receive education on the platform’s capabilities and that organization-wide messaging is communicating the importance and value of Viva Learning to our employees’ learning experience.
We’re adopting Viva Learning as our primary learning experience platform in the context of what we call Customer Zero. We all use our own products, and we use them extensively. We obsess over the employee experience to ensure that our products and services don’t just meet our own employees’ needs, but exceed them. The Customer Zero program helps us apply our internal learnings to improve our solutions, ensuring that our products also exceed our customers’ expectations.
Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small-and-midsized customers.
As Customer Zero for Viva Learning, we have a unique opportunity to inform product development by aligning closely with product teams and internal stakeholders responsible for deployments, granting us the ability to address challenges other customers may experience through early and extensive feedback.
We collaborate closely with the Viva product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of the Customer Zero partnership, Microsoft HR and our implementation teams get early access to new features and a chance to steer the product roadmap in a direction that best meets real enterprise learning needs. This enables our own learning experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Viva Learning development process.
Customer Zero has influenced the development of Viva Learning in many ways. For example, when working with the platform’s ratings and reviews features, our learning management found that the typical star rating system was useful to assess and report the quality of different learning resources. However, management didn’t find the same usefulness in the review capability, which almost never provided value to learners, especially if negative reviews were posted for mandatory courses that our learners were required to take, regardless of the review.
Many other features have been influenced directly by feedback from our Microsoft HR and learning teams, including:
As Customer Zero, we’re positioned to ensure that every feature in Viva Learning—right down to the finest detail—meets the need of both our organizations and our customers.
Moving to a new learning-experience platform can be a daunting endeavor. Like many organizations, we have significant investments in learning-management solutions and training platforms. We have created a large catalog of learning resources. Providing unified access to these resources is a big part of how we’re fostering a culture of learning. A critical part of choosing to adopt Viva Learning at Microsoft was the platform-agnostic capabilities of Viva Learning’s APIs. These APIs helped our implementation teams integrate internal learning solutions and third-party providers with Viva Learning. With this approach, we were able to bring our capabilities and content into the broader picture of learning at Microsoft without needing to convert, remove, or otherwise change them. This enabled us to capitalize on existing learning investments and more quickly implement Viva Learning as our primary learning experience platform.
For example, we use LinkedIn Learning across Microsoft for a wide variety of learning capabilities. LinkedIn Learning contains a tremendous catalog of learning resources that we use frequently. We used the Viva Learning APIs not only to make the LinkedIn Learning content available through Viva Learning, but also to send data from LinkedIn Learning back to Viva Learning to track course completion and other important metadata. We can use the APIs in the same way across many learning sources, creating a unified catalog and a unified learner experience.
Viva Learning’s content-discovery capabilities provide easy surfacing of relevant training materials to our learners and ease of access to the learning that they need. We’ve experienced a significant increase in optional learning-resource usage as a result. Today, our learners are finding and using more learning resources that are relevant to them and that facilitate their learning journey.
We’re using Viva Learning to enable a learning experience in the flow of work at Microsoft. As Customer Zero, we anticipate that our employees’ learning experience will continue to align increasingly with our culture of learning. Improvements in efficiency and relevance, especially from AI and peer recommendations, will continue to drive a more relevant and effective learning experience.
Here are some of the top things we learned deploying Viva Learning here at Microsoft:
Tags: Employee Experience, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva
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