4 practical steps to increase engagement with leadership using Microsoft Viva Engage

As an internal communications professional, you likely already know the significant impact that your organisation’s leadership has on overall employee engagement.

You understand how leaders have the power to set the cultural tone and influence the employee experience, for better or for worse. And the research that highlights a clear correlation between leadership communication and employee engagement is certainly not new news for you.

You’ve probably also seen first-hand how IC campaigns and employee initiatives can fail to have the impact you’d hoped for, because 70% of the variance in a team’s engagement is determined solely by their leader.

At Silicon Reef, M365 experts specialising in elevating the employee experience, we’ve set out four practical steps on how you can use Viva Engage as a tool to build an engaged workforce where employees feel connected to their leaders.

1. Establish a leadership directory

There are two important reasons why you need to start your Viva Engage journey by ensuring leaders are set up correctly:

1. Visibility. Leaders need to be visible to employees. To successfully build organisational trust, loyalty and employee engagement, team members must know who is steering the ship and who is responsible for making the most important decisions. We often assume that all employees are already aware of who the senior leadership team is, but this isn’t always the case – particularly for frontline workers.  
2. Functionality. You need to identify your organisation’s leaders to unlock the full functionality of Viva Engage, such as being able to assign audience groups and ensure leaders appear in Leadership corner. Within Viva Engage, click on ‘Admin’, then ‘Feature management’ and finally ‘Leadership identification’. You can add leaders individually or by selecting a user group.

Once every leader has been added and linked to the right audience, they will be visible in the Viva Engage leadership directory. This allows employees to find them, connect with them and access their profiles.

2. Enable delegate posting

It’s not uncommon to have a message or announcement that needs to be shared with employees at a set time to align with a broader campaign including other cascading announcements. And it’s also not uncommon for that kind of announcement to come from a senior leader rather than IC, particularly when relating to an important company update or change programme. 

But senior leaders are busy people. They have a long list of other priorities and cannot always prioritise posting the important message or announcement at a specific time.

Viva Engage has a solution to avoid this frustration – delegate posting. Setting up members of the IC team as delegates for leaders removes the bottleneck of waiting for your CEO to emerge from an overrunning board meeting to post that important update. The feature allows pre-approved delegates to create and manage a leader’s posts, stories and announcements in Viva Engage.

Advise your leaders to follow these steps to set up delegates:

1. Within the Viva Engage application in Teams, click on the ellipses in the navigation menu and select ‘Manage delegate settings’.
2. Add the name of the team member being assigned as a delegate.
3. Pick the role – either a ‘delegate’ who can create posts on behalf of the leader within Viva Engage Communities, or a ‘delegate manager’ who can create posts but also configure audiences and assign more delegates. 
4. Select the ‘Storyline’ toggle to allow the new delegate to add stories and announcements to the leader’s storyline.

3. Drive two-way communication

We explored earlier how ‘identifying’ a leader within Viva Engage automatically includes them in Leadership corner, where employees can learn more about leaders and build connections with them.

Leadership corner aggregates content from leaders across the organisation, including discussions, events and campaigns. Employees can also see the communities that leaders have joined, presenting an opportunity to showcase leaders’ hobbies and interests outside of work and drive connection on a more human level.

Use these tips to maximise opportunities for two-way communication and engagement within Leadership corner: 

• Produce a short briefing to introduce Viva Engage to your leadership team, highlighting the features and benefits of Leadership corner.
• Encourage leaders to join or create communities across both work-related and personal topics or interests.
• Promote leader interaction on the platform, such as adding posts and liking or replying to employee comments.

4. Prioritise dynamic content  

Gone are the days when members of the C-suite would communicate with employees solely via lengthy plain-text emails providing their functional updates.

Our workforces are more connected and tech-savvy than ever before, so leaders need to share dynamic and in-the-moment content to stay relevant and engage their employees.

Ask Me Anything events – Viva Engage enables leaders to host ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) events – moderated Q&A-style sessions – to directly connect with employees and provide opportunities to build rapport and trust. Moderators can screen questions in the background and decide whether or not to allow anonymous questions.

We recommend running frequent AMA events that invite employees to engage with leaders around specific topics rather than infrequent open forum sessions. This could involve your chief financial officer running an AMA after each set of quarterly results, or your head of HR running a session dedicated to your new flexible working policy or healthcare plan.   

Employees can see a list of all scheduled leaders’ AMA events within Leadership corner.        

Stories – Viewing and engaging with stories and other short-form videos on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook is now common practice for many employees. The ‘stories’ feature within Viva Engage allows leaders to post digestible and personable day in the life content that helps increase their visibility and build connection.

From the Viva Engage app within Teams, leaders simply need to click ‘Create’ on the stories carousel at the top of the home feed. They then have the option to capture a new story with the camera or upload an existing image or video snippet.

Once published, the story is visible on the leader’s storyline and the feed within Leadership corner.

The features we’ve explored are part of Viva Engage Premium, available with either the full Viva Suite or the Viva Communication and Communities license bundles. We always recommend collaborating with your IT colleagues to help set up some of the more advanced features that allow you to maximise the full potential of Viva Engage.