Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – V is for…(part 1)

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – V is for…(part 1)

There’s SO MUCH going on in Microsoft Teams as a product, how do you even start to talk about it?! In this blog series I’m going to attempt to work my way through the letters of the alphabet, talking about as many features as I can think of in turn.

If you’re new to Teams, hopefully this helps you find your way around. If you’re not new to Teams, maybe you’ll still get some new ideas. Here we go…

V is for Viva! (Insights)

Full disclosure, this is going to be another multi-part blog series, because I can!

Viva is Microsoft’s answer to employee engagement. It splits out into different modules, and some of them have an extra cost. In this blog I’ll be focusing on Viva Insights, as that’s the Viva module you’ll likely already have access to if you’re using Microsoft Teams.

Viva Insights is an app you can access from the Teams App store and pin it to your navigation bar on the left if you like. Insights gives you information about your working patterns so that you can use that information to your advantage, and also make sure you are looking after yourself.

It’s broken down into sections for:

Wellbeing
Productivity
Teamwork

Wellbeing

Wellbeing is the area that helps you make sure you’re keeping focused and setting work boundaries, which I think is ever more important now that work and home environments bleed into each other so much.

You are prompted to:

Set focus time on your calendar – this puts your status on Do Not Disturb so that in theory you are not distracted and can get on with some deep thinky work
Set quiet time hours – this mutes your Outlook and Teams mobile notifications so that you can properly enforce your working time boundaries and disconnect
Set up reminders for a virtual commute – an end of workday ‘ritual’

I love the virtual commute feature, especially when I’m working from home. Sometimes the transition from walking down the stairs isn’t long enough to mentally move from being an employee to being a wife and mum again, so I find this really helps.

Plus, it’s pretty:

The virtual commute gives you a list of your upcoming meetings, suggests tasks based on things you’ve said in emails, and then offers short mindfulness and meditation exercises to help you make the mental switch. I don’t go a day without it.

In the wellbeing area, you can also keep track of your working patterns – for example if you set a plan for focus time, you can see how well you are sticking to that plan:

It won’t tell you how to organise your time but it will flag how much time you’re in focus mode, and if that’s not very much maybe it’s a flag that something should change.

There are also soundtracks available via Headspace to encourage focus thinking:

Productivity

This section of Viva Insights tells you about your Teams meeting patterns, which helps flag things like whether the meetings started on time, and whether you multitasked during them:

Again, it won’t tell you how you should be running your meetings but does give some useful food for thought.

Suggested tasks (like the ones in your virtual commute) are also in this area too.

Teamwork

The teamwork section of the app will show you who you most collaborate with and how you collaborate with them – alerting you to things like collaborating outside of your normal working hours:

You can also see a summary of your recent communication habits:

This can be useful for

if you’re trying to build a habit of only checking emails at certain times of the day – here you can see whether you are on track
if you want to find out the time of day when you are ‘busiest’
if you want to see how much of your work is creeping outside of your working hours

Home

I skipped over the home section because I got excited about covering the other stuff – but there are some useful articles on the theme of wellbeing and employee engagement collected for you in there too:

I think having knowledge about yourself can be a powerful thing – both to open your eyes to your current situation, and to give you the data you need to make changes.

For example, you might think that you hardly ever do work outside your working hours, but Insights might help you see that’s not quite true. You might get annoyed when colleagues expect you to be late to meetings, but Insights might help you see that you are actually routinely late. Once you’ve got the data you can start using it to make changes if you want or need to.

You can find out more about Viva Insights on the Microsoft Support pages here: Viva Insights app in Teams and on the web – Microsoft Support

If you liked this blog and want to catch up on the rest of the A-Z series so far, you can find posts A-F here:

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/01/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-a-is-for/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/07/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/16/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-b-is-for/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/22/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-c-is-for-part-1/

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 2) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 3) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for (part 4!!!) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – D is for… – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – E is for… – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – F is for… – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog