New Year, New Me Viva Goals

Published January 2024

A new year is here, and many of us can find ourselves caught up in the new year, new me mindset – often with no real plan in place of how to achieve what we want to set out to do. Lucky for us, there’s a more strategic and effective way to approach personal and professional growth. 

Countless organisations – including us, Vinnies and more, use Microsoft’s Viva Goals to achieve their personal and professional ‘best’. Are you one of us?

Viva Goals is part of the Viva Suite, a set of tools focusing on the Employee Experience. Viva Goals leverages the proven Objective and Key Result (OKR) goal-setting methodology to bring clarity, focus, and alignment to your personal and professional aspirations.

At Engage Squared, we use Viva Goals to help us align our OKRs across multiple levels – from individual, team to organisational. OKRs across all levels are transparent, and we can be clear on what we’re working towards – together. Knowing that we’re working in unison towards delivering <people friendly technology>.

The business need for goal setting

In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “a goal without a plan is just a wish.”  This sentiment holds true, both in personal and professional realms. The ability to set and achieve meaningful goals is crucial for personal and professional success. Goal setting provides direction, motivates individuals and teams, and fosters a culture of accountability.

The Viva Goals platform takes this philosophy a step further by integrating the OKR methodology. It’s not just about setting goals; it’s about setting the right goals and outlining measurable key results to track your progress.

OKR’s should be:

• Ambitious and inspiring – we refer to them as ‘stretch-goals’
• Tied to measurable outcomes
• Tied to your daily work, without being too ‘business as usual’ in style
• Aligned to your team and broad organisational OKRs

Planning for 2024

We’ve laid out a few tips to help you wrap up 2023 and reach for the stars in 2024.

• Reflect and assess your performance. The platform provides actionable steps for regular check-ins and progress tracking, allowing you to see how well you moved towards your objectives.
• Close your OKRs. Whether you reached your goal, or fell a little short, closing your OKR’s is a crucial step in the goal-setting process. Viva Goals guides you through a reflection on what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved for next time. It’s a valuable exercise that ensures continuous improvement and sets the stage for even more ambitious goals in the future.
• Clone OKRs you want to keep working on. If you’re closing Q4 2023 objectives in preparation for 2024, you may have unfinished business – aka, objectives that you want to continue working on. If this is the case, you’ll want to roll your OKRs over to a new time period. Cloning is a more effective way to do this than simply editing the time period of the unfinished objective. By making a clone, you can “reset” the objective’s progress for the next time period, while saving your progress in the current time period. In this way, you can show your progress in the previous quarter and continue progress into the new year.

Exciting changes are coming to Viva Goals

There are two very exciting changes coming to Viva Goals this year, that will make planning your OKRs even easier with Viva Goals.

🎉The first being that Microsoft has announced that Copilot in Viva Goals will be generally available for all Viva suite customers in Q1 2024!

Copilot will make goal setting in the new year easier, by:

• Helping you create and refine ambitious goals that inspire your team, tied to measurable outcomes and the daily work of employees in less time.
• Translating strategy and vision documents that leadership has been crafting into goals your teams feel prepared to tackle and accountable for.
• Making it easier and more efficient to share progress updates across teams, from crafting updates for you based on check-ins to refining your updates to sound more professional or more succinct with conversational AI.

🎉 And the second, Viva Goals will be integrated into Viva Engage this year!

The Viva Goals in Viva Engage integration brings mission, alignment and results into communities and conversation by helping customers build communities around goals, view goal progress from Viva Goals directly in Viva Engage, and create business communities within Viva Engage designed to help leaders better communicate top-down interactions and initiatives – including delivering praise based on goal progress and achievement.

You can expect to see this come to life in the first half of 2024.

Like what you see?

In the world of goal setting, Viva Goals stands out amongst the rest. By embracing the OKR methodology, the platform helps individuals and businesses alike move beyond wishful thinking and transform aspirations into tangible results. As you embark on your journey into 2024, let Viva Goals help you to turn your goals into achievements, one key result at a time.

Get in touch below if you’re excited to learn more about how Viva Goals can help keep your organisation on track.

About the author

Caiti is a certified Change & Adoption Consultant at Engage Squared, with several years’ experience working in communications and change management in the tech space. Caiti is passionate about keeping people at the heart of technology change. When she isn’t sharing photos of her plants in the Plants of E² Viva Engage community, she’s running long distances in Awabakal Country, and drinking strong coffee.