Ensure Success with Microsoft Viva Goals

Ensure Success with Microsoft Viva Goals

Discover how Microsoft Viva Goals can help your company plan, track, report and most importantly achieve your targets in three easy steps.

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3 Simple Steps to Success with Microsoft Viva Goals

Microsoft viva goals is a tool that enables you to set goals for your company and track them.

It’s easy to use, simple to understand and can be used on any device.

You can set one or many goals at once, add different milestones for each one of them and set deadlines for goals to be achieved.

Microsoft viva goals keep track of how well you’re doing in meeting your targets with its visual dashboard, so it’s easy for all employees to use.

You can smash targets with Microsoft viva goals with three simple steps as follows

Step 1 – Align with business strategy

First your senior management team should gather to discuss goals for the entire company based around the current business strategy.

The company goals should be aligned to the business strategy timeline.

It is important that the company goals are related to the overall business strategy.

Employees need to know what the overall vision is to be able to gauge if their efforts are pointed in the right direction.

Identify OKRs in Microsoft Viva Goals

OKRs are objectives and key results. OKRs help you to focus on what matters most to your organization, and they help define what success looks like.

Your company has business goals, but individuals have personal ones as well.

To meet both needs simultaneously, set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable/achievable, relevant, and time-bound) objectives that align with your company’s goals.

Example of SMART Goals

• Specific – I will increase revenue by 20% over the next 12 months by creating new products for our customers’ online stores.
• Measurable – By the end of this quarter we will see an improvement in customer satisfaction scores.
• Achievable – We’ll be able to measure this because we have clear definitions for what constitutes good customer satisfaction on our website​.
• Relevant – If we’re not seeing improvements within a few months then it means something is wrong.
• Time – This objective has four milestones which each need their own timeline; if any milestone isn’t completed by its deadline, then it might affect our ability to hit revenue targets so there’s also some urgency around getting this right!

Step 2 – Set Microsoft Viva Goals

The next stage is to set goals throughout your organisation.

Goals should be set at multiple levels within the hierarchical structure of your organisation.

The high level company objectives should define specially what are the mission critical objectives.

The lower down the objectives are set including Team and Individual objectives the goals should contain more and more detail.

Company, Team, and Personal Objectives

In Microsoft Viva Goals the OKRs are not just set at the company level.

Goals are set at multiple levels throughout the company including:

Company – These goals should align to the business strategy to deliver change, improve efficiency and growth.

Department – Department goals should be derived from the overall company objectives. They should have specific outcomes that can clearly be linked back to the company specific goals.

Team – A department would typically have multiple teams within it. These team goals are designed to split out the department goals into more specific deliverables that are team specific. However, these team specific goals should always tie back to department specific objectives.

Personal – Individuals can set their own goals against their Team. Goals can be either for the benefit of a Team goals progression or a personal development

Plan and prioritise

The true value of this product does not just come from the ability to document specific goals.

It comes from the ability to plan tasks by priority and provide incremental updates over the period of a year.

Key Results and Integrations with Microsoft Viva Goals

Often your key results that are entered into Microsoft Viva Goals are related to actions, tasks or data stored in third party system.

Microsoft Viva Goals offers some native functionality to integrate with the likes of:

• Zendesk – for tracking key results related to support tickets and actions
• Salesforce – for sales cycle management and customer relations
• SQL – for integrating with data that is used by custom or third party software packages

Step 3 – Measure progress

The final step of achieving objectives using Microsoft Viva Goals is to measure the progress and success of your goals.

Data is key to measuring progress and understanding what’s going on in your organisation, in particular during a stage such as this.

It can also help you identify areas where improvements can be made.

Microsoft Viva Goals will issue automatic emails to users to request they provide updates in the form of a percentage.

These check ins are documented and can easily be reviewed by management to determine how much progress is being made.

Coach and feedback

Lastly the management team should be reviewing progress of their teams’ goals with them individually.

It is typical for goals to be set on an annual basis and reviewed during quarterly personal development review meetings.

This gives an opportunity for management to provide feedback and coach their team to ensure progression of tasks.

This in turn will increase the overall success of goals being reached on an individual basis. This will drive success in the team, department and overall company goals.

Microsoft Viva – Next Steps

I hope you found this blog article useful, if you are interested in getting some assistance with SharePoint Online, Microsoft Viva or PowerApps Services, please feel free to contact me with any questions using our contact us form.

We have a range of Microsoft Viva services and expertise, check out: Viva Insights, Viva Learning Viva Connections and Viva Topics

You might also be interested to read What is the Best Database for your Microsoft PowerApps

Author

Dougie Wood – Microsoft Solutions Architect & Director