Discover Viva Personal Insights for Supervisors to Balance Productivity and Well-Being

The Microsoft Viva Insights app in Microsoft Teams gives you personalized recommendations that help you do your best work. Get insights from analytics in Viva Insights to build better work habits, like following through on commitments to collaborators and protecting focus time in the day for uninterrupted, individual work.

Some businesses feel that frontline workers need to be more connected to reap the benefits of Viva personal insights. I have given this some thought and found an answer.

Leaders should target Viva personal insights to those operating between frontline workers and knowledge workers – the supervisors. These supervisors often have an office on a factory production floor or regional retail managers in cars visiting local stores, on construction sites in portacabins, and Emergency Service helpdesks.

Common Challenges That Supervisors Face

Supervisors play many key roles to ensure that their organization achieves maximum productivity. They are expected to manage workflow and team schedules. They connect, collaborate, and report to supporting functions like Procurement, Finance, Quality Assurance, and senior stakeholders. Other responsibilities include evaluating performance and providing feedback, identifying and providing career advancement opportunities, helping resolve employee issues and disputes, training new hires, and communicating management plans, policies, decisions, and strategies to subordinates. 

I found a daunting but absorbing 13-page blog on LinkedIn from 2016 by Tom Fitzgerald, Industrial Health and Safety Consultant and Trainer with 44 years of supervisory management experience. He takes us through his challenging career with no holds barred. I bulleted highlights and then (in the section that follows) summarized where Viva Insights can help. If you have this type of role, I hope that you find the following points from Tom’s blog helpful:

• Being a good supervisor is not just an eight-hour-a-day job. It is usually more.
• It can affect weekends because you need to stay ahead of hundreds of emails and paperwork.
• Not everyone can successfully lead a group of 20-50 people.
• Every night, I left the dangerous and exhausting plant physically and mentally exhausted.
• The supervisor should be on the floor as much as possible.
• Being honest and respectful is not a new management style, so give respect to earn respect.
• Not being a good listener gives a sense of arrogance to your staff and creates disrespect.
• When you give directions to employees, you are the face of the company.
• Terminating a friend is hard, and they will feel betrayed.
• The supervisor is not paid to do the factory’s dirty work, but rather to think and plan.     
• A minute of downtime on a production line can cost several thousand dollars.      
• Accidents happen, and whether you know what to do or not, you must always inspire confidence and trust. Do not let the situation manage you. You control the situation.
• What did you learn, what would you have done differently, and how will you ensure it does not happen again?
• If you make a mistake, come up with answers, meet with your boss, explain what happened, what you learned, and your plan.
• Being a good leader is also being proud of your people and their hard work; you should reward and praise them often.

How Viva Insights Can Help

Viva Insights gives recommendations and insights for building better work habits, like following through on commitments and protecting focus time. These tips can help to balance productivity and employee well-being.

The Viva Briefing email helps you stay in control of your calendar and be intentional about your day. Within two hours of your workday (as set up in Outlook), you'll get an email about any relevant items and tips to help you prepare for the day ahead.

Productivity

Here are some examples of items, reminders, and tips that can help with productivity:

• A commitment that you made in an email to carry out a particular task for someone else.
• Another person asking in an email for you to carry out a task.
• Your request in an email for someone to carry out a task.
• A task that you've added to your To Do task list.
• Documents related to today’s meetings that you might want to review beforehand.
• Suggested focus time you can schedule to help get independent work done.
• Ways to increase your focus hours to accomplish deep work fast.
• Keeping up with important contacts and stakeholders.
• Tips on how to plan your calendar.
• Spending less time in less valuable meetings.
• Writing more effective emails and documents quickly.
• If away from your office computer on the production line, you are notified of all the above again at the end of the day via the Teams App on your fully managed mobile device. Review tomorrow's upcoming meetings, tasks, and tasks commitments fast in virtual commutes.

Well-Being

Here are some examples of reminders and tips that can help with employee (including your own) well-being:

• Praise colleagues.
• If you're a team lead or manager with a Microsoft Viva Insights license, get insights about your team and suggestions on how to help improve or maintain your team's well-being and effectiveness.
• Find a balance between work and personal time; learn to disconnect and unwind after hours.

Privacy

The personal insights in Viva Insights won’t reveal personally identifiable data of co-workers beyond what you can see in Outlook and Teams.

Viva Insights strictly adheres to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance requirements. All Personal Insights data in Viva Insights is stored in your personal Exchange Online mailbox. It has no tracking software running on your computer or mobile device. Only you can see your data; your manager or system administrator cannot. Every calculation that Viva Insights performs is based on data that you can get by gathering and examining metadata of your email, meetings, calls, and instant messages, such as their start and end times and subject lines.

Conclusion

The analytics in Viva Insights give supervisors effortless transparency into their workplace collaboration habits to help them – and those they supervise – be more productive and happier at work.

For more information about Microsoft Viva, see the following:

• My previous article Microsoft Viva, a Virtual Onboarding Buddy 
• Introducing Copilot in Microsoft Viva—A new way to boost employee engagement and performance