Microsoft has revealed research suggesting companies with highly engaged employees perform twice as well financially as those with a disengaged workforce.
The findings, announced during this year’s Viva Summit, accompany the reveal that Microsoft is adding its Copilot productivity AI solution to Viva later this year to enable businesses in improving employee engagement.
To assess the business impact of engagement ahead of Copilot’s integration with Viva, Microsoft analysed the engagement scores of over three million employees at more than 220 companies across different industries before assessing those companies’ combined stock price movement throughout 2022. Microsoft’s research posits that businesses with highly engaged workforces outperformed the S&P 500 after a year.
Jared Spataro, Corporate VP, Modern Work and Business Applications at Microsoft, commented during the Summit’s keynote:
2022 was a tough year for the stock market. Yet the most engaged organizations performed twice as well financially as those with the most disengaged employees. Put simply, companies with highly engaged workforces have better financial outcomes. Engagement can no longer be a nice to have.”
Microsoft Adding Copilot to Viva to Boost Engagement
Microsoft introduced Copilot in March as an AI-powered tool intended to boost the productivity of Office 365 users, with “productivity” being the prominent term attached to the solution. Microsoft CEO Natya Sadella described Copilot as “The most powerful productivity tool on the planet.”
Since productivity has historically been the labour-centric metric most closely affiliated with financial performance, focusing on how Copilot might empower a more productive workforce has understandably been Microsoft’s priority. However, as Microsoft’s own research advises, it is not necessarily that straightforward in the new era of work where employee engagement has become essential to business success.
As announced during the keynote speech of Viva Summit, Microsoft’s addition of Copilot intends to address “the new performance equation in the age of AI,” one blog post wrote. This equation is founded on the idea that productivity alone is not a barometer of financial success, but “Both engagement and productivity drive performance — and they are mutually reinforcing(…) When you are engaged in your work, you are more productive. When you are productive, you are more engaged in your work.”
Viva’s integration with Copilot will combine large language models (LLMs) with company data in Microsoft Graph and Viva apps to give leaders a new way of engaging with their workforce.
Viva’s Copilot-powered features include drafting organization objectives and key results (OKRs) by analysing business plans and strategy papers to clarify goal setting for leaders.
Another feature is Copilot’s capacity to improve leadership engagement and uplevel communications by drafting posts from prompts or topics within workplace communities and conversations. Copilot can also help with the structure and tone of the post or ways to personalize the message, and with pre-empting likely questions from employees so that leaders can be prepared with responses.
Viva Glint is a solution being added to the Viva suite in July which helps leading organizations measure and improve employee engagement to drive business outcomes. Copilot will also be integrated with Glint, enabling the solution to better parse and analyze employee engagement data and comments to provide more valuable insights.
Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, said: “With Copilot, Microsoft Viva takes advantage of next-generation AI to accelerate this new performance equation, where engagement and productivity lead to better business outcomes and success.”
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