EXP is our DNA: Microsoft Viva and Rightpoint – Rich Wood
Monday, February 8, 2021
EXP is our DNA: Microsoft Viva and Rightpoint
By Rich Wood
I’m not sure if there’s a group of people more excited about Viva, Microsoft’s new Employee Experience Platform (EXP) than the team here at Rightpoint. Building digital, employee-centric work experiences on Microsoft’s platform is in our organizational DNA—it’s what we’ve been doing since 2007. More recently and more specifically, it’s what we’ve been aiming toward with our pioneering work in the Topics and Insights pillars of this EXP for the past eighteen months.
Our Employee Experience team feels very strongly that, while EX absolutely has an important digital component, to truly succeed in EX you need to also address the physical and cultural aspects of your employees’ work environment. Last week’s launch messaging made it very clear that Viva is a digital platform designed with the cultural elements of EX in mind—alongside an awareness of the shifting physical boundaries so many of us are dealing with in our daily lives.
“We need to stop thinking about work as a place,” Jared Spataro said while introducing the product, “and start thinking about how to maintain culture, connect employees and harness human ingenuity in a hybrid world.”
Like the solutions Rightpoint builds for our clients, that statement told me that Viva is technology, but it’s technology with a purpose. The COVID pandemic has only accelerated the migration to multi-faceted working environments—remote, hybrid, office-based and everything in between. In this fast-moving new world, the only reliable commonality employees have is in that digital interface they all share (scoped as it may be to their individual needs), so it had better be a joyful, engaging, successful experience every time.
To us, creating these joyful, engaging solutions isn’t just a line of business, but rather a reflection of our entire raison d’etre. I’ve been in organizations that tell you everyone is a salesman. What’s unique about Rightpoint is that here, regardless of your title and your day job, everyone is an experience consultant. Literally. From our CEO on through the org chart.
That kind of unique DNA makes Rightpoint uniquely qualified to have a look at this Employee Experience Platform and figure out its broader implications. As an early pioneer of employee-centric digital workplaces and one of only a handful of Microsoft’s select Preferred Partners for both Topics and Insights, we’ve already been doing that for some time now. We’re looking forward to doing it with Connect, with Learning, and with you.
