This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.
The start of a new year is often seen as a time to reflect on the past, plan for the future, and set New Year’s resolutions for ourselves. It is also a key time for business leaders to set goals to help their organizations and teams accomplish more in the new year, whether those goals are a new product release, business growth, or workplace culture improvement.
Furthermore, we know that simply writing down your goals is often not enough to achieve them! You also need to communicate your goals with key stakeholders, track your progress, and measure your results. This can be challenging, especially if your organization has multiple goals, competing priorities, or cross-team dependencies.
This is where Viva Goals and Microsoft Copilot can help.
Viva Goals is Microsoft’s solution for creating, managing, and tracking organizational goals. It is founded on the Objective and Key Result (OKR) framework, yet can be customized to meet other goal-setting strategies. To learn more about changing your goal terms from “Objectives and Key Results” to other frameworks or labels, visit our page on customizing terminology in Viva Goals.
With the content generation and summarization capabilities in Copilot in Viva Goals, creating and tracking your goals is becoming even easier.
Quickly create your goals with Copilot in Viva Goals
One challenge we frequently hear from customers is uncertainty about getting started with writing actionable, outcome-driven goals. Setting appropriate and ambitious goals can be daunting, but using Copilot can make the process easier.
From a quick click of the “Copilot” button in the Viva Goals app (available on Microsoft Teams or in your browser), Copilot is ready to help you generate new goals or OKRs:
Copilot in Viva Goals can be accessed from the tool bar or the Copilot icon within Viva Goals.
Copilot in Viva Goals can help you generate goals in two different ways:
Generating new goals based on context you provide (ex: industry, roles, business mission)
Clicking “Help me generate new OKRs” means Copilot will help you in crafting OKRs, using the conversational interface and its repository of sample OKRs.
Copilot in Viva Goals will generate goals based on prompts or information you provide in the chat.
By asking Copilot to “Write an OKR for this year's plans to roll out Microsoft Copilot to employees across my organization,” you may get a result like:
Objective: Roll out Microsoft Copilot to employees across the organization
Key Result (KR): Train 60% of our employees on the basics of taking the “Copilot for Microsoft 365” training in Viva Learning
KR: Set up all required infrastructure and hardware to support Microsoft Copilot for these employees
KR: Ensure 60% all newly hired employees have used Microsoft Copilot in their first month of onboarding
Note that this content is AI-generated and will change based on inputs / sample data.
Using the Copilot interface, you can ask Copilot to regenerate these OKRs, refine them (“be more conservative,” “increase the adoption rate,” etc.), or publish them to your Viva Goals instance.
Generating goals from a document you provide (ex: business plan, strategy paper)
Oftentimes, business leaders will already have strategy or business planning documents they have been circulating with their leadership teams. This can be a great place to get started: by uploading these strategy documents to Viva Goals , Copilot can then identify potential goals from the document and format into actionable OKRs. This capability is currently available for local .docx files, and will be expanding file types and file sources in the coming months.
Copilot in Viva Goals can use content from your existing documents to suggest outcome-based goals.
One thing to remember: using Copilot means that you, as the user, are always in control of what gets saved, published, and shared.
Copilot in Microsoft 365 can also be helpful in writing goals
For users that are not currently using Viva Goals, or are looking for suggestions on annual goals elsewhere, Copilot in M365 can be a great place to get started. Copilot in Word or in the Microsoft Copilot web experience can be great resources for creating the right goals for you and your organization. You can use prompts like “Write 3 OKRs for building a new (product/service) in the new year” or “Provide some goal suggestions for boosting employee morale” and work with Microsoft Copilot to refine these goals.
Furthermore, at Ignite last November (2023), we also announced that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be enhanced with Viva in early 2024. This means users will have access to Viva functionality within the Copilot for Microsoft 365 experience, including a chat experience that works across Viva data and apps to support employees, managers, and leaders. To learn more, check out the announcement from our blog in November, New ways Microsoft Copilot and Viva are transforming the employee experience.
Just make sure that after creating your goals, you are communicating these goals to your stakeholders and tracking your progress!
Summarizing your goals with Copilot
With Copilot, it is even easier to summarize and share your goal progress. Copilot uses context from your goal status updates and check-ins to generate summaries of your progress, making it even easier to share your current status with other teams and leadership.
Copilot in Viva Goals will quickly summarize your goals for easy sharing.
You can work with Copilot to tailor the update messages to your audience by asking the conversational AI to make the summary content more succinct, detailed, or professional. Looking to quickly share these updates with your teams, audiences or stakeholders? Use functionality within Viva Goals to broadcast your updates to email via Outlook or to post on Viva Engage with just a few clicks.
With the Viva Goals integration into Viva Engage, it’s easier than ever to share your team goals with your community.
It has never been easier to get started with setting and tracking your goals with Microsoft and Viva Goals, especially with the power of AI. Always make sure to review Copilot’s responses to make sure the suggestions and content it presents are relevant to your organization and your goals.
Set your 2024 Goals with Copilot today
Copilot in Viva Goals is available to Viva suite customers in public preview since December 2023 and will be Generally Available in early 2024. NOTE: Customers with Viva suite licenses interested in using Copilot in Viva Goals should work with their IT Admins to enable public preview of Copilot for users from their Microsoft Admin Center. To learn more about enabling Copilot in Viva Goals, please visit our Copilot in Viva Goals documentation.
Microsoft will also be hosting a webinar session on January 31st, 8am US-PT, for those interested in a live demo and to hear how Copilot in Viva Goals is helping address goal-setting and tracking challenges. More details available at Microsoft Virtual Event "Discovering the Power of Copilot in Viva Goals".
Have feedback about Copilot in Viva Goals? Use the feedback tool in Viva Goals to let us know your thoughts.
From the Microsoft Viva Goals team to yours, we wish you success in achieving your goals in the new year!