Viva Glint Copilot: Gen AI for Human Resources

Microsoft Copilot and Viva Glint are two advanced solutions designed to enhance the employee experience and well-being within an organization.

The integration of these tools enables companies to collect and analyze valuable data on employee perceptions while providing intelligent and proactive support for daily tasks.

Microsoft Copilot, with its AI-powered assistance capabilities, and Viva Glint, a platform for employee feedback and engagement, together create an ecosystem that fosters productivity, engagement, and organizational well-being.

In this article, we will explore how this integration can unlock new opportunities to optimize human resource management and improve workplace culture.

Viva Glint Copilot: a brief introduction

In just a few years, Generative AI has significantly transformed the way we perceive work and business processes across the global landscape, with no industry managing to resist the overwhelming force of this rapidly evolving technology.

One of the driving forces behind this unstoppable advancement is undoubtedly Microsoft Copilot, the AI-powered digital assistant from Redmond. Despite its relatively short existence, Copilot has already demonstrated to many companies the immense potential that generative AI can offer in the realm of office work.

However, work is still carried out by real people, whose contributions have greatly benefited from the introduction of Copilot into their daily tasks. But is an employee really just their work? Is their value to the organization solely tied to fast and efficient output, or can they also provide a broader perspective on what is happening within the business?

The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.

Yet, many companies remain anchored to an outdated view of their employees, and as a result, workers often feel excluded from the decision-making process.

So how can generative AI help HR teams ensure employees have the voice and recognition they deserve?

The integration of Copilot within Viva Glint could be the solution HR leaders have been searching for. Let’s explore why in the following sections.

What are Microsoft Copilot and Viva Glint?

Before diving into the specifics of their integration, let's take a moment to bring everyone up to speed—especially those who may not be familiar with Copilot or Viva Glint. Here’s a quick overview of their features and functionalities.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered digital assistant designed to streamline users' daily tasks, enhance productivity, and boost creativity. Its primary focus is code generation, writing assistance, and collaboration.

Seamlessly integrated with popular Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, Copilot provides contextual suggestions and helps users process information more effectively.

Powered by the cutting-edge GPT-4 language model, Microsoft Copilot offers impressive capabilities, including auto-completion of code, documentation search, and collaborative writing. Microsoft continues to update Copilot with new features, underscoring its commitment to investing heavily in Gen AI for the future of its business-oriented products.

Microsoft’s AI assistant is designed for a broad range of users and professionals, including developers, content creators, and workers looking for AI-powered support in their daily activities.

The main ways to use Microsoft Copilot are:

1. Adopting Copilot – Microsoft provides various Copilot assistants to enhance productivity and creativity. Integrated into multiple Microsoft products and platforms, Copilot transforms the digital workspace into a more interactive and efficient environment.
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2. Extending Copilot – Developers can incorporate external data, simplifying user workflows and reducing the need to switch between different applications. This not only improves productivity but also fosters better collaboration. Copilot makes it easy to integrate external data into commonly used Microsoft products.
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3. Building Your Own Copilot – Beyond adoption and extension, businesses can create a customized Copilot for a unique conversational experience using Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Search, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and other Microsoft Cloud technologies. A custom Copilot can integrate corporate data, access external data in real time via APIs, and seamlessly fit into business applications.

Microsoft Copilot is available in different formats, with specific pricing plans tailored to various use cases:

• Copilot (Free) – The free version offers access to generative AI features for PC management (in Windows), online search (in Edge), and general chatbot conversations on the web.
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• Copilot Pro – Designed for individual users who want to maximize the benefits of generative AI. For approximately $20 per user per month, it provides access to Copilot in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
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• Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Tailored for individuals and teams working with Microsoft apps, this version includes access to Copilot Studio, enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance features, as well as advanced capabilities.

Additionally, Microsoft offers specialized Copilot versions built for specific Microsoft tools, such as:

• Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics, designed for sales and customer service teams.
• Security Copilot, integrated into Microsoft Purview for enhanced cybersecurity.

Microsoft has also started rolling out and updating a series of industry-specific “Agents” tailored for finance, customer service, and marketing, with training and features designed for these particular business sectors.

While many Windows 11 users were initially skeptical when Microsoft began focusing on Copilot, the service has grown significantly since its preview release. Today, it is considered one of the best productivity tools in the AI era.

Microsoft Viva Glint

In a market where data is the foundation of the most successful organizations, Microsoft Viva Glint offers a cutting-edge approach to continuous data-driven analysis, providing valuable insights to support improvements in organizational productivity and workforce engagement.

However, despite the advanced data analysis capabilities of many modern organizations, a Microsoft survey of 20,000 people found that 75% of employees (and 80% of managers) feel their company does not request feedback frequently enough.

In an ever-changing environment, simply asking employees how they feel is no longer sufficient. To truly understand their mindset, companies must also consider how they work.

Viva Glint helps organizations do just that, offering deeper insights that take into account both behaviors and emotions, enabling a more comprehensive approach to improving employee experience and business outcomes.

Glint officially became part of the Viva Suite in July 2023. Acquired by LinkedIn in 2018, Glint is an employee engagement platform that provides tools for companies to collect real-time feedback from employees on various aspects, such as management, company culture, and compensation.

Additionally, it offers recommendations to help managers improve based on this feedback. The goal is to reduce the costs and efforts associated with recruiting and training new employees while focusing on enhancing the experience and engagement of existing ones.

With fully customizable survey templates, organizations can accurately measure team sentiment. These surveys are essential for assessing employee perceptions on critical topics such as diversity and inclusion, onboarding and offboarding processes, and other key areas that contribute to a healthy work environment.

With Glint, results are instant—there’s no need to wait until a survey is completed to access the data. Glint immediately processes responses into heat maps, trends, and key insights.

When presenting these insights to the team, Glint helps transform data into positive actions. Not only does it generate automated and personalized presentations that guide audiences through the collected data, but it also provides actionable insights to drive improvements based on survey results.

Glint goes beyond surveys by combining feedback with workplace analytics and data from Viva Insights, offering a holistic view of how employees feel and work!

By leveraging the powerful analytical capabilities of Insights, users can observe how work patterns influence employee engagement and their responses to survey questions, providing a deeper understanding of their feedback.

At the same time, leaders can uncover hidden insights within Glint’s data analysis, highlighting emerging workplace trends and shifts in sentiment, helping them stay in tune with employee engagement.

Viva Glint Copilot: features and capabilities

Now, let’s dive into the core topic of our article and take a closer look at what the integration of Microsoft Copilot within Viva Glint entails.

Copilot in Viva Glint is designed to respond to survey comment-related queries. It serves as your partner in analyzing all comments and can:

• Summarize comments: Copilot provides a clear and concise summary of collected comments, helping to quickly understand overall sentiment and key discussion points raised by employees.
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• Identify key themes in comments: Using artificial intelligence, Copilot detects and categorizes recurring themes within comments, identifying major topics of interest or concern among employees.
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• Summarize comments based on demographics: Copilot can segment comments according to demographic characteristics such as role, age, or location, offering a targeted analysis to better understand the opinions of specific groups within the organization.
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• Summarize comments based on topics: Comments can be gathered and analyzed in relation to specific themes, such as company policies, benefits, or management practices, providing deep insights into how each aspect is perceived by employees.
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• Identify employee-requested actions: Copilot can detect and highlight explicit employee requests, such as suggestions or desired changes, enabling companies to respond promptly to workforce needs and expectations.

HR administrators and personnel can use Copilot in Viva Glint to summarize large amounts of data, allowing them to quickly extract key insights and support ad-hoc stakeholder requests.

Organizational leaders can leverage it to summarize comments for their teams and identify commonalities and unique needs based on employee feedback, using prompts and filters to analyze different populations within their organization.

Managers can take advantage of the integration between the two solutions to access comment summarization services and quickly identify comments grouped by common topics or themes, pinpointing areas to explore further in their ACT (Action-Centered Thinking) conversations.

For those concerned about ethical considerations, Copilot in Viva Glint fully aligns with Microsoft’s principles for responsible AI development and undergoes rigorous internal stress testing to proactively identify and address any systemic issues.

This ensures that Copilot’s comment summarization in Viva Glint remains free from undesirable content or behavior, such as hate speech, incitement to violence, or misinformation.

Additionally, Microsoft remains vigilant in protecting privacy and preventing the disclosure of sensitive information, reaffirming its commitment to safeguarding users in every aspect.

Viva Glint Copilot: considerations for deployment

Deploying Copilot and Viva Glint can significantly boost employee engagement within an organization.

However, like any tool, before implementing it hastily and risking outcomes contrary to expectations, it is essential to ask the right questions and carefully evaluate the decision.

Therefore, before taking the leap, it’s worth considering the following aspects.

Current usage

Does your implementation team have experience with Viva Glint? Before introducing new features or tools like Copilot, it’s helpful to assess how familiar your team is with the platform. If they already have experience, adopting and integrating new capabilities will be easier. Otherwise, investing time and resources in proper training will be necessary to ensure a smooth transition and optimal use of the advanced features available.

Number of comments

Do you anticipate a high volume of comments? If employees are expected to provide a large number of responses to a survey, Copilot can be particularly useful in analyzing and summarizing the data. Enabling comments in such cases can generate a significant amount of qualitative feedback, and Copilot is designed to help process and analyze this information efficiently. It’s important to consider whether the volume of comments will be manageable and whether the analysis system can provide meaningful insights without being overwhelmed.

Survey timing

Aligning survey planning with Copilot’s deployment in Viva Glint is crucial to maximizing the platform’s effectiveness. If a survey is already scheduled or planned for the near future, integrating Copilot with this process allows for the collection of relevant data and real-time analysis of responses, improving the overall efficiency of data gathering and insights generation.

Comfort with AI

Can expert users help others with the implementation? Introducing AI-powered tools like Copilot can be a significant step for many organizations. To facilitate adoption, it is useful to identify "superusers"—experienced users—or leverage consulting services to assist team members in using the new technology. Engaging these individuals early in the implementation process and designating them as key points of contact for support and training can accelerate adoption and increase confidence in AI within the organization.

Extent of organizational changes

Is your organization already undergoing a period of change? Is this the right time to introduce a new tool? When considering the adoption of a new technology like Copilot in Viva Glint, it is important to evaluate the organization's current state. If the company is already experiencing significant organizational, cultural, or structural changes, adding another tool could pose a challenge or generate resistance. It’s crucial to assess whether the timing is right for implementation, considering the organization’s capacity to manage change and its openness to adopting new technological solutions.

Viva Glint Copilot: best practices for use

To conclude our overview of the Copilot integration in Viva Glint, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to share some practical suggestions.

Learning to use a tool like this can be extremely simple, but leveraging it to its full potential is a different story. No one wants to invest time and resources in an implementation that yields marginal or non-existent results.

So, here are a few useful tips to help you confidently make the most of the advanced features offered by this integration:

• ‍Enable comments: Enabling comments allows for the collection of more detailed and contextualized feedback, enriching data and improving its usefulness in the synthesis phase. This approach provides a comprehensive view of feedback, helping generate accurate and meaningful summaries that reflect employees’ real opinions on various aspects of the organization. Comments offer context that helps correctly interpret quantitative data, making analysis richer and more valuable for informed decision-making.
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• ‍Ask open-ended questions: Open-ended questions in surveys capture a wide range of feedback, allowing respondents to freely express their thoughts on topics that may not be explicitly covered in the survey. These responses, often more detailed, reveal valuable insights that might not emerge from numerical data or closed-ended responses. Open-ended questions provide qualitative information, essential for a deeper understanding of employees' experiences and perceptions, which might be missed in purely quantitative analysis.
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• ‍Use filters for relevant attributes: Copilot in Viva Glint leverages attributes sent to Glint to filter data. It’s crucial to enable filtering attributes that are meaningful to the roles of users interacting with Copilot. Filters refine the data, ensuring that insights and summaries are relevant and useful for specific user groups, such as managers or HR teams, making the analysis more targeted and strategic. Using the right filters helps generate more precise and actionable results, for example, distinguishing between different departments, seniority levels, or other demographic variables.
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• ‍Leverage recurring and ad hoc programs: Where applicable, use both recurring and ad hoc programs. Currently, Copilot in Viva Glint cannot access “Always-On” and “Employee Lifecycle” programs. To maximize Copilot’s effectiveness in Viva Glint, it’s recommended to set up recurring programs for ongoing topics, such as employee engagement, and ad hoc programs for occasional subjects, like change management. Recurring programs allow continuous and consistent monitoring of engagement, while ad hoc programs are ideal for gathering feedback on specific, temporary topics, offering greater flexibility and precision in analysis.

Conclusion

As we have seen, even the human resources landscape can greatly benefit from the latest advancements in generative artificial intelligence. Copilot, integrated into Viva Glint, can be a valuable addition to the range of tools used by HR professionals.

Microsoft’s digital assistant not only reaffirms itself as an incredibly versatile and useful tool but also helps address a systemic challenge faced by many companies—restoring greater synergy and alignment with their workforce.

This not only translates into higher productivity but also fosters stronger employee cohesion and a deeper sense of belonging to the organization—the true driving force behind any truly successful business.

FAQ on Microsoft Copilot in Viva Glint

What is Copilot in Viva Glint?

Copilot in Viva Glint is a Microsoft AI-powered assistant that helps collect and analyze employee feedback through Viva Glint surveys. By leveraging AI, it synthesizes responses, identifies key themes, and provides valuable insights to enhance employee engagement and well-being.

What are the main features of Copilot in Viva Glint?

Copilot in Viva Glint summarizes survey comments, highlights recurring themes in responses, and segments feedback based on demographics or specific topics. It also helps identify explicit employee requests, allowing HR managers to address key areas for improvement.

What are the benefits of integrating Copilot with Viva Glint?

The integration enables companies to process survey data faster, identify organizational challenges more precisely, and equip managers with tools to make data-driven decisions. This combination enhances employee engagement and helps optimize workplace culture.

Can Copilot in Viva Glint analyze comments in real time?

Yes, survey data is processed immediately, allowing managers to access summaries and detailed analyses without waiting for the survey process to conclude.

What types of surveys are supported by Copilot in Viva Glint?

Copilot can analyze surveys related to employee engagement, company culture, leadership, diversity and inclusion, onboarding processes, and company policies, providing managers with deeper insights into employee needs and expectations.

Does Copilot in Viva Glint ensure data privacy?

Yes, Microsoft ensures compliance with privacy and security standards. Copilot prevents the disclosure of sensitive data and filters out undesirable content such as hate speech or misinformation, ensuring ethical usage and adherence to data protection regulations.

What best practices should be followed for using Copilot in Viva Glint effectively?

To maximize Copilot’s potential, it is recommended to enable comments in surveys for richer feedback, use open-ended questions to gather contextualized responses, and apply demographic filters for targeted analysis. Implementing recurring and ad hoc surveys can also help track engagement trends over time.

Is Copilot in Viva Glint suitable for all companies?

Copilot is particularly beneficial for organizations that manage large volumes of employee feedback and wish to automate data analysis for more informed decision-making. However, before implementation, companies should assess their team's familiarity with Viva Glint and their organizational context to ensure a smooth adoption and maximize return on investment.

Can Copilot in Viva Glint be customized?

Yes, Microsoft allows customization by configuring specific filters and attributes to tailor data analysis to business needs. Users can set segmentation criteria and summary parameters to improve the quality of generated insights.

What is the difference between Copilot and Copilot in Viva Glint?

Copilot is a general AI assistant designed to enhance productivity in applications like Word, Excel, Teams, and Outlook by providing smart suggestions and automation for daily work tasks. Copilot in Viva Glint, on the other hand, is specifically built for analyzing employee feedback and improving engagement by generating detailed survey insights.