Stop Ignoring Recognition: 3 Ways to Send Praise with Viva Insights

0:00Almost every Internet project I've worked on, someone asks the same thing. Can we let employees recognize each other right here in SharePoint? Well, SharePoint can do it, but something you're probably already paying for can. Hello again, this is Greg from SharePoint Maven and welcome to Episode 279 of the SharePoint Maven Podcast. So, in today's episode, I will talk about functionality that's not really, you know, SharePoint teams. It's a separate application, but it's the one that, you know, my clients always inquire about. And I just wanted to briefly, you know, mention it to you because on my opinion, it offers lots of value. So, as I build Internet portals for my clients, many of them ask, well, hey Greg, you know, do we, you know, can we add a widget to something where employees can, you know, raise each other, you know, for the, you know, for the job. And unfortunately, you know, my response is, well, there is really nothing available

1:01out of the box in SharePoint. There is no web port. This really allows you to do that. There might be, obviously, I've seen some third-party web ports out there, but for that, you would need to acquire them or purchase some third-party products, but out of the box, nothing really exists. And some of my clients have been using either teams, you know, chat or, or the Viva Engage, you know, communities for that purpose because they do have the ability to kind of praise, you know, employees, however, we also have a dedicated kind of functionality built as part of Viva Insights. So Viva Insights is something you obviously have to have separate licenses for, you know, for your organization. But if you have it, if you have Viva Insights license, then, and then visit the Viva Insights application, if you click on the personal insights, I know it's a little bit challenging for you to follow

2:04because, you know, this is not a video, but there is literally a feature there where you can send the praise to your colleagues. And it's almost like a little intake form, right? You specify who you want to praise, you specify how you want to praise them through, you know, one-on-one chat or team's channel. And then you pretty much can, you know, choose title for your praise, like thank you, congratulations, awesome, with some emojis, and then provide an actual note as well, I think, in order. And yeah, essentially, then you click send, and it sends, it actually does this nice card that it sends through, let's say, a team's channel, and users will get to see that you praise, you know, one of your colleagues. Now, you can also access the same kind of function, what I described to you is how you access it through Viva Insights kind of interface. But if you are in Teams, if you are in Teams, you know, there is an app for that, right?

3:08Once again, as long as your organization has Viva Insights app, if you find that app within Teams, you know, there is this praise, essentially capability, literally that's what it's called. You click on praise, and it, you know, pops up with the same intake form, and you can pretty much initiate your praise from Teams application. And finally, another option to send the praise, and again, it's literally the same method, it's just a different way to access it. If you're using, you know, dashboard, all right, Viva dashboard, and if you added one to your internet, the one that has all this kind of extra cards, you know, personalization, you know, cards, one of them, you know, one of the cards available on dashboard is called praise. And literally, just again, it's more of a, it's almost like a call to action, really.

4:10When you click on that praise, you know, call to action button, once again, it will open up a Viva Insights app, and you just send off your praise. In the show notes, I will include the link to the articles, so you can see some images. I know, I know it's a bit challenging to follow during the podcast, but the reason I decided to record an episode on this is because again, it's just such a freaking little requested feature. And unfortunately, SharePoint by itself does not have this, you know, it's not a web part, you can add, it's not a feature that we have at SharePoint, and you can literally utilize this, you know, capability. I guess the downside is you have to, you have to, you know, have those Viva Insights licenses. Now, if licenses, I need to show you, if you don't have the skip ability, like I mentioned earlier, you know, I've seen my clients do a few walk around. So first of all, you can use, you know, regular Teams chat, you can use Viva Engage Communities. Those do have the praise capability, you know, essentially a spot

5:16of the community features. And I have also seen some of my clients utilize the news web part. So the idea is that you give users the ability to add news balls, but instead of news balls, they literally add a praise. Essentially, you create a news post for each and every, you know, praise. Let's say a praise Mary for a great job on the project. I would create a news post and add a title, let's some text to it, maybe some images. And the beauty about this method is that, first of all, it's SharePoint based, but second of all, it will appear in the new speed. All right, it will appear in the new speed. And yeah, it's a great walk around. Obviously, you just need to set up some maybe permissions on the provost, right? Independent how many employees will be contributing to this, but it's a nice walk around if Viva Insights licenses and they show. As I mentioned earlier, I will add a link to the show notes so you can check out the article and the images.

6:20And I also have some examples of this wonderful functionality on my portfolio lookbook 365.com. But for now, thank you very much for listening and talk to next week. Goodbye.