Viva Goals Quick Start Web App

Microsoft Viva Goals aligns you to your organization’s strategic priorities and unites teams around mission and purpose.

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In this article:

Get started with Viva Goals

Viva Goals navigation Collaborate: How OKRs align through your company

Create objectives, key results, and projects

Check-in and track results

Close, score, and reflect

Viva Goals navigation

Your default view in Viva Goals is “My OKRs.” This page can be broken down into three main areas:

Left-hand navigation menu
Time-period selector
Central content

Left-hand navigation menu

This menu is your launching pad that will take you to the various locations within Viva Goals.

Search: Search within Viva Goals.
Notifications: Activity reminders that require your attention.
Explorer: The Explorer lets you create new OKR views.
Teams: List of OKRs assigned to the group(s) that you are a member of.
Users: Here you can view your direct reports, your team members, or all users in your organization.

Your Pinned OKRs are the OKRs that are most relevant to you

Time-period selector

The time- period selector enables you to filter views based on your timelines. Choose from active, upcoming, and previous time periods and toggle a setting to view multiple time periods at once.

Central Content

Based on your selections from the left-hand navigation menu and the time period selector, different sets of OKR information will appear in the center of the page.

Collaborate: How OKRs align through your company

OKRs are divided into company-wide goals and team goals.

Company OKRs are the effort of the entire business and represent the goals that everyone else will collaborate with.
Team OKRs are group efforts that roll up to the company level OKRs. Teams can have multiples groups and sublevels represented like department, team, project group, or working unit.

To discover the alignment of an objective, key result, or project you have two options:

View the expandable list of nested goals
View the details of a single goal to discover its alignment to the highest level

View nested OKRs

Select the organization for which you want to view OKRs.
Select Active under the time period selector.
Identify the goal you would like to view.
1. Objectives are identified by the target symbol.
2. Key Results are identified by the speedometer symbol.
3. Initiatives are identified by the calendar symbol.
Select the chevron > symbol to the left of your goal. This will generate a drop down of objectives, key results, or projects that are contributing to the selected goal.
1. Continue expanding the chevron icons within your nested list to expand cascading goals.

View the details of a single goal

Identify the goal you would like to view.
Select the title of your goal you’d like to view. This will produce a panel of information.
Scroll through the information panel until you reach the Aligned to section.
The selected goal will appear at the bottom of the list and you will be able to see how it rolls up through the other goals in your company.

Create objectives, key results, and initiatives

To add an objective, key result, or project to Viva Goals, navigate to the company or team level goal.

Select the + Objective icon in the top right.
Fill out the New Objective Panel with the following:
1. Details:
  1. Title
  2. Aligned to: What other objectives this objective aligns to.
  3. Team: What team this goal is for.
  4. Owner: The point person who has been assigned responsibility for this goal.
  5. When: The time period the goal will be worked on.
  6. More options: Some optional fields to add context to your goal, including; assigning a delegate, visibility, tags, and a description.
2. Outcome: This will be automatically assigned based on the goal you have chosen to create.
3. Progress: How to calculate success. Options include manual and automatic via rollup from key results.
  1. More options: This allows you to select a person who is responsible for performing check-ins (by default this will be the owner), and allows you to add scoring guidance, if applicable.
Select Create to add the information the goal.

Check-in and track results

Updating your goals is important ensure progress is being made and to provide visibility to your team about the progress towards common goals.

Select My OKRs in your left-hand menu.
Hover over to the key result or project you want to update.
Select the check-in button to open the new check in panel.
Enter the following information:
1. Metric: The numeric value of the progress that has been made.
2. Status: How you feel about your progress. Options include, not started, on track, behind, and at risk.
  1. Viva Goals will automatically assign a value based on the expected progress vs the actual progress. This status can be overwritten as needed.
3. Add a note (optional): a text block where you can include a note about the progress that has been made.
4. Date of check-in: automatically populates with the date. This can be edited to back date a check-in as needed.
Select check-in to save

Updating your goals will automatically update the progress of the parent(s) your goals are aligned with.

Close, score, and reflect

Closing your OKRs and projects allows you to score and reflect on your progress to gain valuable insight when repeating the OKR cycle.

Select My OKRs in your left-hand menu.
Hover over the key result or project you want to close.
Select the more actions ellipses and choose Close from the dropdown to open the close panel.
Enter the following information:
1. Metric: The numeric value of the progress that has been made.
2. Status: Viva Goals will automatically select close.
3. Score: Viva Goals will recommend a score based on actual versus expected progress.
4. Continue working on this in another time period: Choose this option if you want to keep working on this OKR in another time period and close it for this current time period.
5. Closing Note: A summary of why how you scored your goal.
Select Close to save.

A closed goal will show a grayed-out progress bar with a score on the right on your OKR home screen. Once all key results have been closed, progress will roll up and the objective will close with a score that is an average of the scores of the key results below.