Edit

Navigate the admin dashboard

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To log in to Viva Goals, visit: https://goals.microsoft.com/

Organization admins have direct access to the Microsoft Viva Goals admin dashboard. The dashboard offers settings that you can customize for your organization, which creates efficiency and confidence in Microsoft Viva Goals.

Like other employees, you need to be familiar with:

  • The OKR framework
  • How to write great OKRs
  • Viva Goals software training

Review the Get Started with Viva Goals learning path to dive deeper into these topics.

How to access and use the admin dashboard

To access the Viva Goals Admin Dashboard, navigate toward the bottom of the left side panel and select “Admin” next to the gear icon.

Screenshot showing where to access the admin tab in the navigation sidebar.

Organization admins configure the Viva Goals instance and have access to settings in the admin dashboard to set up users, teams, time periods, notifications, integrations, OKRs, and initiatives.

Here are recommended first five steps for organization admins:

  1. Navigate your settings in the admin dashboard, and configure the instance according to your business rhythms.

  2. Invite users.

  3. Create teams and assign users to them.

  4. Add OKRs.

  5. Set up integrations.

Overview of the tabs in the admin dashboard

Settings

The Settings tab lets you control general settings, such as settings related to the people and teams in your organization.

  • Who Can Join This Organization controls who is allowed to join your instance of Viva Goals and view your organization.

  • Invite Policy controls who can add users to your Viva Goals instance.

  • Team Creation is a feature that allows you to segment your organization into different workgroups and then add employees to those groups in Viva Goals. These groups will own team-level OKRs, and this setting controls who can create teams. Using this permission setting, admins can control the users who can create teams within their organization. There are three options that can be used:

    1. Any regular user
    2. Admins
    3. Team admins
    4. Customized (Choose users and grant them access)

    Note

    By default for all the newly created organizations, the default permission setting for who can teams would be set to 'Admins' and 'Team Admins'. This option can be changed if needed.

  • Tag Creation is a feature that allows you to categorize OKRs in buckets that you can later filter in a report.

Users

On the Users tab, you'll find a list of all the individuals that have been added to your instance. This page also serves as a report, as you can use the export button to download a CSV file with people information.

All of the information can be filtered using dropdown menus such as role, account type, status, and manager.

For example, if one of your users isn't sure if they got an invite, you could filter for users who have a status of "Pending."

Screenshot showing pending users alignment.

As admin, you can use the action menu, marked by three dots, to modify the various settings.

  • Cancel Invite retracts an email that you sent.
  • Resend Invite resends an invitation to join your instance.
  • Deactivate locks a user out of Viva Goals. All their OKRs and historical information will remain, but they won't be able to log on. You might use this option for someone who has left the company. You can reactivate them if needed. You aren't billed for deactivated users.
  • Edit lets you view basic information about the employee, such as name and email, and you can assign teams from this view.
  • Make Admin lets you add or remove privileges for a user.
  • Delete permanently deletes a user from Viva Goals.

Teams

This tab shows all the teams that you've set up, plus the team owner and members. To add a new team, select the Add Team button. To modify team settings, select the ellipses next to a given team. Learn more at Create and edit teams.

Notifications

The Notifications tab lets you customize the notifications that are sent to employees. Notifications is a critical feature that helps drive the rhythm of the business. In a perfect world, every employee consistently checks in their OKRs. But we know from experience that sometimes it takes a little nudge.

Integrations

The Integrations tab lets you manage integrations in three categories:

  • Messaging integrations: Microsoft Teams
  • Data integrations: Asana, Jira, Salesforce, and more
  • Authentication integrations: Azure Active Directly only

To learn more, see Viva Goals integrations overview.

Two steps are required to start using most integrations. As an example, let’s say your company wants to integrate with Excel.

  • Step 1: The Excel integration must be enabled in the admin dashboard. This option is a one-time, organization-level setting that essentially says, "I authorize the company to use Excel as an integration-with ally."

  • Step 2: The Excel integration can now be used at the individual level. This option is a one-time, user-level setting that essentially says, "I want a certain OKR to pull data from Excel as an integration with Viva Goals."

As an admin, you can oversee and manage these integrations. To continue our Excel example, you could disable the integration for the whole company, add a new connection or view existing connections and reauthenticate, edit, or delete them.

For a messaging integration like Microsoft Teams, you can add, edit, or delete notifications. Let's say you want to ring a virtual bell every time the sales team lands a sale. You can add a notification that does the following:

  1. For the sales team ...
  2. Every time there’s a new check-in ...
  3. Post that message to a specific sales team channel.

You can also enable private group notifications between users and their managers.

As a best practice, it’s a good idea to take a crawl, walk, run approach with integrations. While it may be tempting to see our long list of options and turn several on right away, first make sure your employees are comfortable with writing OKRs and using Viva Goals. From there, it can be useful to start with one group, such as Jira for the product team, before you roll out integrations to a larger audience.

Time periods

Viva Goals includes both annual and quarterly time periods. Typically, organizations operate on an annual planning cadence, and departments/teams operate on a quarterly planning cadence.

Admins can manage OKR time periods and customize them for your organization's requirements. Instead of the default quarterly periods, you could use monthly periods or define a custom time period.

To learn more, see Manage OKR time periods article.

OKR model configuration

Viva Goals understands that every business has its own set of processes and lets you configure and create your own OKR rules to fit your business needs.

To learn more, see Configure your OKR model in Viva Goals.

OKRs and initiatives

Admins can determine whether to allow multiple teams and OKR owners to collaborate on key objectives and initiatives. Admins can also establish OKR approval settings.

To learn more about initiatives, see Initiatives.