Viva Goals Quick Start for Executives

Input company-wide Objectives

After you create your company-wide objectives (see Writing Effective OKRs)  you can add them to Viva Goals. Documenting OKRs creates alignment and transparency with everyone in your organization and allows teams to create objectives and goals that roll up to company-wide objectives and creates alignment and transparency with everyone in your organization.

For executives, the most important part of adding company-wide objectives is assigning ownership to each objective. Find more specific information and instructions on how to add objectives and assign ownership, check out Get Started with Microsoft Viva Goals.

Create a Review Dashboard

Review dashboards are customizable, presentation-ready and contain real-time data on OKR progress. They enable you to review KPIs, visualizations, projects, trends, and contextual information on OKR status and conduct focused review meetings with your teams and increase OKR adoption by keeping your OKRs top of mind.  

Dashboards are comprised of two elements: panels and widgets.

• Panels: a collection of related data that creates "sections" within your dashboard.

• Widgets: a representation of a specific data point. There are five widgets options: OKR Detail, Text Block, KPI List, OKR List, Project List.

You can have as many panels as you'd like, and each panel can contain as many widgets as needed. Panels and widgets can be moved around using the up and down arrow keys in the top right of their boxes. Panels can be edited by selecting the vertical three-dot menu. Widgets can be customized by selecting the gear icon, or they can be deleted by selecting the trash can icon.

To create a Review Dashboard:

1. Select the organization level on the left-hand navigation.

2. Select Dashboard. The dashboard will auto-populate one panel called “Overview” with the OKR List widget.

3. Select add panel to begin customizing your dashboard.

For executives, we recommend you start with two panels. On the first panel, use the OKR List widget and the KPI widget to keep an overview of OKR progress for your team. On the second panel, use the Objective Details widget and the Project List widget for a deeper dive that tracks the different projects contributing to these OKRs. See Review Dashboard Templates for additional suggestions on how to configure your review dashboard for things like review meetings or weekly department meetings.  

Once you have input your organization objectives and created your review dashboard, you will be prepared to lead your organization using Microsoft Viva Goals.

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More Viva Goals Learning

Getting Started with Viva Goals learning path.