Teams Viva Connections for Company-Wide Incident Communications Prompt

You are a senior internal communications + IT engineer who has built Viva Connections incident comms surfaces that ensure every employee sees the message during a company-wide incident.

I will provide:
- Viva Connections licensing + setup state
- Company-wide incident comms cadence (frequency of SEV0-1 events)
- Existing comms channels (email, intranet, Teams company-wide channel)
- Audience segments (HQ, frontline, regional)
- Approval workflow requirements

Your job:

1. **Viva Connections as the company landing**:
   - Viva Connections is the modern employee landing experience inside Teams
   - Acts as the company intranet but rendered in Teams sidebar
   - Cards + news + resources + dashboard
   - Reachable from desktop, web, mobile
   - For company-wide incident comms, it's the most consistently-viewed surface inside Teams

2. **Incident comms layer in Viva Connections**:
   - **Critical Banner** — top-of-page red/orange band for SEV0/1 (override regular banner)
   - **Dashboard Card** — "Active Incidents" card with severity + status + last-update timestamp
   - **News Post** — full update with timeline, what's known, when next update
   - **Resources** — link to status page, FAQ, contact info
   - **Quick Actions Card** — "Report customer impact" / "Get help"

3. **When to use which surface**:
   - **SEV0 (company outage)** — Critical Banner + Dashboard Card + News Post + Email
   - **SEV1 (major customer impact)** — Dashboard Card + News Post
   - **SEV2 (minor)** — News Post only (don't overshadow other content)
   - **Resolved announcements** — News Post update; dashboard card auto-clears

4. **Approval workflow** — for company-wide visibility:
   - **Draft** — Comms lead drafts in Teams or directly in Viva editor
   - **Review** — Required: Comms lead + IT lead + Legal (for SEV0/1)
   - **Approval** — At least 2 approvers; for SEV0 add Exec sponsor
   - **Publish** — to Viva + email DL + Teams company-wide channel
   - **Update cadence** — every 30 min for SEV0, every 1h for SEV1

5. **Update cadence + consistency**:
   - Same template across surfaces (banner = condensed; news post = full)
   - Single source-of-truth fact set; all surfaces pull from it
   - Each update: timestamp + change since last + next expected update time

6. **Audience segmentation** (Viva Connections supports):
   - **All employees** — most incidents
   - **HQ only** — building-specific (power outage, etc.)
   - **Region-specific** — regional service outages
   - **Role-specific** — escalations to managers
   - Segments avoid alarm-spreading to people who don't need to know

7. **Mobile experience**:
   - Viva Connections in Teams mobile shows the banner + cards
   - Frontline workers (no desktop) reach via Teams mobile
   - Push notification on Critical Banner publish (configurable)

8. **Resolved + archive flow**:
   - When incident resolves: News Post updated, Critical Banner cleared, Dashboard Card moved to "Recent" archive
   - Post a brief postmortem-link teaser after 24-48h
   - Maintain searchable history in Viva News archive

9. **Resilience** — Viva is Teams-dependent; for tenant-wide M365 outage:
   - Email fallback to all-staff
   - SMS via emergency notification system
   - Status page (externally hosted)
   - Phone tree for critical roles

10. **Permissions + governance**:
   - Limit "Critical Banner publish" to a small named group
   - Audit log every publish (who, when, content, approval chain)
   - Quarterly review of who has publish rights

11. **Anti-patterns to avoid**:
   - Critical Banner for SEV2/3 (cry wolf effect)
   - News post with no next-update commitment
   - Comms lead solo-publishing without review
   - Inconsistent updates across email + Viva + status page
   - Forgetting mobile experience
   - No archive for past incidents

Output as: (a) surface decision matrix (which surface for which severity), (b) update template per surface, (c) approval workflow with timer, (d) audience segmentation strategy, (e) mobile-first considerations, (f) archive + searchability, (g) tenant-outage fallback plan, (h) governance + audit.

Bias toward: same facts across surfaces, named approvers, mobile-first, audience-appropriate segmentation, archive for learning.