Productivity Metrics: How is Work Time / Idle Time / Activity Percentage / Productive Time / Unproductive Time / Total Time determined? – Teramind

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Explanation of Productivity Metrics Frequently Asked Questions

Explanation of Productivity Metrics

These are associated with the Employee > Time Worked or Productivity reports. More more information about these reports, check out the Analyzing Employee Performance with the Productivity Reports section on the User Guide.

Session Time:

Session time = Work time + Locked session time(i.e. when a screensaver is running or the Lock command is used in Windows). In other words, total time which user had been logged into their computer.

Work Time:

Work time = Active time + Idle time. In other words, work time represents the gross amount of time which your employees logged as user sessions (excluding any locked sessions). With this column, you can see if your employees were present or absent from work; and how many hours they’ve clocked in for a selected date range.

Productive Time:

Represents time spent on productive websites and applications; based on the classification you made in the Web Pages and Application report. Check out Configuring Productivity Profiles section for more information on activity classification.

Unproductive Time:

Unproductive time is total time spent in applications and websites classified as 'Unproductive' (on the Applications & Websites monitoring report). Not that, activities not classified will not count towards the unproductive time, only activity specifically classified as 'Unproductive' will. Check out the How to classify activities as productive / unproductive? article for more information on activity classification.

Productive (no idle) Time:

Similar to Productive time, only difference is, this time measures time the user is actually active (moving the mouse, typing on the keyboard) on the websites/applications.

Active Time:

Represents time spent engaging the keyboard or mouse.

Idle Time:

Idle represents the absence of activity on keyboard and mouse.

This is calculated in conjunction with the Idle Time Threshold set on the Applications settings page. For example, if the idle time threshold is set to 10 minutes, and someone didn’t use their mouse/keyboard for 15 minutes, then the idle time will be 5 minutes. So, basically, the system will not start counting the idle time until the threshold is reached.

Activity:

Represents the average activity percentage for the selected date range. This value is an average of the activity level in 5-minute intervals during which the employee was logged into a session. The score of each five-minute interval is calculated based on the user’s keyboard and mouse activity. If the user types at or above 40 words-per-minute or is active on the mouse with relatively few breaks, score will be 100%. If the user is completely idle, their score will be 0%.

Color guide:

The color table below shows the activity %:

	Green = 70% – 100% activity
	Yellow = 11% – 69% activity
	Red = 0% – 10% activity

Total:

Represents the total wages earned by the user during this time frame and is based on salary/wage rate you may have designated to the user. To setup the wages/salary: Select the EMPLOYEES menu. Select an employee from the list. Click the EDIT INFO button. You can set the pay RATE on the PERSONAL INFO tab).

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why Session time is 0 for current date?

Session time, as well as Productive / Unproductive time and some others time values may be calculated with some delay, up to several hours, especially on the Cloud.

2. Why Session time is greater than 24 hours for a single day in selected date range?

Because user could be logged into several machines and we show total time on all machines.

3. Why Work time is greater than Session time?

It can happen when the Agent is offline for some time (Teramind server was inaccessible due to network connection or other issues). In offline mode. Teramind continues recording all activity and Work time, but not the Session time.

4. Why Work time is less than Productive time for some users?

This can happen if some background apps were running while the user was idle. It might be counted as productive time but not as work time.

i	This was an issue with older versions of the Agent. On the latest Agent versions, Productive time is no longer tracked if the session is locked, just like Work time. If you encounter this problem, please update the Agent.

5. Why Work time reported on Productivity Report is different than the Dashboard Widgets?

The Online employees widget on the Dashboard shows Work time only on current computer on which user works at the moment. Productivity Reports summarize time on all computers on which user has been working at the day.

Please note that, for Work time to work properly, the Agent should have a task assigned. Especially, if it’s a Hidden Agent. You can change the Default Task from the Agent Default Settings. It’s configured by default, but sometimes you may have reset it, so Work times may stop counting. The Agent should be reconnected to apply new default task. Restart machine for that.

6. Why Productive/Unproductive/Unclassified time can be greater than ‘work time’?

That is possible because Work time does not take into account the time when the session was locked and if there is no task set for the user, work time won’t be counted. Same is possible for Session time in case of offline mode.

7. How does time spend on sites that are not monitored recorded?

When using the DON’T MONITOR WEB TRAFFIC FOR THESE IPS/WEBSITES setting is used (available under Websites Monitoring Settings), the time log is affected as follows:

DON’T MONITOR WEB TRAFFIC FOR THESE IPS will not affect the time log.
DON’T MONITOR WEB TRAFFIC FOR THESE WEBSITES will affect the time log. It will still count Work Time, Active Time and Idle Time. However, the sum of webpages will not add up to Time Worked since the webpages will not appear on the report.