The time that employees spend away from the computer is known as Idle Time or Passive Time.
With CurrentWare’s employee computer monitoring software solutions you can…
Want to learn more? In this article you will learn the difference between Active Time and Idle Time, how to track your employee’s Idle Time with CurrentWare’s system Idle Time tracker software, and the best practices for monitoring the Idle Time of employees.
Active time refers to the time that an employee spends actively using their computer. This includes mouse/keyboard inputs, using applications, or browsing the internet. Employee computer monitoring software measures this time and generates computer activity reports to show how employees are actively spending their time at work.
Idle Time is the opposite of Active Time. The exact definition of Idle Time is slightly different depending on the context that it is being used, though it generally refers to the time that a given asset is available but not being used.
As a traditional workplace productivity metric in fields such as manufacturing, Idle Time is defined as a period of time that an asset (such as a machine) is ready and available, but is not doing anything. In these environments Idle Time can be caused by workflow inefficiencies such as unexpected downtime.
When monitoring employee computer usage Idle Time refers to the periods of time that the employee’s computer is not being actively used. This form of Idle Time happens when employees are on break, not actively working, or are working on job-adjacent tasks such as making phone calls, attending in-person meetings, or engaging in deep thinking.
Employee monitoring software will change from Active Time tracking to Idle Time tracking after a designated period of inactivity. For example, the default time before CurrentWare’s BrowseReporter switches from Active Time tracking to Idle Time tracking is after 20 minutes of inactivity.
Activity levels are measured based on inputs from the employee such as mouse movement and keyboard inputs. This threshold can be customized to better fit what makes the most sense for each organization.
In this example you will get a more accurate report by filtering out Idle Time from your employee’s computer usage reports.
If your employees rarely perform tasks that do not require computer input (watching videos, webinars, etc) you may also want to reduce the Idle Time threshold (X) to a lesser number.
Note: Adjusting the Idle Time threshold will not retroactively modify the existing computer usage data that has already been captured.
The presence of Idle Time does not always mean that employees are away from their computers. They could also be watching training videos, webinars, or tutorials that do not require them to use their mouse and keyboard.
In this example the accuracy of the computer activity data can be improved by including the employee’s Idle Time in the report. If your employees frequently watch videos, webinars, etc you may want to set the Idle Time threshold (X) to a greater number.
Tracking the times that employees log in and out is one method of tracking employee computer usage, but it does not tell you how active they were during that time.
An employee could log in at the start of the work day, walk away from their computer, and log back out at the end of the work day. By monitoring the Idle Time of remote employees you can see whether or not they are using their computers during work hours.
Employees will find creative ways to prevent themselves from appearing idle during work hours. They might use dedicated tools such as hardware or software-based mouse jigglers that simulate mouse movements or keyboard inputs.
How to detect mouse jigglers:
Having the option to include or exclude Idle Time as needed improves the accuracy and utility of computer activity reports.
As shown in the previous examples Idle Time is usually filtered out to remove clutter from the reports, though there may be times that an employee registers as inactive even when they are working.
Generating reports with Idle Time included will also show you extended periods where the employee’s computer was on but not in use. These periods could be caused by employees forgetting to turn off their computers after work or from logging into their workstation without performing any tasks.
Tracking the Idle Time of your employees gives you a better understanding of:
In the broader context of workforce analytics Idle Time tracking is one of many data points you can use to better understand how your workforce operates.
Having an understanding of when your employees are most active on their computers is especially helpful when managing employees that work from home as you can see when they are the most involved in their tasks and when they are usually away from their computer.
The presence of Idle Time does not always mean that your employees are not working.
Your employee’s computers will be designated as idle after they have not touched their mouse or keyboard for a set time period. While inactivity does happen when an employee isn’t working this can also happen when they are in an in-person meeting, problem solving away from their computer, watching a training video/webinar, or making a work-related phone call.
Your employees may forget to shut down their computers before they leave work. Including Idle Time in reports will show you the time periods where their computers were left on without being actively used. If you would like to automatically shut down computers that are left idle you can use enPowerManager’s automatic PC shutoff features.
Tips for Computer Power Management:
To track the Idle Time of your employees you will first need to install computer monitoring software such as CurrentWare’s BrowseReporter.
BrowseReporter will track your employee’s computer activity such as application usage, websites visited, and bandwidth consumption. Once they’ve been inactive from their computers for a set period of time the activity log will change employee time tracking from Active Time to Idle Time.
If you’d like your employees to track their time manually as well you can combine employee monitoring software with time tracker software. This will allow your employees to manually report what their time was spent on and you can use the active/idle time reports to understand how much of their self-reported time was spent on the computer.
The next step is to set how long your employees should be inactive for before the system Idle Time tracker software switches from Active Time to Idle Time. The default inactivity period for BrowseReporter is 20 minutes.
How to Change the Idle Time Threshold in BrowseReporter:
Thanks for checking out the latest CurrentWare how-to video. Today we will cover How to Monitor Internet Use.
If you like this or other videos we’ve produced, hit the subscribe button below. Stay tuned to the end to learn how to get a free trial of the software I demo today.
In a previous video, we covered some of the benefits of monitoring employees including for productivity reasons, to avoid legal liability and to prevent cyber threats. In this video, we’re going to cover how to monitor internet use and some of the industry best practices.
We’re going to be using BrowseReporter, CurrentWare’s computer monitoring solution.
This solution requires an agent to be installed on your employee’s computers. Once installed, their computer activity is streamed to your server where you can run reports and view their activity.
To start off, we recommend you determine which browsers are being used by your company. This is a good time to look at your company’s policy and determine which default browser you recommend. You can also find out which browsers your employees are using with BrowseReporter’s application monitoring report. In addition, you can actually block the installation or use of other browsers by using CurrentWare’s BrowseControl solution.
The next step is to figure out what time period you want to look at. You can pull reports on demand at any desired time period including last 7 days, last month or a custom date range.
For this example, we’ll look at yesterday’s results. Now you can actually schedule these reports to email automatically to the appropriate person on your team, but in this case we are going to use on-demand reports, pulling the reports up as needed.
So let’s jump in and start with a snapshot report on employee internet use based on productivity.
With the CurrentWare Employee Productivity Report, you get a simple snapshot into how much time was spent on websites that are deemed to be productive. The definition of productive is based on our proprietary system of ranking each website based on whether it’s productive, unproductive or neutral. You can even change the categorization of websites based on your business needs to make this report more helpful.
Looking at the CurrentWare console, we’ll pull up the employee productivity report for employee Conan. We will look at yesterday’s performance and see that Conan was only 24% productive. The majority of his time was spent on Social Media and Sports websites vs. work related tasks.
The next way to assess productivity is to see which sites someone has spent the most time on. For example, if you know the employee is on the sales team and should be spending the majority of time on salesforce.com, you can investigate and see which are the main sites they are really browsing.
By pulling up the Top Domains visited report, we can see exactly which domains Conan browsed yesterday by Active Time and Total Time. Similar to the previous report, we see the majority of his time was spent on Facebook and ESPN.
One of the most interesting features of CurrentWare’s internet monitoring reports are related to tracking the actual activity of a user and not letting the data get convoluted with different tabs or windows that a user has open.
BrowseReporter has 3 different ways to determine how the internet and applications are being used:
Active Time measures how long the current window is in focus, giving you the most accurate report on where users spent their time on websites and applications. BrowseReporter has the capability to determine which website tab was active at the top of the screen so you get extremely accurate reporting on where they spent their time.
Total Time measures the total duration the window is opened for, from the start time until the end time regardless of whether the window was in focus or not. Not every user acts the same. Some users switch between two monitors. Some like to stream content in the background. No matter what their behaviors are, BrowseReporter can track the total time they spent on the websites whether or not they were focused on the window.
Finally, Idle time measures how long the user is away from his computer after the mouse and keyboard stopped moving. By default, idle time is tracked after 20 minutes of inactivity. Time tracking should be fair. If your users are not in front of their computers, BrowseReporter will separate the time tracked into idle time so you can filter it out if you need to during report generation.
Now if you want to investigate the exact website pages that the employee visited, you can use the Sites visited report. This report breaks down each url in detail along with how much time was spent on each page.
This lets you distill down if they were looking at pages related to work on those domains or if it was something more personal. This is specifically helpful for domains like youtube.com which for certain industries or roles can provide value, but knowing which exact video was watched can help you understand the use case by the employee.
Finally, we recommend investigating productivity by looking at employee keyword searches.
This report allows you to Review the exact search keywords used by employees and Identify employees that are distracted or struggling with specific topics. In addition, you can also discover employee sentiment and monitor for high-risk search terms such as attempts to find adult-oriented websites.
In this keywords searched example we can see employee Greg has searched lots of personal items into google over the past working days. This helps you understand where they may be spending their time and what they are browsing in google.
That’s it for this video on how to monitor internet use with BrowseReporter. If you have any thoughts on the reports or suggestions we’ve covered in this video, feel free to comment below..
If you’d like to give BrowseReporter or any of the other CurrentWare Solutions a try, please check our free trial at currentware.com/download or get in touch with us and we’d be happy to help!
NOTE: The above video contains a legacy user interface for BrowseReporter. To see the most up-to-date version, please visit the BrowseReporter product page.
As your employees use their computers their activity will be collected by the CurrentWare software agent. This data will be used by BrowseReporter to generate several different computer activity reports.
Below you can see three of the most popular Idle Time tracking features in BrowseReporter
Now that you’ve learned how to monitor employee computer usage with BrowseReporter you can use the Idle Time Tracking feature to modify the data that is included in the reports.
By default Idle Time is excluded from BrowseReporter’s reports. To include Idle Time in the reports all you need to do is select the “Include Idle Time in this report” checkbox in the Report Options window.
Measuring the Idle Time of employees provides greater insights into their work habits. With this capability you can find out when your employees are actively using their computers, verify the causes of Idle Time, and address excessive periods of inactivity.
If you want to monitor employee computer activity including Idle Time, software usage, and web activity, you can use employee monitoring software such as CurrentWare’s BrowseReporter.
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