ActivTrak dashboards utilizing Insights (available in trials and select ActivTrak plans) provide valuable productivity insights, coaching opportunities, and recommendations for leaders, as well as goal-setting capabilities that help you and your teams work more wisely. To ensure accurate reporting and data privacy, you’ll need to customize how Insights are configured for your organization.
To get started, navigate to Settings > Insights Configuration to access the Insights Configuration Page. Here, you can customize your Insights settings, organized into three tabs: Metrics, Privacy, and Subscriptions.
The table below outlines the settings available on each tab and explains how changes impact historical data and reporting. Click on a specific Tab or Setting to navigate to the corresponding documentation.
| Tab | Are changes retroactive? | When are changes reflected? |
|---|---|---|
| Metrics | Yes | After the next Insights data refresh |
| Privacy | Yes | Immediately |
| Subscriptions | N/A | Immediately |
Note: Users' access to dashboards and features may vary based on account configuration. ActivTrak Admins can adjust access settings by assigning user roles and permissions.
Contents
Metrics tab
View and adjust key metrics that impact productivity measurement. This tab includes five settings, which are detailed below.
Configuration to Compute Averages
ActivTrak calculates several metrics—including average daily productive hours—based on a user's Active Days during a specific period. How these Active Days are determined depends on whether your account has the HRIS Integration enabled.
For accounts with HRIS Integration
When the HRIS Integration (Add-on) is enabled, ActivTrak uses work schedules and approved time off data to accurately determine Active Days. This means your productivity metrics are based on working days.
How Active Days are calculated:
- A user is Active when they log any amount of productive time on a scheduled workday; this will count as an Active Day
- A user is Inactive when approved time off exists (full or partial), OR it's a non-workday (not dependent on the absence or existence of logged productive time); this will not count as an Active Day
Therefore, the Configuration to Compute Averages panel will be disabled, and you will see the following message:
Daily averages, such as productive hrs/day, are calculated by dividing productive hours by the number of active days in the selected time period.
Active days are automatically calculated based on work schedules and Time-Off data (from your HRIS integration).
This approach ensures your averages aren't skewed by activity logged during time off or on weekends. Digital activity is still recorded, but it is removed from your productivity averages.
For accounts without HRIS Integration
If you don't have the HRIS integration enabled, you can configure how active days are counted using the Define Active Days to Compute Averages setting.
You have two options:
- Use Work Schedule
Any day a user logs productive time on a scheduled workday counts as an active day, regardless of total time worked. Days outside the assigned work schedule are excluded from active day counts, even if the user records digital activity.
This option provides the most accurate averages by anchoring active day calculations to your team's actual work schedules. ActivTrak recommends this setting if you've configured work schedules for your users.
- Use Hourly Threshold (default)
A day counts as active only when a user logs at least the specified number of productive hours. This was the only available option prior to this update and remains the default for both existing and new accounts to prevent any unexpected changes to your data.
Setting an appropriate threshold prevents brief periods of activity on weekends or non-workdays from diluting your productivity averages. However, setting the threshold too high can skew results in the opposite direction. ActivTrak recommends setting the hourly threshold to 2 hours.
Example 1: Setting the threshold too low
If you set the threshold to 0 hours and an employee logs 40 hours of productive time over 5 days, the average productive time is 8 hrs/day. If that employee logs in for 1 hour over the weekend, that day counts as active. The same productive time is now divided by 6 days, bringing the average down to 6.7 hrs/day.
Example 2: Setting the threshold too high
If you set the threshold to 5 hours and an employee logs 40 hours of productive time across 7 days, only 3 of those days meet the active-day criterion. The result is an inflated average of 13.3 hrs/day.
To see how these examples compare to ActivTrak's recommended approach, see the table below.
Notes:
- This setting applies to all users and cannot be configured per individual user or team
- Changes apply retroactively — after updating the threshold, you may notice higher values for average metrics
- The hourly threshold is not the same as a team's Productive Time goal. The Productive Time goal represents the ideal number of hours employees work each day; the hourly threshold is the minimum required for a day to count as active
Account-level Goals
With one easy setting, Admins can set or adjust goals for productivity metrics (Productive, Collaboration, and Focus Time) for all teams in the account, including existing and future teams.
When setting goals, consider employees’ historical benchmarks and our Benchmarks Guide, which is based on data from ActivTrak’s customer base.
Managers on select ActivTrak plans can also set custom team-level goals via Benchmarks & Goals.
Note: The most recently set goal — whether at the account or team level — will take precedence. When a user belongs to multiple groups, their Primary Group determines which team-level goal applies to them.
Utilization Level Threshold
Admins and Configurators can customize the Utilization Level Threshold to determine whether a User is overutilized or underutilized (based on the percentage above or below their Productive Hrs/Day goal). This ensures that managers and leaders can accurately assess which employees are overworked or disengaged in line with the organization’s expectations, rather than relying on the default threshold.
The Utilization Level Threshold Setting defaults to 20% but can be configured to any value between 10% and 80%. To adjust your account’s Utilization Level Threshold, update the Threshold vs Productive Hrs/Day Goal (+/-) field and click the Save button to apply changes.
Attention Shifting
An Attention Shift is triggered when a user toggles between multiple applications or screens within a minute. Consecutive minutes without Attention Shifts are counted toward a user’s Focused Time.
There are two ways to customize Attention Shift settings:
- Set the number of applications or websites visited within a minute that will trigger an Attention Shift
- Set how the number of screen views will trigger an Attention Shift
Tip: Consider the nature of your team’s work. If their processes often involve multiple screen views or site shifts, increase these settings to accurately capture Focused Time. If their work requires high focus within individual applications, reduce these settings.
Collaboration Time
Determine which activity categories should count toward users’ Collaboration Time. The applications and websites within each category can be configured from the Classification page.
By default, Collaboration Time includes the “Meeting Software” and “Chat & Messaging” categories. Tailor what is considered Collaboration Time in your organization by selecting all the applicable categories, then click the Save button to apply the changes.
Privacy tab
It is critical to ensure organization and employee data privacy while measuring productivity. This tab includes two settings, which are detailed below.
Exclude Non-Business Activity Details
By hiding details of non-business activities from Insights dashboards, organizations can provide managers with access to in-depth workforce productivity insights while protecting employee privacy and mitigating concerns about the exposure of personal data.
When this setting is enabled, Insights dashboards display the total time spent on unproductive or unclassified activities, but not the details of specific apps and websites accessed.
Note: This setting is applied at the account level and cannot be configured for individual users or teams.
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Hide User Activity Data
Toggle the Hide User Activity Data setting to protect employee privacy and focus on analyzing productivity metrics at the team or account level in Insights Dashboards. Once enabled, all Insights dashboards will display aggregate or anonymized data only and will not display individuals' names.
Note: This setting does not apply to the Personal Insights Dashboard.
Subscriptions tab
Email Subscriptions make it easier to share dashboards utilizing Insights and enable your team to:
- Align on goals and measure progress
- Identify productivity blockers and the necessary actions to remove them
- Have more productive coaching conversations
- Optimize schedules based on personal and teamwork habits
Subscriptions & Sharing
By default, managers with access to the ActivTrak app can share Personal Insights with their direct reports and create email subscriptions for other app users. To change this, toggle off "Allow Users to Share Personal Insights with direct reports or subscribe other application users.”
Important: Your company agrees to obtain all required consents from an employee before using the ActivTrak application to capture and share activity data with the employee, other employees, or representatives of your company. ActivTrak's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy continue to apply.