Enhanced Passive Time Release (5.0.0)

We are excited to announce updates to how Passive Time is classified and displayed in ActivTrak, along with configuration options that give you more flexibility and control to define how you want to capture Passive Time for your organization.

During the workday, employees switch between actively interacting with the keyboard and mouse and passively interacting through voice and video, actively working and passively consuming information. Active time is anytime an employee is actively engaged with their keyboard or mouse including activities like answering emails, creative design, logging data in an application, writing task tickets and troubleshooting code. Passive time is when an employee is not actively using their keyboard or mouse, and occurs when an employee is attending a video or in person meeting, on the phone, reading a document or away from their computer for a break.   

We’ve updated how the platform captures, records, configures and displays passive time. These enhancements reflect the activities/behaviors of users prior to going passive. Passive time is now classified as Productive Passive, Unproductive Passive, or Undefined Passive based on the last activity the user was engaged in before going passive.

Passive Time Configuration

Admins now have the ability to control when passive time starts and stops recording. We now default to stopping passive time after 5 minutes per episode. 

• Passive time recording continues to default to 2 minutes, Admins can now adjust it to start anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes.
• Passive time now defaults to stop after 5 minutes, Admins can adjust it to stop from 0 to 30 minutes or choose to keep recording indefinitely or until the computer goes to sleep, is locked, or turned off. If the Admin selects to stop at 0 minutes, no passive time will be recorded.

Agent Requirements 

This classified passive data is available using the latest agent versions (MacAgent 8.1.4 & WinAgents 8.1.12 and newer versions) and appear throughout the app starting January 13, 2021 and going forward. Any passive data collected with previous agent versions and prior to January 13, 2021 will be shown as Undefined passive.  

See here for how to upgrade to the latest agents.

Summary vs Detail Views 

This release introduces Summary and Detailed Views across the reports. Summary views include active and passive duration. Detailed views break down active and passive time explicitly.

The Dashboard and Team Pulse always show the summary views where active and passive time are shown together as Productive, Unproductive or Undefined.

Drilling down into the reports, the Top Users & Groups report has been updated and simplified to both reflect the new color schema and to provide an easier means to see both a summary view and a detailed view either by individual Users or by Groups. 

 Summary View: 

 Detailed View: 

On the Productivity Report Detailed View, you will see the new color scheme utilized here with the activities broken out by the descriptors. 

Within the Single Day Report (Live Reports > Productivity) you’ll see we show passive locked or stopped as blank intervals:  

Passive-Locked is the Passive state when ActivTrak does not know what the employee is doing because they are not interacting with their computer. This occurs when the employee has turned off their computer, it has gone to sleep, or after passive time stops collecting. By default, passive time now stops after 5 minutes. 

Activity Log

Within the Activity Log you can see each passive activity now shows the details of the last activity the employee was engaged in prior to going inactive. These details are how each passive episode is classified with a productivity status.  

In this example, mail.google.com is considered a Productive activity and classified as Productive Active. The employee went passive while in gmail so therefore that passive time is classified as Productive Passive. 

You can also see the employee was passive for longer than 5 minutes so any time after the 5 minute mark is shown as Passive - locked. Given the user is not interacting with their computer while Passive, ActivTrak cannot determine exactly what they are doing. Therefore, we stop collecting passive time after 5 minutes to prevent over reporting.

New App Navigation

In addition to the passive changes we have updated the navigation menu to make it easier and faster to find what you need using intuitive grouping of pages, order they are shown and more identifiable names. Customers informed us that our legacy navigation was confusing and hard to find the right page. For example, customers often had to look between the Settings and Account sections a couple of times before finding the right page.  

The new navigation groups similar pages together to make it easier to see all aspects of a feature or similar types of settings pages. 

• All alarms based features are now under ‘Alarms’
• Settings and Account are now under Settings. We’ve grouped the similar settings pages together to make it easier to see and find the right page.

We’ve reordered the reports under Live Reports based on popularity. For more details on the new nav and a full mapping from the legacy see here.

Learn more 

For more information on passive time controls and navigation enhancements see the following articles: 

• Passive Time Frequently Asked Questions 
• Understanding the New Passive Time Classification
• Passive Time Configuration
• New App Navigation