Does The Activity % Tell Me How Much Time Someone Was Working?

Before we begin, the activity percentage value should not be read as the amount of time a person spent working.

Depending on someone’s job and daily tasks, activity rates will vary widely.

Jobs involving data entry, design, development, and other high mouse and keyboard activity will tend to have higher averages.

Team members who spend more time in meetings, doing more research, or participating in video chats will tend to have lower scores. It makes sense; they’ll be moving their mouse and keyboard less if they’re primarily talking or reading.

That’s why people with 75% scores and those with 25% scores can often times both be working productively. If a usual day for your team involves checking email, reading articles, or having calls with one another, they might have an average activity rate around 50%.

Instead of using activity rates as a one-time snapshot of productivity and making a decision based only on them, our recommendation is to use these as trends.

Look for patterns, and if a continually declining activity rate shows up, have conversations. The idea of activity rates is to keep a dialogue going and improve processes and workflow over time.

At Hubstaff, we discourage the use of quotas or scoring based on activity rates. Frustration can emerge when managers and team members aren’t clear on what’s expected of them, so an open dialogue can keep work moving.

Hubstaff does NOT store individual keystrokes that are entered (there is no keylogging) or where your mouse clicks. We simply track the number of seconds we detect keyboard or mouse activity which includes mouse move, mouse click, mouse wheel, and keyboard presses. We don’t store specifically what was done, only that there was some activity during a second.