In Teramind, Idle Time is defined as the period during which the Teramind Agent is running, but no keyboard or mouse activity is detected from the user. Accurate idle time tracking is essential for measuring productivity, auditing payroll, and ensuring Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance.
1. Configuring the Idle Time Threshold
The baseline for all idle metrics is the Idle time threshold setting which can be configured from the Applications monitoring settings. This defines the duration of inactivity required before the system stops counting time as "Active" and begins logging it as "Idle". If the threshold is set to 5 minutes, the user remains "Active" until the 5th minute of inactivity is reached. At that point, those 5 minutes (and all subsequent inactive time) are retroactively reclassified as "Idle."
2. Viewing Activity vs. Idle Time on Dashboards
The Productivity Dashboard serves as the central hub for visualizing these metrics across the organization. You can configure the Productivity Details grid widget to include columns such as Idle Time, Productive Idle Time, Unproductive Idle Time, etc. to measure different idle time metrics.
For more information about the productivity metrics, check out this article.
3. Automating Idle Management with Behavioral Rules
The Schedule, Applications, and Webpages rules support various time-based criteria, such as Time Idle, Time Active, and Time Focused allowing you to automate responses to inactivity based on specific workplace contexts.
By defining these criteria within rules, you can trigger immediate actions to maintain productivity and security, such as displaying a warning for the user to return to work when idle time is too long, or locking the workstation to mitigate security risks if they left a sensitive application open unattended.
Here are two rule examples:
4. Beyond Active/Idle Time Measurement: Productivity Classification
While the distinction between Active and Idle time reveals whether a user is physically at their workstation, Productivity Classification provides the context necessary to determine if that time is being spent on business-critical tasks.
By categorizing applications and websites as Productive, Unproductive, or assigning them to custom categories, you can transform raw activity data into actionable performance metrics.
On the Productivity Dashboard and other analytics views, this classification allows you to combine behavioral data with activity status to measure highly granular KPIs, such as:
Productive vs. Idle Ratio: Identifying if high idle time occurs within productive apps (e.g., "Active Listening" during a Zoom meeting).
Net Productive Time: Calculating active time spent exclusively within productive-rated software.
Workflow Efficiency: Spotting instances where users are "Active" but spending that energy on unproductive or unclassified resources.