How to Use Insightful to Track Office Employees

Insightful is a solution designed for both office and remote employee tracking. Although the features are similar for both scenarios, there are some options specifically created for each one of them.

Today we’ll go through those options and help you setup and use Insightful to track office employees.

Installation and Setup

After you’ve created an account on our signup page, you’ll be taken through the onboarding process during which you’ll be able to create your company, add different teams, etc.

If you’re tracking office employees who are working on company-owned computers you should choose the Company Computers option. This option will let you track employees in stealth mode, set up different tracking scenarios, etc - but we’ll get into more details about those in the next steps.

After you’ve set up the basic info about your company, the next step is to create tracking settings on a company level. These can be changed later, and you can create different settings for different teams/employees. However, we advise you to go through the setup right away so you can get a grip of the features and learn more about them.

App Visibility

One of the main differences between tracking office and remote employees is the fact that you can track office workers in stealth mode. This means that they won’t be able to see Insightful on their computer, therefore they won’t be able to interact with it in any way.

If you decide to make Insightful visible, it will still automatically turn on, but with this option you can let employees track time on projects and tasks.

Based on which option you chose, other features may or may not be available.

Attendance Tracking

Besides acting like an employee monitoring and time tracking software, Insightful serves as an attendance tracker. The software can automatically track clock-ins/outs based on computer activity logs, or you can select the Manual Attendance option, in which case your employees will need to click a clock in/out button.

Task Tracking

If you allow Insightful to track time on tasks, employees will need to click the start/stop button when switching between tasks. On the other hand, if you don’t want to track tasks separately, Insightful will work all the time and measure time at work as well as time spent on different websites and applications.

Screenshots per Hour

Screenshot feature is optional, and here you can set up the frequency per hour (maximum number of screenshots per hour is 30). Screenshots are taken at random times, so your employees aren’t able to trick them. You can also trigger manual screenshots from your dashboard.

Break Time

If you want to track how much time your employees spend on their regular breaks you can set it up here. In case that the breaks aren’t limited, you should choose the No Break Time option.

When employees click on the Start Break button, their computer activities won’t be tracked anymore.

Add Employees

The next step is installation. On this step, you can download an installation file for Windows or macOS. You can use an active directory to install Insightful on everyone’s computer at once.

Otherwise, you can just share the installation file with everyone in the office so they can install the tracker themselves.

Insightful must be installed on at least one computer in order for you to access the dashboard, so make sure you complete the installation.

Dashboard

When you log into the dashboard, you’ll be able to switch between pages in the menu and analyze different segments of tracking.

The first tab you can see is Real-Time Tracking. There you’ll have a list of all employees, when they clocked in/out, which app they’re currently using and on which task they’re working (in case of Time Tracking plan). Additionally, if you got the add-on for Manual Screenshots, you’ll have an option to trigger them. You can also see if your employees are on break, or inactive.

In the Screenshots tab you can see screenshots from all your employees, or filter them based on teams, projects or tasks. You can open each screenshot separately, and erase them if you wish. Additionally, if your employees use multiple screens at work, Insightful will capture all of them at the same time.

In the Employees tab you can see all employees who have Insightful on their computers, along with deactivated accounts. You can select which information you want to see (office time, computer activities, productive, unproductive, neutral, idle and break time; as well as productivity percentage).

In the top right corner of every page you’ll be able to see a button called Review Usage. When you click on it Insightful will present you with a list of apps and websites your employees have used, but you haven’t labeled yet. You’ll then be able to select whether these are productive, unproductive or neutral. Also, if your employees are visiting many websites throughout the day, you’ll be happy to know that Insightful automatically categorizes them into topically related groups (educational, entertainment, social media, etc.), making labeling simpler.

It’s also a place where you can edit employees settings, change their teams, etc.

What is more, you can open each employee separately and see their individual productivity data, timesheets, screenshots, timelines, as well as most used apps and websites.

The Timeline gives you a visual representation of how your employees spent their working hours. Purple sections show you active time, Gray areas represent manual time your employees added (usually added for meetings and other activities that are performed away from the computer), and there are blank spaces which represent idle time.

If you’re using a Time Tracking plan, you can track projects within the Projects Tracking tab. Here you’ll have an overview of all projects, you can change their bill rates, assign new employees, etc.

Additionally, you can see every project separately in a Kanban board. All details including the cost, payment, time, screenshots, and others can be seen in this tab.

You can use the Team tab to edit, create or erase teams, as well as to check data for each one of them.

Another useful feature for office teams is Time and Attendance. Within this tab you can see when each of your employees clocked in/out, how active they were during the day, etc. These can be exported as CSV, so you can share them with Accounting teams which handle payments. Insightful tracks how long your employees have been in the office (based on clock-ins/outs), as well as how much time they’ve spent actively working on their computers (Computer Activities time). If an employee doesn’t have any keyboard or mouse activities for 2 minutes (default setting that can be customized) Insightful will consider them as idle.

In the end, you can jump to the Apps and Websites tab to check which apps and sites your employees are using most often. It’s a great feature to establish if you have hidden costs on software licences, but also to see how productive your employees really are.

Tracking Settings

You can either create Shared Settings, and apply them to multiple employees (by default the settings will be automatically applied based on whether employees use Company or Personal computers), or create different settings for each employee.

In this section we’ll go through all options and give you a bit more details about them.

Here, you’ll be able to see some of the same options you saw during the onboarding: App Visibility, Screenshot Frequency, Break Time, etc. However, you can choose if you want to give your employees access to screenshots, and whether or not they’ll be able to erase them.

Insightful has 5 different tracking scenarios:

• Unlimited - Tracker works whenever the computer is on, on the days you select;
• Fixed - Define working hours and days during which Insightful will work;
• Automatic - Tracker works when employees are connected to office networks;
• Manual - Insightful will track activities only when employees manually clock in;
• Project Based - Tracker will work only when employees are tracking time on projects.

If you’ve selected Visible mode for Insightful, you’ll also have an option to create different permissions for employees:

• Choose whether employees can access their own data;
• If they can see used apps and websites; and
• If they can add offline time.

There are also settings related to tasks, so you can choose if they can track time on tasks, add new tasks, and analyze activities performed during those tasks.

Wrap Up

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As good as it can serve as a remote team management tool, Insightful has shown that it is an essential part of every office team. 

Our time tracking and employee monitoring capabilities have helped teams improve productivity, increase attendance accuracy, and optimize business processes.

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Check out our other posts to find out how to track employees working from home.

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This article was originally written on 16th May, 2015 by Marija Grgur. It was updated on 25th February, 2020 by Bojana Djordjevic.