Inside Hubstaff Insights: How to Turn Time Tracking Data Into Coaching Moments

Measuring productivity is straightforward when your whole team works in one office and you see them every day. Global and remote teams have to piece it together from a distance.

We hosted a webinar to show how Hubstaff Insights helps managers put that picture together.

Aubrey Nekvinda and Cody Rogers, Hubstaff’s Product Marketing Manager and Chief Product Officer moderated. Presenting were Lucas Mocellin, Senior Product Manager for Insights, and Gabriel Ayala, a Customer Success Manager who worked with Hubstaff customers daily.

You can watch the full recording below or read on for the key takeaways.

Productivity is a puzzle with a lot of pieces

We opened with a poll on which Hubstaff metrics attendees use to gauge productivity. Activity percentage led the pack, followed by hours worked, screenshots, and idle time, with meeting time landing at the bottom of the list.

Cody’s framing: understanding productivity means assembling a puzzle. Some pieces are metrics that Hubstaff records directly:

• Time-based signals. Hours worked, focus time, meeting time, and idle time, plus billable versus non-billable breakdowns.
• Proof of work. Apps and URLs, screenshots, and activity levels that show whether time went where it was supposed to.

Other pieces live outside the platform, like submitted pull requests, closed support tickets, closed sales, and whether the client is happy with the work. Cody’s warning was to keep a high-level view across all of them, because overoptimizing any single metric is dangerous.

The case for tracking the early indicators comes down to speed. Teams without a tool like Hubstaff often discover work is late or below standard only after the deadline passes, while signals like activity and focus time surface within days.

Inside the Insights performance dashboard

About half of the attendees used Hubstaff Insights already, so Lucas structured his demo around three ways it turns raw time tracking into coaching opportunities. He started with the performance page, a single-glance view built from customizable widgets:

• Utilization. Answers the simplest question first: how much has the team worked compared to its target? In the demo, a customer success team with a daily target of 7 hours and 12 minutes sat right on it.
• Work time classification. Slices tracked time into core (value-creating work), non-core (necessary overhead like Slack), and unproductive time, then benchmarks your share of core work against your company average, peers, and industry standards.
• Daily focus and activity rate. Focus measures deep work on a single task or project, while activity tracks keyboard and mouse movement to round out the picture.

The classification settings drew the most questions from the chat, and the answer is that everything adapts to job type. Instagram counts as unproductive for most roles and core work for a social media manager, and a batch importer assigns job types in bulk for large teams.

The demo’s customer success team showed low daily focus alongside a high activity rate, which fits a role built on jumping between customers rather than long heads-down stretches.

Lucas closed the dashboard tour with the leaderboard, the widget managers love most. It breaks time spent, activity rate, and work classification down to the individual level. Sort any column to surface top performers and the people who deserve more attention.

What unusual activity flags actually mean

The unusual activity page flags work patterns that deviate from millions of anonymized user hours across Hubstaff. In the demo week, that meant three members, five instances, and around 16 hours of potential time wasted.

Lucas leaned hard on the word “potential”. “Unusual activity is a signal, not a judgment,” he said, and different roles behave differently, so the manager makes the call on whether a flag applies in context.

Each instance gets a confidence grade from slightly unusual to highly unusual, where high means a pattern rare enough to warrant a closer look. His example: a team member logged 6 hours and 20 minutes with two uninterrupted blocks where activity never dipped below 30%.

A stretch like that has several possible explanations. It could be heroic focus on deep work, a timer someone forgot to stop, or in the worst case, an app faking activity.

Either way, it might be a coaching moment. Lucas’s advice is to jump into the instance, check the screenshots from that window, and confirm the full context before starting any conversation.

Used this way, the page helps managers spot burnout, mislogged hours, and process gaps early.

Smart notifications put your dashboards on autopilot

Everything so far requires you to go looking for red and yellow flags. Smart notifications push those insights to you instead, so problems surface without anyone checking a dashboard.

Only about a third of attendees use the feature so far, and Lucas called it a must-have for anyone already on Insights. His demo built an alert from a template in under 30 seconds:

• Pick the trigger. The “members with low core work” template fires whenever core work drops below 25%, and the threshold is adjustable.
• Set the frequency. Lucas switched the default weekly check to daily, because faster alerts mean faster coaching.
• Choose who’s covered and how you’re notified. He scoped the rule to one team and routed the alert to his own email.

You can stack as many rules as you need, covering overworking, underworking, unproductive time, or even specific URLs you want to monitor.

How My Biz Niche uses Insights to prevent burnout

Gabriel brought the features to life with a customer story. My Biz Niche is a full-service digital agency out of Arizona with teams around the globe, and they’ve been a Hubstaff customer since 2014.

Before Hubstaff, managers there spent hours on manual admin: checking timesheets and reviewing productivity member by member across spreadsheets. Operations manager Lauren Klesser shared what changed:

• Internal processes streamlined by 25%. Hubstaff cut the manual work down by roughly 10 to 15 hours, and the time off approval system streamlined requesting and approving leave.
• Managers refocused on people. With the admin automated, managers spent their time on team well-being instead, which boosted client satisfaction.
• Workload allocation became visible. “We use Insights to ensure workloads are balanced across the team, preventing burnout,” Lauren said.

In practice, that means a daily smart notification flagging anyone averaging below 20% activity, a threshold Gabriel noted is genuinely low for Hubstaff users. From there, managers check the screenshots and app and URL usage to work out whether someone is burnt out or just needs to pick up their productivity.

From the Q&A: Benchmarks, targets, and mobile tracking

The chat stayed busy throughout, and a few questions came up often enough to answer for everyone:

Where do industry benchmarks live?

At the bottom of each Insights widget, it shows where your company and industry fall for that metric.

Can you change daily work targets?

Yes, the utilization widget’s targets are adjustable, along with the metrics behind smart notifications and the job types behind work classification.

What about people working on phones?

The Hubstaff mobile app tracks time and location and works well for field teams. Phone operating systems don’t allow app usage tracking or screenshots, so those stay desktop-only.

Ready to see your team’s productivity clearly?

No single metric tells you how productive a global team is, and the value of Insights is pulling the pieces together fast enough to act on them.

Want a walkthrough of Insights matched to your team? Book a demo, and we’ll show you how it fits your setup.