With the rise of internet work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our notion of a traditional workplace can differ from the rooms full of individual cubicles that we were used to. HubStaff, a software from a firm of the same name established in the United States, offers its services for conventional, distant, or even entirely online offices.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their responsibilities, as well as screen and be aware of unwanted or illegal activity. Aside from monitoring behavior, it may also be used to handle any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff How to Start Hubstaff
HubStaff includes the features that you would expect from an employee monitoring software such as:
Online Activity Monitoring:
We all know full well that social media kills productivity. All too often, a few swipes on any social networking app will wind up consuming hours of our time, even in the workplace. Checking up on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it’s helpful if supervisors know when it’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if workers use too much social media and other applications that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can take note of the websites (and even the url of the specific page) that workers visit during work hours, as well as the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications can also be monitored and the time spent on them is also listed.
The information is displayed neatly, and supervisors can see the page title of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in a single glance. They can also visit the links displayed to confirm if workers really are letting time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Screen Monitoring
Tracking individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be very awkward if done personally. But then, it’s crucial for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it’s impossible to handle employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature that can enable managers to take screenshots of the employees’ screens at a customizable time period, with 10 minutes as the default. If it sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it could be set to have the screenshots be partly blurred. In this way, managers can determine if employees are working on their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It should be noted that employees would know that this feature is activated on their screens. Employees would also have the ability to view the screenshots taken from their displays just so that they’ll be ensured that this feature is implemented just for reasons related to work.
With that said, this still has an effect on the behavior of employees as knowing that their displays are monitored is enough of a reason for them to execute their tasks.
Monitor Activity on Computer Peripheral Devices
In standard office setups, the sound of keyboard strokes and mouse clicks can be enough of a step of worker activity. HubStaff can detect keyboard strokes and mouse interaction and discover times of inactivity where none of those instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the overall time where the mouse or keyboard is busy to the overall time spent working. HubStaff believes a productivity rate of at least 60% as a great sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% can indicate that a worker is taking too much time on the desk doing nothing, or if an employee is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool displays the productivity rate of every member of the team. In this way, the tool may also be used to see how many members of this team are working on a project at a given time.
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Work Limit Monitoring How to Start Hubstaff
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries like Japan where it is an unofficial standard. Reasons can vary from employees wanting to finish their jobs early, catch up on projects, and some are just workaholics who wish to be working as much as you can.
However, it has been proven that too much work can be harmful as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There’s a great reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track if workers are working a lot of hours per week. They can set the maximum time every week that workers can remain logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time monitoring tool stops. This way, workaholic tendencies are curbed, and that workers will not be given the incentive to put in a lot of time to work and sacrifice rest and personal time.
Monitor the Location of Employees
Managers working with remote teams may find it tough to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees might be jumping from place to place for work, and even be working from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be difficult if employees are commuting from 1 place to another, or if they are doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff in their smartphones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be used. With this, managers and team leaders can track the location of their members during work hours.
HubStaff can display how much time employees spend on commuting between places and how much time is spent on each location. From these data, managers can determine the best time to do rapid meetings.
As this requires employees to install HubStaff on their phones, this may be seen as too intrusive of a tool. But same as the principles on iOS and Android applications, employees will know exactly when their places are being tracked.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the whole team report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to provide a report on the status of each project on a weekly basis. On the staff dashboard, managers can view each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of their completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also shows whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features How to Start Hubstaff
Besides tracking employee productivity, HubStaff can also make it easier for managers and admins to handle payrolls and manage accounts.
Timesheet and Payroll Management
HubStaff can function as a digital check-in and check-out mechanism for companies. And, better than conventional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can record the first keyboard stroke or mouse action of the day for each employee.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, keeping a record of working hours and salaries is also made simpler. HubStaff’s payroll managing tool can determine each employee’s payout depending on the hours logged for them. By linking their paypal accounts with HubStaff, then payment transfers are made easy. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set interval.
Project Tracking for Clients How to Start Hubstaff
Being transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with customers, in addition to assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to have a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply done by including clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the phases of the project, in addition to the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely with other project monitoring tools including but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is great news for business owners who are already using other project management software.
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Employee Spying?
You might be wondering if using HubStaff to manage employees can be counterproductive since it might make a feeling of distrust between managers and team members. To ease your mind, you can be certain that HubStaff lets the entire team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can be sure that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they are being monitored.
However, as a business owner or manager, it is your duty to let your workers know beforehand that your workplace will be implementing HubStaff. Also, HubStaff should only be installed on the devices necessary for work where it would make sense to have implement a monitoring system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a tracking system and not a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the cases of their keystrokes and mouse actions are listed, rather than the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff will not let managers and admins know what exactly their workers are typing.
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Pricing
HubStaff has three paid programs that charge a fixed price per user per month. The Basic plan costs $10, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost $10 and $20 respectively.
Just the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes associated with payroll administration. The enterprise feature includes fleet monitoring and even a concierge accounts.
For those who are ready to pay on an annual basis, then the price per person per month of their paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict How to Start Hubstaff
It’s important to find the right software for your business since this will allow you to, in a way, outsource some of your tasks to the specific software.
You can be sure that HubStaff can flawlessly do the job that it promises to do. The user interface is clean and intuitive, and isn’t in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees not familiar with the software.
However, it has to be said that not all companies might benefit fully from utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is especially suited to contemporary desk tasks, and for projects where staff members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that take a whole lot of reading for instance, where employees might seem to be inactive based on computer interaction. The software might say that they are inactive, but they just might be at the top of a reading assignment in reality
Business owners should also not completely rely on the information that HubStaff collects to ascertain whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is merely a project management software using features and tools that can allow you to gauge the performance of employees and other members of the group. This is certainly not a virtual or artificial intelligence office manager.
All the same, HubStaff collects data seamlessly, and we all know that data helps you run your business effectively.
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FAQ How to Start Hubstaff
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff stores the screenshots and other data using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of team members that may use HubStaff?
A: The paid programs have a minimum of two users and limit of 350 users.
Q: Is implementing HubStaff in businesses completely legal?
A: HubStaff has complete legal permissions for use, and resources regarding them are available on their site. But these are just based on United States laws. It is wise to consult with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they’re being tracked?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and finish HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once monitoring ends.