With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our notion of a conventional workplace can differ from the rooms full of individual cubicles that we were used to. HubStaff, a software from a company of the same name based in the United States, offers its services for traditional, remote, or even completely online offices.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, in addition to screen and look out for unwanted or prohibited 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 Hubstaff Freshdesk
HubStaff includes the features that you would expect from an employee tracking software such as:
Online Activity Monitoring:
All of us know full well that social media kills productivity. All too frequently, a few swipes on any social media app is going to end 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 employees use an excessive amount of 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 see during work hours, in addition to the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be monitored and the time spent on them is also listed.
The information is displayed neatly, and managers can see the page title of the visited pages, the url, and the time spent, all in a single glance. They can also visit the links displayed to confirm if workers really are allowing time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Tracking individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be quite awkward if done personally. But then, it’s necessary for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it’s impossible to manage employees in person.
HubStaff has a quality that can enable managers to take screenshots of the employees’ screens at a customizable time period, with 10 minutes as the default. If this sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it could be set to have the screenshots be partially blurred. This way, managers can determine if workers are working on their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential sensitive information.
It should be noted that employees would understand that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also be able to view the screenshots taken from their displays just so they’ll be ensured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
With that said, this still has an influence on the behavior of employees as knowing that their screens 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 employee activity. HubStaff can detect keyboard strokes and mouse interaction and detect times of inactivity where none of these instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the total time where the mouse or keyboard is active to the total 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 an employee is taking too much time on the desk doing nothing, or if a worker is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool shows the productivity rate of every member of the team. This way, the tool can 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 Hubstaff Freshdesk
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries such as Japan where it is an unofficial standard. Reasons can vary from employees wanting to finish their jobs early, catch up on jobs, and some are only workaholics who wish to be running as much as possible.
However, it has been demonstrated that too much work could be detrimental as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There is a good reason why there is a standard 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track if workers are working too much hours per week. They can set the maximum time every week which workers can remain logged on for work. Following the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. In this manner, workaholic tendencies are suppressed, and that employees will not be given the incentive to put in too much time to work and sacrifice rest and personal time.
Monitor the Location of Employees
Managers working with remote teams might find it tough to communicate and organize 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 hard if workers are commuting from one place to another, or if they’re doing field work.
Members of the group can install HubStaff on their smartphones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be utilized. With this, supervisors and team leaders can monitor the location of their members during work hours.
HubStaff can display how much time employees spend on commuting between locations and how much time is spent on each location. From these data, managers can determine the best time to do quick meetings.
As this requires employees to install HubStaff on their phones, this can be seen as too intrusive of a tool. But same as the rules on iOS and Android programs, employees will know precisely when their places are being monitored.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the entire team report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to provide a report on the status of each job on a weekly basis. On the team dashboard, managers can view each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of their completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also shows whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Freshdesk
Besides tracking employee productivity, HubStaff can also make it easier for managers and admins to manage 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 traditional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can record the very first keyboard stroke or mouse activity of the day for each employee.
Managers can also pause the machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a list of working hours and wages is also made simpler. HubStaff’s payroll managing tool can determine each employee’s payout based on the hours logged for them. By linking their paypal accounts with HubStaff, then payment transfers are made simple. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set interval.
Project Tracking for Clients Hubstaff Freshdesk
Being transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with clients, as well as assure them that things are going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to have a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply accomplished by including clients into the members tab. From there, they could see the stages of the project, in addition to the completed and pending tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate well with other project tracking tools including but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is great news for business owners who are already using other project management applications.
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Employee Spying?
You may be asking yourself if using HubStaff to handle employees can be counterproductive since it may make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and staff members. To ease your mind, you can be sure that HubStaff lets the whole team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can be sure that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and precisely how they are being monitored.
However, as a company owner or manager, it is your duty to let your employees 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 tracking system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a tracking system and not a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the instances of their keystrokes and mouse activity are listed, rather than the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff won’t 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 features related to payroll administration. The enterprise feature includes fleet monitoring and even a concierge account.
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 Hubstaff Freshdesk
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 perform the job that it promises to do. The user interface is clean and intuitive, and is not in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers not knowledgeable about the software.
However, it has to be said that not all companies might benefit fully from using HubStaff. HubStaff is specially suited to contemporary desk jobs, and for projects where team members use computers for the majority of their time. Take jobs that take a lot of reading for example, 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 fact
Business owners should also not completely depend on the data that HubStaff collects to determine whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is merely a project management software using features and tools that will allow you to gauge the performance of employees and other members of the team. This is in no way a virtual or artificial intelligence workplace 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 Hubstaff Freshdesk
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff stores the screenshots and other information using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of team members who 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 only based on United States laws. It’s best to check with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are being tracked?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff tracking and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once tracking ends.