With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, our notion of a conventional workplace can be different from the rooms filled with 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 completely online offices.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their responsibilities, in addition to screen and be aware of unwanted or illegal activity. Apart from monitoring behavior, it may also be used to handle any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Activtrak Vs Hubstaff
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 often, a few swipes on any social media app will end up consuming hours of our time, even in the workplace. Assessing 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 monitor if employees use too much social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can take note of the websites (and even the url of the exact 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 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 letting time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Screen Monitoring
Tracking individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be quite awkward if done personally. But then, it is necessary for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it’s impossible to manage employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature that could enable managers to take screenshots of the employees’ screens at a customizable time period, with 10 minutes as the default option. If this sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it could be set to have the screenshots be partly blurred. This way, managers can determine if employees are working on their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential sensitive information.
It should be noted that workers would understand that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also be able to look at the screenshots taken from their displays just so they’ll be ensured that this feature is implemented just for reasons related to work.
That said, this still has an effect on the behavior of employees as knowing that their displays are tracked is enough of a reason for them to perform 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 found.
HubStaff can then compare the total time where the mouse or keyboard is busy to the overall time spent working. HubStaff considers a productivity rate of at least 60% as a good sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% can mean that a worker is taking too much time on the desk doing nothing, or if a worker is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool displays the productivity rate of each member of the team. This way, the tool can also be used to see how many members of the team are working on a project at a specified time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Activtrak Vs Hubstaff
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries like Japan where it’s an unofficial standard. Reasons can vary from employees wanting to finish their tasks early, catch up on jobs, and some are only workaholics who wish to be working as much as you can.
However, it has been proven that too much work could be detrimental as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There is a good reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if workers are working a lot of hours per week. They can set the maximum time each week which workers can stay logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. This way, workaholic tendencies are suppressed, and that workers will not be given the incentive to put in a lot of time to work and sacrifice personal and rest time.
Monitor the Location of Employees
Managers working with remote teams may find it tough to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees may be leaping from place to place for work, and even be operating from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be hard if workers are commuting from one place to another, or if they are doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff in their smartphones so that the employee location monitoring feature can be used. With this, managers and team leaders can monitor 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 needs employees to install HubStaff on their phones, this may be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. But same as the rules on iOS and Android programs, employees will know exactly when their places are being monitored.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the entire group report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to provide a report on the status of every job on a weekly basis. On the staff dashboard, managers can see each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of the completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also shows whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Activtrak Vs 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 be a virtual check-in and check-out mechanism for businesses. And, better than conventional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can capture the first keyboard stroke or mouse activity of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a record of working hours and wages is also made easier. HubStaff’s citizenship handling 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. Cash transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Job Tracking for Clients Activtrak Vs Hubstaff
Becoming transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with customers, in addition to assure them that things are going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to have a peek into the progress of projects. This can be simply accomplished by adding clients into the members tab. From there, they could see the phases of the project, in addition to the completed and pending tasks.
Third party Applications Integration
HubStaff can integrate well with other project monitoring tools such as but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is great news for business owners that are already using other project management applications.
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Employee Spying?
You might be wondering if using HubStaff to handle employees can be counterproductive as it might make a feeling of distrust between managers and staff members. To ease your mind, you can be certain that HubStaff lets the whole team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can make certain that their actions are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they’re being tracked.
However, as a company owner or manager, it is your duty to let your employees know beforehand that your office 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 certain 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 just what 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 $7, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost $10 and $20 respectively.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock features associated with payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet monitoring and even a concierge account.
For those people 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 Activtrak Vs 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 perform the job that it promises to do. The user interface is intuitive and clean, and is not at all 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 utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is specially suited to modern desk tasks, and for projects where staff members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that require a whole 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 ascertain if their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is merely a project management software using tools and features that can allow you to gauge the performance of workers and other members of the group. This is certainly not 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 Activtrak Vs Hubstaff
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff shops the screenshots and other information using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of group members that may use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of two users and cap of 350 users.
Q: Is implementing HubStaff in companies completely legal?
A: HubStaff has complete legal permissions for use, and resources regarding them are available on their website. However, these are just based on United States laws. It’s wise to check 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 does not collect any data once tracking ends.