With the rise of internet work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our concept of a conventional workplace can differ 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 traditional, remote, or even completely online workplaces.
An employee monitoring software is used to track whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, as well as 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 Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff
HubStaff includes the features that you would expect from an employee monitoring 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 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 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 exact page) that employees visit during work hours, as well as the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be tracked and the time spent on these can also be listed.
The data is displayed neatly, and managers can see the page title of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in a single glance. They can also go to the links displayed to confirm if workers really are allowing time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Tracking individual screens is too much of a hassle and can be very 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 feature that could 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 partially 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 must be noted that workers would know that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also be able to view the screenshots taken from their screens just so that they’ll be assured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
That said, this still has an influence on the behaviour 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 measure of worker 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 total 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 an employee is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool shows the productivity rate of every member of the group. In this way, the tool may 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 Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries such as Japan where it’s an unofficial standard. Reasons can range from employees wanting to finish their jobs early, catch up on jobs, and some are only workaholics who want to be running as much as possible.
However, it has been demonstrated that too much work could be harmful as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there’s a regular 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track if workers are working too much hours each week. They could set the maximum time each week which workers can remain logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. In this manner, workaholic tendencies are curbed, and that workers won’t be given the incentive to put in too much time to work and sacrifice personal and rest time.
Monitor the Location of Employees
Managers working with remote teams may find it hard to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees might be leaping 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 1 place to another, or if they are doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff on their telephones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be utilized. With this, supervisors and team leaders can monitor the location of the 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 needs employees to install HubStaff in their phones, this may be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. However, 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 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 view each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of the completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also displays whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff
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 be a virtual check-in and check-out mechanism for businesses. And, better than traditional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can capture the first keyboard stroke or mouse action of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a record of working hours and salaries is also made easier. HubStaff’s citizenship handling 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 simple. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set interval.
Job Tracking for Clients Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff
Becoming transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with customers, as well as assure them that things are going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it simple for clients to take a peek into the progress of projects. This can be simply done by adding clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the stages 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 good news for business owners that 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 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 make certain that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and precisely how they’re being monitored.
However, as a business owner or manager, it is your responsibility 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 monitoring system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a tracking system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the cases of their keystrokes and mouse actions are listed, and not 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 plans 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.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes associated with payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet tracking 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 the paid plans will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Dave Nevogt of 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 certain that HubStaff can flawlessly perform the job that it promises to do. The user interface is intuitive and clean, and is not in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers not knowledgeable about the software.
However, it must be stated that not all companies might benefit fully from using HubStaff. HubStaff is specially suited to contemporary desk tasks, and for projects where team members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that take a lot of reading for instance, where employees might appear to be inactive based on computer interaction. The software might say that they are inactive, but they just might be on top of a reading assignment in reality
Business owners should also not completely rely on the information that HubStaff collects to ascertain if 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 group. 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 Dave Nevogt of Hubstaff
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff stores the screenshots and other information using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of group members that may use HubStaff?
A: The paid programs have a minimum of 2 users and cap of 350 users.
Q: Why 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 best to check with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they’re being monitored?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff tracking and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once tracking ends.