With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our concept of a traditional workplace can differ from the rooms filled with individual cubicles that we were used to. HubStaff, a software from a company of the same name established in the United States, offers its services for conventional, remote, or even entirely 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 be aware of unwanted or prohibited activity. Apart from monitoring behaviour, it may also be used to handle any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Features of 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 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 is helpful if managers know when it’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if employees use an excessive amount of social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can pay attention to the sites (and even the url of the exact page) that employees see during work hours, in addition to the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be tracked and the time spent on them can also be recorded.
The data is displayed neatly, and managers can see the page title of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also visit the links displayed to verify if employees really are letting time slide on sites 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 interval, 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 partially blurred. In this way, managers can determine if workers are working in their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential sensitive information.
It must be noted that employees would know that this feature is activated on their displays. 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.
That said, this still has an effect on the behaviour 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 found.
HubStaff can then compare the total time in which the mouse or keyboard is busy 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% may 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 each member of the team. 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 Features of Hubstaff
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, 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 projects, and some are just workaholics who want to be running 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’s a regular 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if employees are working too much hours per 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 monitoring tool stops. This way, workaholic tendencies are suppressed, and that employees won’t be given the incentive to put in too much time to work and sacrifice personal and rest time.
Monitor the Location of Workers
Managers working with remote teams might find it tough to communicate and organize the team. Some employees may be jumping from place to place for work, and also be working from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be difficult if workers are commuting from 1 place to another, or if they’re doing field work.
Members of the group 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 long 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. However, same as the principles on iOS and Android programs, employees will know exactly when their places are being monitored.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the whole team report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to offer 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 the completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also shows whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Features of Hubstaff
Aside from monitoring 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 businesses. 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, maintaining a record of working hours and wages is also made simpler. 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 easy. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Project Tracking for Customers Features of Hubstaff
Becoming transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with clients, in addition to assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it simple 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 can see the phases of the project, as well as the completed and pending tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely with other project tracking tools including but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is good news for business owners that 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 may make a feeling 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 make certain that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they are being tracked.
However, as a company owner or manager, it is your responsibility to let your workers know beforehand that your workplace will be implementing HubStaff. Additionally, 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 rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the instances of the keystrokes and mouse activity are recorded, 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 plans 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.
Just the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes related to payroll administration. The enterprise feature includes fleet tracking and even a concierge accounts.
For those people who are willing to pay on an annual basis, then the price per person per month of the paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Features 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 sure that HubStaff can flawlessly perform the job that it promises to do. The user interface is clean and intuitive, and is not at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees not familiar with the software.
However, it must be said that not all companies might benefit fully from utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is especially suited to modern 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 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 depend on the information that HubStaff collects to ascertain whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is merely a project management software with tools and features that can help you gauge the performance of employees and other members of the group. This is in no way 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 Features 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 can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of 2 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 site. But these are only based on United States laws. It’s best to consult with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are 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 tracking ends.