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 differ from the rooms filled with individual cubicles that we were used to. HubStaff, a software from a firm of the same name based in the United States, offers its services for traditional, remote, or even entirely online offices.
An employee tracking software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their responsibilities, in addition to screen and look out for unwanted or prohibited activity. Apart from monitoring behavior, it may also be used to manage any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Free Hubstaff Alternative
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 is going to wind 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 managers know when it’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help monitor if workers 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 specific page) that employees visit during work hours, in addition to the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be monitored and the time spent on these is also listed.
The data 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 go to the links displayed to confirm if employees really are letting time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Screen Monitoring
Monitoring individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be quite awkward if done personally. But then, it is crucial for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it is impossible to manage employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature that can enable managers to take screenshots of their 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 partly blurred. In this way, managers can determine if employees are working in their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It must be noted that workers 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 assured 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 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 measure of worker 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% may 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 each member of the group. This way, the tool may also be used to see how many members of this team are working on a project at a specified time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Free Hubstaff Alternative
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries like 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 only workaholics who want to be working as much as possible.
However, it’s been demonstrated that too much work could be harmful as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there is a standard 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if workers are working a lot of hours each 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 monitoring tool stops. In this manner, workaholic tendencies are suppressed, and that workers will not 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 tough to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees might be leaping from place to place for work, and also be operating from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be difficult 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 telephones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be used. With this, supervisors and team leaders can track the location of their 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. But same as the principles on iOS and Android programs, employees will know exactly when their locations are being monitored.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the entire team report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to offer a report on the status of every project 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 workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Free Hubstaff Alternative
Aside from 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 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 very 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 list of working hours and wages is also made easier. 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 Free Hubstaff Alternative
Being transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with clients, as well as 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 stages of the project, in addition to the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Applications Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely 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 software.
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Employee Spying?
You may be asking yourself 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 certain that HubStaff lets the entire team know of the whole monitoring system. Employees can be sure that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they’re being tracked.
However, as a company owner or manager, it’s 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 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 won’t let managers and admins know what exactly their employees 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 related to payroll administration. The enterprise feature includes fleet tracking and even a concierge account.
For those people who are willing to pay on an annual basis, then the cost per person per month of their paid plans will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Free Hubstaff Alternative
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 clean and intuitive, and is not in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees 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 jobs, and for projects where team members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that take a whole 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 fact
Business owners should also not completely depend on the information that HubStaff collects to determine 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 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 Free Hubstaff Alternative
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 that can use HubStaff?
A: The paid programs 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 can be found on their site. But these are only based on United States laws. It is wise to consult with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are being tracked?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once monitoring ends.