With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, our concept of a traditional workplace can be different from the rooms filled with 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 track whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, as well as screen and look out for unwanted or illegal activity. Aside from monitoring behavior, it can also be used to handle any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff How Does Hubstaff Measure Activity
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 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 track if employees use an excessive amount of social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can pay attention to the websites (and even the url of the exact page) that workers see 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 is also recorded.
The data is displayed neatly, and supervisors can see the page title of the visited pages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also go to the links displayed to verify if workers really are allowing 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 very awkward if done personally. But then, it’s crucial for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it is 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 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 workers are working on their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential sensitive information.
It should 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 displays just so that they’ll be ensured that this feature is implemented just for reasons related to work.
With that said, this still has an effect on the behaviour 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 measure of employee 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 overall 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 an employee 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 every member of the group. In this way, the tool may 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 How Does Hubstaff Measure Activity
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries such as Japan where it’s an unofficial standard. Reasons can vary from employees wanting to complete their jobs early, catch up on jobs, and some are just workaholics who want to be running as much as you can.
However, it has been demonstrated that too much work can be harmful as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there’s a standard 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track if employees are working a lot of hours each week. They could set the maximum time each week that employees can remain logged on for work. Following 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 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 smartphones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be used. With this, managers 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 too 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 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 see each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of their completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also displays whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features How Does Hubstaff Measure Activity
Aside from 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 companies. And, better than traditional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can record the first keyboard stroke or mouse activity of the day for each employee.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, keeping a list of working hours and wages is also made simpler. 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 easy. Cash transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Project Tracking for Customers How Does Hubstaff Measure Activity
Being transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it effortless 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 done by adding 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 nicely with other project monitoring tools such as but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is good news for business owners who 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 may make an atmosphere 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 make certain that their actions are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they are being tracked.
However, as a business owner or manager, it’s your duty to let your workers know beforehand that your office 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 monitoring system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a tracking system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the instances of their keystrokes and mouse activity are recorded, and not the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff will not 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.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes related to payroll administration. The enterprise feature comprises 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 their paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict How Does Hubstaff Measure Activity
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 do the job that it claims to do. The user interface is clean and intuitive, and is not at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees not knowledgeable about the software.
However, it must be said that not all businesses might benefit fully from utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is specially suited to modern desk jobs, and for projects where team members use computers for the majority of their time. Take jobs that require 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 at the top of a reading assignment in reality
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 using tools and features 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 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 How Does Hubstaff Measure Activity
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 who can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of 2 users and limit of 350 users.
Q: Why is implementing HubStaff in companies completely legal?
A: HubStaff has complete legal permissions for use, and resources regarding them can be found on their website. However, these are only based on United States laws. It is 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 finish HubStaff tracking and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once tracking ends.