With the rise of internet work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, our concept of a traditional workplace can differ from the rooms full of 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 traditional, remote, or even completely online workplaces.
An employee tracking 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 can also be used to handle any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Academy
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 often, a few swipes on any social media 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 is helpful if managers 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 pay attention to the sites (and even the url of the exact 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 them can also be listed.
The data is displayed neatly, and managers can see the page name 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 websites 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’s impossible to handle employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature that can enable managers to take screenshots of the employees’ screens at a customizable time interval, with 10 minutes as the default. 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 workers are working on their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It must be noted that workers would understand that this feature is activated on their screens. Employees would also be able 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 behaviour of employees as knowing that their screens 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 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 good sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% can 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 shows the productivity rate of each member of the group. This way, the tool can 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 Hubstaff Academy
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries such as Japan where it is an unofficial standard. Reasons can range from employees wanting to complete their tasks early, catch up on jobs, and some are just workaholics who want to be running as much as you can.
However, it’s been demonstrated that too much work could be detrimental as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if employees are working a lot of hours each week. They could set the maximum time every 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 suppressed, and that workers will not be given the incentive to put in a lot of time to work and sacrifice rest and personal time.
Monitor the Location of Workers
Managers working with remote teams might find it tough to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees may be jumping 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 1 place to another, or if they are 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, 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 requires employees to install HubStaff on their phones, this can be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. But same as the principles on iOS and Android applications, employees will know exactly when their places are being tracked.
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 each job on a weekly basis. On the team dashboard, managers can see each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of the completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also displays whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Academy
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 conventional 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 machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, keeping a list of working hours and salaries 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 simple. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Job Tracking for Customers Hubstaff Academy
Becoming transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with customers, in addition to assure them that things are going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it simple for clients to have a peek into the progress of jobs. 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 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 might be wondering if using HubStaff to manage employees can be counterproductive as it may make a feeling of distrust between managers and team members. To ease your mind, you can be sure that HubStaff lets the whole team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can be sure that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they’re being monitored.
However, as a business owner or manager, it’s your responsibility 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 and not a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the cases of their keystrokes and mouse activity are recorded, rather than 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 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 features associated with payroll management. The enterprise feature comprises fleet monitoring 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 Hubstaff Academy
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 intuitive and clean, and is not in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees not familiar with the software.
However, it must be stated that not all businesses 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 lot of reading for instance, 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 determine whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is merely a project management software with features and tools that can allow you to gauge the performance of workers and other members of the team. This is certainly not 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 Hubstaff Academy
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 who can use HubStaff?
A: The paid programs have a minimum of 2 users and limit of 350 users.
Q: Why is implementing HubStaff in businesses completely legal?
A: HubStaff has complete legal permissions for use, and resources regarding them can be found on their website. However, these are just based on United States laws. It’s 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 monitoring ends.