With the rise of online 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 full of 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, distant, or even entirely online workplaces.
An employee monitoring 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 illegal activity. Aside from monitoring behaviour, it can also be used to manage any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff App Review
HubStaff includes the features that you would expect from an employee tracking 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 networking app is going to end 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 is becoming a problem. HubStaff can help monitor if workers 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, as well as the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications can 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 pages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also go to the links displayed to verify if employees really are letting 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 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 their 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 partially blurred. In this way, managers can determine if employees are working on their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential sensitive information.
It should be noted that employees would understand 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 ensured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
That said, this still has an effect 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 employee activity. HubStaff can detect keyboard strokes and mouse interaction and detect times of inactivity where none of those instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the total time where the mouse or keyboard is active to the overall time spent working. HubStaff believes a productivity rate of at least 60% as a good sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% may indicate that a worker is taking too much time on the desk doing nothing, or if a worker is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool displays the productivity rate of each member of the team. In this way, the tool can also be used to see how many members of the team are working on a project at a given time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Hubstaff App Review
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 only workaholics who wish 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 great reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track if workers are working a lot of hours per week. They can set the maximum time every week that workers can remain logged on for work. Following the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. This way, workaholic tendencies are curbed, and that employees won’t 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 hard 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 employees are commuting from 1 place to another, or if they are 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, managers and team leaders can track 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. But same as the principles on iOS and Android applications, employees will know precisely when their locations are being tracked.
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 each project 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 displays whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff App Review
Aside from monitoring 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 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 employee.
Managers can also pause the machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, keeping a list of working hours and wages is also made simpler. HubStaff’s payroll managing 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. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set interval.
Job Tracking for Clients Hubstaff App Review
Being transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with customers, as well as assure them that things are going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to have a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply done by adding clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the stages of the project, as well as 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 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 since it might make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and staff members. To ease your mind, you can be certain 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 company owner or manager, it’s your duty to let your employees 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 tracking system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a monitoring system rather than 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 just what 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 $7, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost $10 and $20 respectively.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes associated with payroll administration. The enterprise feature comprises fleet tracking and even a concierge account.
For those who are ready 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 App Review
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 isn’t in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers 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 contemporary desk jobs, and for projects where staff members use computers for the majority of their time. Take jobs that require a whole 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 fact
Business owners should also not completely rely on the data that HubStaff collects to determine if their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is merely a project management software using features and tools that can allow you to gauge the performance of employees and other members of the team. 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 Hubstaff App Review
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff shops the screenshots and other data using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of team members who can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of two 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 can be found on their website. 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 monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once tracking ends.