With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our notion 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 based in the United States, offers its services for traditional, remote, or even completely online offices.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, as well as screen and look out for unwanted or prohibited activity. Apart from monitoring behaviour, it can also be used to manage any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Blog Posts
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 will wind up consuming hours of our time, even at work. Checking up on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it’s helpful if supervisors know when it’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help monitor if workers use too much social media and other applications that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can pay attention to the sites (and even the url of the exact page) that workers visit during work hours, as well as the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications can also be tracked and the time spent on these can also be recorded.
The information 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 go to the links displayed to verify if workers really are letting time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Screen Monitoring
Monitoring individual screens 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 could enable managers to take screenshots of the employees’ screens at a customizable time interval, with 10 minutes as the default. If it 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 rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It must be noted that employees would understand that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also have the ability to view the screenshots taken from their displays just so they’ll be ensured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
That said, this still has an influence on the behaviour of employees as knowing that their displays are monitored 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 step of employee 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 active to the overall time spent working. HubStaff considers 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 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 Hubstaff Blog Posts
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 finish their jobs 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 can be harmful 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 employees are working too much hours each week. They could set the maximum time each week that 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 curbed, and that employees 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 Employees
Managers working with remote teams might find it hard to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees might be leaping from place to place for work, and even be working from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be hard if employees are commuting from one place to another, or if they’re doing field work.
Members of the group can install HubStaff on their smartphones so that the employee location 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 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 in their phones, this may be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. However, same as the rules 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 each job on a weekly basis. On the staff 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 Hubstaff Blog Posts
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 function as 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 very first keyboard stroke or mouse activity of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a record 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 period.
Job Tracking for Clients Hubstaff Blog Posts
Becoming 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 going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to take a peek into the progress of projects. 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 monitoring tools such as but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is great news for business owners that 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 might make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and staff members. To ease your mind, you can be sure that HubStaff lets the entire team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can make certain that their actions 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 tracking system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a tracking system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the cases of their keystrokes and mouse activity are listed, 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.
Just the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes related to payroll administration. The enterprise feature comprises fleet monitoring and even a concierge account.
For those 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 Hubstaff Blog Posts
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 claims to do. The user interface is intuitive and clean, and is not at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees not knowledgeable about the software.
However, it has to be stated 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 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 information that HubStaff collects to ascertain if their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply a project management software with tools and features that will help you gauge the performance of workers and other members of the group. 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 Blog Posts
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 may use HubStaff?
A: The paid programs have a minimum of two users and limit 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. 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 monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once monitoring ends.