With the rise of internet 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, distant, or even completely online offices.
An employee monitoring 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 prohibited activity. Aside from monitoring behavior, it can also be used to manage any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Browser Extension
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 frequently, a few swipes on any social networking app will end up consuming hours of our time, even in the workplace. Checking up on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it’s helpful if supervisors know when it is becoming a problem. HubStaff can help monitor if employees use too much social media and other applications that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can pay attention to the websites (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 tracked and the time spent on these is also listed.
The information is displayed neatly, and supervisors can see the page title of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also visit the links displayed to verify if employees really are letting time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Screen Monitoring
Tracking individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be quite awkward if done personally. But then, it’s necessary 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 this sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it could be set to have the screenshots be partially blurred. This way, managers can determine if workers are working on their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential sensitive information.
It must be noted that workers would understand that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also be able to view the screenshots taken from their displays just so they’ll be assured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
With that said, this still has an effect 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 measure of employee 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 overall 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 great sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% may mean 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. In this way, the tool may 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 Browser Extension
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries such as 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 wish to be running as much as possible.
However, it’s been proven that too much work can be harmful as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if employees are working a lot of hours each week. They can set the maximum time every week that employees can stay logged on for work. Following the maximum time has been reached, then the time monitoring 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 rest and personal 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 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 are doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff on their telephones so that the employee location monitoring feature can be utilized. With this, managers 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 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 can be seen as too intrusive of a tool. However, same as the rules on iOS and Android applications, employees will know precisely when their places are being monitored.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the entire group report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to offer a report on the status of every job on a weekly basis. On the team dashboard, managers can view each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of their completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also displays whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Browser Extension
Besides monitoring 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 digital 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 very first keyboard stroke or mouse activity of the day for each worker.
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 based 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 Customers Hubstaff Browser Extension
Becoming transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with customers, as well as assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to take a peek into the progress of projects. This can be simply done by adding clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the phases of the project, as well as the pending and completed 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 great news for business owners that 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 as it might make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and team members. To ease your mind, you can be certain that HubStaff lets the whole team know of the whole monitoring system. Employees can make certain that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they’re being monitored.
However, as a business owner or manager, it is your responsibility to let your employees know beforehand that your workplace 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 monitoring system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the instances of their keystrokes and mouse actions 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 $10, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost $10 and $20 respectively.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes related to payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet tracking and even a concierge accounts.
For those people who are willing to pay on an annual basis, then the cost per person per month of the paid plans will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
> > Click Here to try Hubstaff for Free! < <
Verdict Hubstaff Browser Extension
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 has to be said that not all businesses might benefit fully from utilizing 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 example, 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 reality
Business owners should also not completely depend on the information that HubStaff collects to ascertain if their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply 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 workplace manager.
All the same, HubStaff collects data seamlessly, and we all know that data helps you run your business effectively.
> > Click Here to try Hubstaff for Free! < <
FAQ Hubstaff Browser Extension
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff shops 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 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. However, these are only based on United States laws. It is wise to check with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are being monitored?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and finish HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once tracking ends.