With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, our concept of a conventional 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 entirely online workplaces.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, as well as screen and be aware of unwanted or prohibited 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 Hubstaff Capterra
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 networking app is going to wind up consuming hours of our time, even at work. Assessing on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it is helpful if supervisors know when it is becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if employees use an excessive amount of social media and other applications 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 can also be monitored and the time spent on them can also be listed.
The data is displayed neatly, and supervisors 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 employees really are allowing time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Tracking individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be very awkward if done personally. But then, it is necessary for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it’s impossible to handle employees in person.
HubStaff has a quality that could enable managers to take screenshots of their employees’ screens at a customizable time period, with 10 minutes as the default option. If it 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 in their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential 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 screens just so they’ll be assured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
With that said, this still has an influence on the behavior 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 step of worker 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 where the mouse or keyboard is active to the total time spent working. HubStaff considers 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 a worker is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool displays the productivity rate of every member of the team. In this way, the tool can also be used to see how many members of this team are working on a project at a specified time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Hubstaff Capterra
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries like Japan where it’s an unofficial standard. Reasons can range from employees wanting to finish their tasks early, catch up on jobs, and some are just workaholics who wish to be working as much as possible.
However, it’s been proven that too much work could be harmful as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There is a great reason why there’s a standard 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if workers are working a lot of hours per week. They can set the maximum time each week that employees 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 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 Employees
Managers working with remote teams might find it tough to communicate and organize the team. Some employees may be leaping from place to place for work, and even 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’re 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 track the location of the members during work hours.
HubStaff can display how much time employees spend on commuting between places 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 on their phones, this may be seen as too intrusive of a tool. But same as the principles on iOS and Android programs, employees will know precisely when their locations are being tracked.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the whole 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 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 workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Capterra
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 function as 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, maintaining a list of working hours and salaries is also made easier. 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.
Project Tracking for Clients Hubstaff Capterra
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 simple for clients to have a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply accomplished by including clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the phases of the project, in addition to the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate well with other project monitoring tools including but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is good news for business owners that are already using other project management applications.
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Employee Spying?
You may be asking yourself 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 whole 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 is your duty 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 tracking system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a monitoring system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the cases of the keystrokes and mouse actions are recorded, rather than the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff won’t 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 management. The enterprise feature includes fleet monitoring and even a concierge accounts.
For those who are ready to pay on an annual basis, then the cost per person per month of the paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Hubstaff Capterra
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 do 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 must be said that not all businesses might benefit fully from using HubStaff. HubStaff is especially suited to contemporary desk jobs, and for projects where staff members use computers for the majority of their time. Take jobs that take a lot of reading for instance, 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 rely 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 can help you gauge the performance of workers and other members of the group. This is in no way 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 Capterra
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff stores the screenshots and other data 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 businesses completely legal?
A: HubStaff has complete legal permissions for use, and resources regarding them are available 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 are being monitored?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and finish HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once tracking ends.