With the rise of internet 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 offices.
An employee tracking software is used to track whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, as well as screen and look out for unwanted or prohibited 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 Chrome Extension
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 frequently, a few swipes on any social networking app will 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 supervisors know when it is becoming a problem. HubStaff can help monitor if employees use too much social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can take note of the websites (and even the url of the specific page) that employees see 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 data is displayed neatly, and managers can see the page name of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also visit the links displayed to confirm if employees really are letting time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Tracking 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 is impossible to manage employees in person.
HubStaff has a quality that can enable managers to take screenshots of the employees’ screens at a customizable time period, 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 workers are working in their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It must be noted that employees would know that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also have the ability to look at the screenshots taken from their screens just so that they’ll be ensured that this feature is implemented just for reasons related to work.
With that said, this still has an effect on the behavior 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 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 overall time in which the mouse or keyboard is busy 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% 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 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 Chrome Extension
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 projects, and some are only workaholics who want to be working as much as possible.
However, it has been proven that too much work can be detrimental as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There’s a great reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if workers are working too much hours per week. They could set the maximum time every week that employees can remain logged on for work. Following the maximum time has been reached, then the time monitoring 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 Employees
Managers working with remote teams may find it hard to communicate and organize the team. Some employees may be leaping from place to place for work, and also be operating from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be hard if workers are commuting from one place to another, or if they’re doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff in their telephones so that the employee location monitoring feature can be utilized. 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 places 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 may be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. But same as the rules on iOS and Android applications, employees will know exactly when their places are being monitored.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the entire team report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to provide a report on the status of every project 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 shows whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Chrome Extension
Aside from tracking employee productivity, HubStaff can also make it easier for managers and admins to handle payrolls and manage accounts.
Timesheet and Payroll Management
HubStaff can function as 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 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 record of working hours and salaries 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.
Project Tracking for Clients Hubstaff Chrome Extension
Being transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with clients, in addition to assure them that things are going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to have 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, in addition to the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely 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 applications.
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Employee Spying?
You may be asking yourself if using HubStaff to handle employees can be counterproductive as it might make a feeling of distrust between managers and staff members. To ease your mind, you can be certain that HubStaff lets the entire team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can make certain that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and precisely how they’re being tracked.
However, as a business owner or manager, it’s your duty to let your employees know beforehand that your workplace will be implementing HubStaff. Also, 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 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 plans 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 includes 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 their paid plans will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Hubstaff Chrome 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 certain that HubStaff can flawlessly do the job that it promises to do. The user interface is intuitive and clean, and is not in any way 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 especially suited to contemporary desk tasks, 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 on top of a reading assignment in fact
Business owners should also not completely rely on the information that HubStaff collects to ascertain whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is merely a project management software using tools and features that can allow you to gauge the performance of employees and other members of the team. 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 Chrome Extension
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff stores the screenshots and other data using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of team members who may use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of 2 users and cap of 350 users.
Q: Why is implementing HubStaff in companies 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 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 tracking ends.