With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our concept of a traditional workplace can differ from the rooms filled with 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 entirely online workplaces.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, in addition to screen and look out for unwanted or prohibited activity. Aside from monitoring behavior, it may also be used to handle any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff for Chrome
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 wind up consuming hours of our time, even in the workplace. Assessing on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it is helpful if managers know when it’s 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 specific 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 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 confirm if employees really are allowing time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Monitoring individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be quite awkward if done personally. But then, it is necessary for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it’s 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 interval, 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 partially blurred. In this way, managers can determine if employees are working on their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It should be noted that employees would know that this feature is activated on their screens. Employees would also have the ability to look at the screenshots taken from their screens just so that they’ll be assured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
That said, this still has an influence on the behavior of employees as knowing that their screens are tracked 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 detect times of inactivity where none of those instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the overall time in which the mouse or keyboard is active to the total time spent working. HubStaff believes a productivity rate of at least 60% as a great sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% can mean 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 shows the productivity rate of every member of the team. This way, the tool can 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 for Chrome
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries like Japan where it’s an unofficial standard. Reasons can vary from employees wanting to complete their tasks early, catch up on projects, and some are only workaholics who wish to be working as much as you can.
However, it’s been demonstrated that too much work could be detrimental as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There’s a great reason why there’s a standard 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if employees are working too much hours per week. They can set the maximum time every week which workers can remain logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. This way, workaholic tendencies are curbed, and that workers 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 may find it hard to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees may be jumping 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 are doing field work.
Members of the group can install HubStaff in their smartphones so that the employee location monitoring feature can be utilized. With this, supervisors and team leaders can monitor the location of their 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 rapid meetings.
As this needs employees to install HubStaff on their phones, this may be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. However, 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 group report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to offer a report on the status of every 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 displays whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff for Chrome
Besides 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 virtual check-in and check-out mechanism for companies. And, better than conventional 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 employee.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a list of working hours and wages 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. Cash transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Project Tracking for Customers Hubstaff for Chrome
Becoming transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with clients, as well as assure them that things are going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it simple for clients to take a peek into the progress of projects. This can be simply done 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 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 that are already using other project management applications.
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Employee Spying?
You might be wondering 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 entire 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 tracked.
However, as a company owner or manager, it is your duty to let your workers 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 tracking system and not a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the instances of their keystrokes and mouse activity are listed, rather than the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff won’t let managers and admins know what exactly their employees 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 features associated with payroll administration. The enterprise feature includes fleet tracking and even a concierge accounts.
For those who are ready 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 for Chrome
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 promises 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 stated that not all companies might benefit fully from utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is especially suited to contemporary desk tasks, 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 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 reality
Business owners should also not completely depend on the data that HubStaff collects to determine whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply a project management software with features and tools that will help you gauge the performance of employees and other members of the team. This is in no way 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 for Chrome
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 that can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans 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 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’re being tracked?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once tracking ends.