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 be different 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, remote, or even entirely online offices.
An employee tracking 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 illegal activity. Aside from monitoring behavior, it can also be used to handle any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Freelancer
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 in the workplace. Checking up on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it is helpful if managers 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 take note of the sites (and even the url of the specific page) that workers 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 these 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 one glance. They can also go to the links displayed to confirm if workers really are allowing time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Monitoring individual screens is too much of a hassle and can be very 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 feature that can enable managers to take screenshots of their employees’ screens at a customizable time period, with 10 minutes as the default option. If this sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it can be set to have the screenshots be partly blurred. In this way, managers can determine if employees are working on their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential 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 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 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 measure of employee activity. HubStaff can detect keyboard strokes and mouse interaction and discover times of inactivity where none of those instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the total time in which the mouse or keyboard is active to the total 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 each member of the group. This way, the tool can also be used to see how many members of the team are working on a project at a specified time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Hubstaff Freelancer
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries such as Japan where it is an unofficial standard. Reasons can vary from employees wanting to complete their jobs early, catch up on projects, and some are just workaholics who wish to be running as much as possible.
However, it has been proven that too much work could be detrimental as creativity and productivity 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 each week. They can set the maximum time each week that workers can stay logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time monitoring tool stops. In this manner, workaholic tendencies are curbed, and that employees won’t be given the incentive to put in too much time to work and sacrifice rest and personal time.
Monitor the Location of Workers
Managers working with remote teams may find it tough to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees may be leaping from place to place for work, and even be working from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be difficult if employees are commuting from one place to another, or if they’re doing field work.
Members of the group can install HubStaff in their telephones so that the employee place 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 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. However, same as the principles 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 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 Freelancer
Aside from 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 be 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 very first keyboard stroke or mouse activity of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the machine 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 depending 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 period.
Job Tracking for Clients Hubstaff Freelancer
Becoming transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with customers, in addition to 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 accomplished by including clients into the members tab. From there, they could see the phases of the project, in addition to the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Applications Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely 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 software.
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Employee Spying?
You might be wondering if using HubStaff to manage employees can be counterproductive since it may 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 is your responsibility to let your employees 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 monitoring system and not a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the instances of their keystrokes and mouse actions are listed, and not the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff will not 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 $10, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost $10 and $20 respectively.
Just the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock features associated with payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet tracking and even a concierge accounts.
For those who are willing to pay on an annual basis, then the cost per person per month of their paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Hubstaff Freelancer
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 clean and intuitive, and is not in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers not familiar with the software.
However, it must be said that not all companies might benefit fully from using HubStaff. HubStaff is specially suited to modern desk tasks, and for projects where team members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that require a 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 data that HubStaff collects to determine if their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply a project management software using features and tools that can allow you to 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 Freelancer
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff shops 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 cap 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 wise to check with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they’re being monitored?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff tracking and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once monitoring ends.