With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our notion of a traditional workplace can differ from the rooms full of individual cubicles that we were used to. HubStaff, a software from a company of the same name established in the United States, offers its services for conventional, remote, or even completely online offices.
An employee monitoring software is used to track whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, in addition to screen and look out for unwanted or prohibited activity. Apart from monitoring behaviour, it may also be used to handle any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Freelancer Reviews
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 often, a few swipes on any social media 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’s helpful if managers know when it’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if workers use too much social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can pay attention to the websites (and even the url of the specific page) that workers visit during work hours, as well as the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be tracked and the time spent on them can also be 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 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 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’s impossible to handle employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature 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 partially blurred. In 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 should be noted that workers would know 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 just for reasons related to work.
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 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 step of worker 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 overall time in which the mouse or keyboard is busy to the overall time spent working. HubStaff considers a productivity rate of at least 60% as a good sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% can 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 team. This way, the tool may 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 Freelancer Reviews
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 finish their jobs early, catch up on projects, and some are only workaholics who wish to be working as much as you can.
However, it has been demonstrated that too much work can be detrimental as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There is a good reason why there’s a regular 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if employees are working a lot of hours per week. They can set the maximum time each week that employees can stay logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time monitoring tool stops. This way, workaholic tendencies are curbed, and that employees won’t be given the incentive to put in too much time to work and sacrifice personal and rest time.
Monitor the Location of Workers
Managers working with remote teams might find it tough to communicate and organize the team. Some employees might be jumping from place to place for work, and also be operating from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be difficult if workers are commuting from 1 place to another, or if they’re doing field work.
Members of the team 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 places and how long is spent on each location. From these data, managers can determine the best time to do quick meetings.
As this requires employees to install HubStaff on their phones, this can be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. But same as the principles on iOS and Android programs, employees will know exactly when their locations 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 each job on a weekly basis. On the team dashboard, managers can see each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of their completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also shows whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Freelancer Reviews
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 be a virtual check-in and check-out mechanism for businesses. And, better than conventional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can capture the first keyboard stroke or mouse activity of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the machine 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 period.
Job Tracking for Clients Hubstaff Freelancer Reviews
Being transparent to clients 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 take a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply done by including clients into the members tab. From there, they could see the stages of the project, as well as the completed and pending tasks.
Third party Applications Integration
HubStaff can integrate well with other project tracking tools including but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is great 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 handle employees can be counterproductive since it may make a feeling of distrust between managers and staff 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 are being monitored.
However, as a company owner or manager, it’s 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 tracking system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a monitoring system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the cases of their keystrokes and mouse activity 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 plans 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 features associated with payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet monitoring and even a concierge account.
For those who are ready 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 Reviews
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 promises to do. The user interface is clean and intuitive, and isn’t in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers not familiar with the software.
However, it must be stated that not all companies might benefit fully from utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is specially suited to contemporary desk tasks, and for projects where staff members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that require a 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 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 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.
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FAQ Hubstaff Freelancer Reviews
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 who can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of two users and limit of 350 users.
Q: 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 just 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 finish HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once monitoring ends.