With the rise of online 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 filled with 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 traditional, distant, or even entirely online workplaces.
An employee monitoring software is used to track whether or not employees are keeping on with their responsibilities, in addition to screen and look out for unwanted or illegal activity. Aside from monitoring behaviour, it can also be used to manage any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Picture Flipped
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 is going to 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 monitor if workers 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 employees visit during work hours, in addition to the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be monitored and the time spent on them is also listed.
The information is displayed neatly, and supervisors can see the page title of the visited pages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also visit the links displayed to confirm if workers 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 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 feature that could enable managers to take screenshots of the 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. In this way, managers can determine if workers are working on their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It should be noted that workers would know that this feature is activated on their screens. Employees would also have the ability to view the screenshots taken from their displays just so that they’ll be assured that this feature is implemented just 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 measure 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 overall time spent working. HubStaff believes 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 an employee is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool shows the productivity rate of each member of the team. In 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 Picture Flipped
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries such as Japan where it’s an unofficial standard. Reasons can range from employees wanting to complete their jobs early, catch up on jobs, and some are just workaholics who want to be running as much as possible.
However, it’s been demonstrated that too much work can be harmful as creativity and productivity 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 workers are working a lot of hours per week. They could set the maximum time each week that 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 suppressed, and that workers won’t be given the incentive to put in too much 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 coordinate 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 group can install HubStaff on their smartphones so that the employee location monitoring feature can be utilized. With this, supervisors 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 long is spent on each location. From these data, managers can determine the best time to do rapid meetings.
As this requires employees to install HubStaff in their phones, this can be seen as too 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 whole group 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 shows whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Picture Flipped
Besides 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 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 system 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 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.
Project Tracking for Customers Hubstaff Picture Flipped
Being transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with customers, as well as assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to take 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 stages of the project, as well as the completed and pending tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely 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 might be wondering if using HubStaff to handle employees can be counterproductive since it might make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and team members. To ease your mind, you can be sure that HubStaff lets the whole team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can make certain that their actions are monitored only during work hours, and precisely how they are being tracked.
However, as a company 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 tracking system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be certain 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 employees 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.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes related to payroll administration. The enterprise feature includes fleet tracking and even a concierge account.
For those people who are ready to pay on an annual basis, then the cost per person per month of their paid plans will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Hubstaff Picture Flipped
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 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 utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is especially suited to modern 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 instance, 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 ascertain whether 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 employees 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 Picture Flipped
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff stores the screenshots and other information using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of team members that can use HubStaff?
A: The paid programs have a minimum of two users and cap 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. However, these are just based on United States laws. It’s best to consult with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are being monitored?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once tracking ends.