With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our notion 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 conventional, remote, or even completely online workplaces.
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. Apart from monitoring behavior, it may also be used to manage any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Plugin
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 frequently, a few swipes on any social networking app is going to wind up consuming hours of our time, even at work. Checking up on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it’s helpful if managers know when it is becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if employees use too much social media and other applications that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can pay attention to the websites (and even the url of the exact page) that workers 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 managers can see the page name of the visited pages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also go to the links displayed to confirm if employees really are letting time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Screen Monitoring
Monitoring individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be quite awkward if done personally. But then, it’s crucial for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it’s impossible to manage employees in person.
HubStaff has a quality that could enable managers to take screenshots of their 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 can be set to have the screenshots be partially blurred. 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 understand that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also be able to look at the screenshots taken from their displays just so they’ll be assured 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 tracked 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 employee 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 total 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 great sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% can 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 every member of the team. In this way, the tool may 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 Plugin
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries such as Japan where it is 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 demonstrated that too much work could be harmful as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There’s a great reason why there’s a standard 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track if employees are working too much hours each week. They could set the maximum time every week which employees can remain logged on for work. After 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 Workers
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 employees are commuting from one place to another, or if they are 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 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 can be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. However, same as the rules on iOS and Android applications, employees will know precisely when their locations are being tracked.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the whole team report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to provide a report on the status of each project on a weekly basis. On the staff dashboard, managers can see each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of the completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also shows whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Plugin
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 traditional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can capture the very first keyboard stroke or mouse action of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a record of working hours and wages is also made simpler. 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 simple. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set interval.
Job Tracking for Clients Hubstaff Plugin
Being transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with customers, as well as assure them that things are going as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to have a peek into the progress of jobs. 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 Applications Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely with other project monitoring 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 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 be sure that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and precisely how they’re being tracked.
However, as a business owner or manager, it is your duty to let your employees know beforehand that your office 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 tracking system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a tracking system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the instances of the 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 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 features related to payroll management. 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 Plugin
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 claims to do. The user interface is intuitive and clean, and is not at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers 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 staff members use computers for the majority of their time. Take jobs that take a lot of reading for instance, 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 data that HubStaff collects to ascertain whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply a project management software with tools and features that can help you gauge the performance of employees and other members of the group. 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 Plugin
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 that may use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of 2 users and cap 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 site. However, these are just based on United States laws. It’s best 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 tracking and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once tracking ends.