With the rise of internet work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, our concept of a traditional workplace can be different 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, distant, or even completely online offices.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, as well as screen and be aware of unwanted or prohibited activity. Aside from monitoring behavior, it can also be used to manage any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Project Management
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 often, a few swipes on any social media app is going to end up consuming hours of our time, even at work. Assessing on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it is helpful if supervisors know when it is becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if employees use an excessive amount of social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can take note of the websites (and even the url of the specific page) that workers see during work hours, as well as the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be monitored and the time spent on them can also be recorded.
The data is displayed neatly, and supervisors can see the page name of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in a single glance. They can also visit the links displayed to confirm if workers really are allowing time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Monitoring individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be very awkward if done personally. But then, it’s crucial for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it is 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 interval, with 10 minutes as the default. If this 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 on their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It should be noted that employees would understand that this feature is activated on their screens. Employees would also be able to view the screenshots taken from their displays just so they’ll be assured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
With that said, this still has an influence 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 discover times of inactivity where none of those instances are found.
HubStaff can then compare the total time where the mouse or keyboard is busy to the overall 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 an employee is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool shows the productivity rate of every member of the team. In 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 Project Management
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries like Japan where it is an unofficial standard. Reasons can range from employees wanting to complete their jobs early, catch up on projects, and some are only workaholics who wish to be running as much as possible.
However, it’s 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 each day.
HubStaff can help managers track if employees are working a lot of hours each week. They could set the maximum time each week which employees 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 employees will not be given the incentive to put in a lot of time to work and sacrifice personal and rest time.
Monitor the Location of Employees
Managers working with remote teams may find it hard to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees may be leaping from place to place for work, and also be working from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be hard if workers are commuting from 1 place to another, or if they are doing field work.
Members of the group can install HubStaff on their telephones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be used. 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 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 on their phones, this may be seen as too intrusive of a tool. However, same as the principles on iOS and Android programs, 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 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 Project Management
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 virtual check-in and check-out mechanism for businesses. And, better than traditional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can record the very first keyboard stroke or mouse action of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a list of working hours and salaries is also made simpler. HubStaff’s payroll managing 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. Cash transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set interval.
Project Tracking for Customers Hubstaff Project Management
Becoming transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with clients, as well as assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it simple for clients to have a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply accomplished 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 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 may be asking yourself if using HubStaff to handle employees can be counterproductive since 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 actions 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 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 tracking system and not 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 just what their workers 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.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes related to 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 Project Management
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 isn’t at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees not knowledgeable about the software.
However, it must be said that not all businesses might benefit fully from using HubStaff. HubStaff is especially suited to modern desk tasks, and for projects where team 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 at the top of a reading assignment in reality
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 help you gauge the performance of employees and other members of the group. This is in no way 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 Project Management
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff stores 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 2 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 site. However, these are only based on United States laws. It is 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 finish HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once monitoring ends.