With the rise of internet work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our concept of a conventional 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 conventional, distant, or even completely online workplaces.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their responsibilities, as well as screen and look out for unwanted or prohibited activity. Apart from monitoring behavior, it may also be used to handle any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff’s Comprehensive Infographic
HubStaff includes the features that you would expect from an employee tracking software such as:
Online Activity Monitoring:
We all know full well that social media kills productivity. All too frequently, a few swipes on any social networking app is going to end up consuming hours of our time, even in the workplace. Checking up 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 take note of the sites (and even the url of the exact 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 these can also be recorded.
The data is displayed neatly, and managers can see the page title of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also go to the links displayed to verify if workers really are allowing time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Tracking individual displays 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 is impossible to manage employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature that could enable managers to take screenshots of their employees’ screens at a customizable time interval, with 10 minutes as the default. If it sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it can be set to have the screenshots be partly blurred. 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 employees would understand that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also be able to view the screenshots taken from their screens just so they’ll be ensured that this feature is implemented just for reasons related to work.
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 step of employee activity. HubStaff can detect keyboard strokes and mouse interaction and discover times of inactivity where none of these instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the overall 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 mean 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 group. 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’s Comprehensive Infographic
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, 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 projects, and some are only workaholics who wish to be working as much as you can.
However, it has been proven that too much work could be detrimental as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there’s a standard 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track 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. 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 personal and rest 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 even be operating from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be hard if workers are commuting from 1 place to another, or if they’re 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, managers and team leaders can monitor the location of their 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 rapid meetings.
As this needs 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 applications, 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 provide a report on the status of every project on a weekly basis. On the staff dashboard, managers can see 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’s Comprehensive Infographic
Besides monitoring 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 companies. And, better than traditional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can capture the first keyboard stroke or mouse action 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 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. Cash transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Job Tracking for Customers Hubstaff’s Comprehensive Infographic
Being transparent to customers 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 accomplished by adding clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the stages of the project, in addition to the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate well with other project tracking tools such as but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is good news for business owners who are already using other project management software.
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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 staff members. To ease your mind, you can be certain that HubStaff lets the whole team know of the whole monitoring system. Employees can be sure that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they are being tracked.
However, as a business owner or manager, it is your responsibility to let your workers know beforehand that your workplace 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 monitoring system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a tracking system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the cases of the keystrokes and mouse activity are recorded, and not the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff will not let managers and admins know what exactly 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 $7, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost $10 and $20 respectively.
Just the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes related to payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet tracking and even a concierge account.
For those who are ready to pay on an annual basis, then the price per person per month of their paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Hubstaff’s Comprehensive Infographic
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 intuitive and clean, 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 jobs, and for projects where staff members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that require 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 fact
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 merely a project management software using features and tools that can help you gauge the performance of workers and other members of the team. 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’s Comprehensive Infographic
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 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 are being monitored?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and finish HubStaff tracking and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once monitoring ends.