With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, our notion 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 entirely 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 be aware of unwanted or prohibited activity. Aside from monitoring behaviour, it can also be used to handle any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Is Hubstaff Safe
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 will end up consuming hours of our time, even in the workplace. Assessing on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it is helpful if supervisors know when it’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if employees use an excessive amount of social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can pay attention to the sites (and even the url of the exact page) that employees visit during work hours, in addition to the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be tracked and the time spent on them is also recorded.
The data is displayed neatly, and supervisors 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 verify if workers really are letting 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 crucial for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it is impossible to handle 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 on their desks instead of playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential sensitive information.
It should be noted that workers would understand that this feature is activated on their displays. Employees would also have the ability to look at the screenshots taken from their screens just so they’ll be ensured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
With that said, this still has an influence on the behaviour of employees as knowing that their displays 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 worker 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 in which the mouse or keyboard is busy to the total time spent working. HubStaff believes a productivity rate of at least 60% as a good sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% may 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 this team are working on a project at a specified time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Is Hubstaff Safe
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, 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 running as much as you can.
However, it’s been proven that too much work could be detrimental as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track if employees are working a lot of hours each week. They can set the maximum time each week that workers can stay 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 workers will not be given the incentive to put in too much time to work and sacrifice personal and rest time.
Monitor the Location of Employees
Managers working with remote teams may find it tough 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 employees are commuting from 1 place to another, or if they are doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff on their telephones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be used. With this, supervisors and team leaders can track 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 quick meetings.
As this needs employees to install HubStaff in their phones, this may be seen as too intrusive of a tool. But same as the rules on iOS and Android programs, employees will know exactly 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 offer a report on the status of every job on a weekly basis. On the staff 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 Is Hubstaff Safe
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 activity of the day for each employee.
Managers can also pause the machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, keeping a record of working hours and wages 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. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set interval.
Project Tracking for Customers Is Hubstaff Safe
Becoming transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with customers, in addition to assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to have a peek into the progress of projects. This can be simply accomplished by adding clients into the members tab. From there, they could see the stages of the project, as well as the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate well with other project monitoring tools including but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is good 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 handle employees can be counterproductive as it might make an atmosphere 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 precisely how they’re being monitored.
However, as a business owner or manager, it’s 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 and not a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the instances of the keystrokes and mouse actions are recorded, rather than the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff won’t 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 $7, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost $10 and $20 respectively.
Just the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock features related to payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet monitoring and even a concierge accounts.
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 Is Hubstaff Safe
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 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 specially suited to modern desk tasks, and for projects where team members use computers for the majority of their time. Take jobs that take a whole lot of reading for example, 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 fact
Business owners should also not completely depend on the information that HubStaff collects to ascertain whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply a project management software with features and tools that can help you gauge the performance of workers 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 Is Hubstaff Safe
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff shops the screenshots and other information using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of group members that 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 website. But 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 monitored?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once tracking ends.