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 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 responsibilities, in addition to screen and look out for unwanted or illegal activity. Apart from monitoring behaviour, it may also be used to handle any sort of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Slack Integrated With Hubstaff
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 often, a few swipes on any social networking 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’s helpful if supervisors know when it is becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if employees use too much social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can take note of the websites (and even the url of the exact page) that employees see 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 is also recorded.
The data is displayed neatly, and managers 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 employees really are allowing time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Monitoring 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 handle employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature that can enable managers to take screenshots of their employees’ screens at a customizable time interval, with 10 minutes as the default option. If this sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it can be set to have the screenshots be partly blurred. In this way, managers can determine if workers are working on their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing potential sensitive information.
It must 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 ensured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
That said, this still has an effect on the behavior of employees as knowing that their screens 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 step of worker activity. HubStaff can detect keyboard strokes and mouse interaction and discover times of inactivity where none of those instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the total time where the mouse or keyboard is active 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 mean that a worker is taking too much time on the desk doing nothing, or if a worker is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool displays 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 given time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Slack Integrated With Hubstaff
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 finish their tasks early, catch up on jobs, and some are only workaholics who want to be working as much as you can.
However, it has been demonstrated that too much work could be detrimental as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There’s a great reason why there’s a regular 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if employees are working too much hours per week. They could set the maximum time each week which workers can stay logged on for work. Following the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. This way, workaholic tendencies are suppressed, and that employees won’t 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 tough to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees might be jumping 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’re doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff on their telephones 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 locations and how much time 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 overly intrusive of a tool. However, same as the rules 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 offer a report on the status of every project 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 employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Slack Integrated With Hubstaff
Aside from 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 worker.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a list of working hours and salaries is also made easier. HubStaff’s citizenship handling 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 period.
Job Tracking for Customers Slack Integrated With Hubstaff
Being transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with clients, in addition to assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it easy for clients to take a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply accomplished by including clients into the members tab. From there, they could see the phases of the project, as well as the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Applications Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely with other project tracking 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 may be asking yourself if using HubStaff to manage employees can be counterproductive as it might 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 activities are monitored only during work hours, and precisely how they are being monitored.
However, as a company owner or manager, it’s your duty to let your workers 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 monitoring system and not a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the instances of their keystrokes and mouse activity are recorded, rather than 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 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 monitoring and even a concierge accounts.
For those people who are willing to pay on an annual basis, then the cost per person per month of their paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Slack Integrated With Hubstaff
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 isn’t at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees 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 tasks, 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 on top of a reading assignment in fact
Business owners should also not completely depend on the data that HubStaff collects to determine if their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is merely a project management software using features and tools that can allow you to gauge the performance of employees 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 Slack Integrated With Hubstaff
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 who can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of two users and cap of 350 users.
Q: Why is implementing HubStaff in companies 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 is best to check with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are being monitored?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff tracking and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once monitoring ends.