With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, our concept of a traditional 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 traditional, distant, or even completely online workplaces.
An employee monitoring software is used to track whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, as well as screen and look out for unwanted or illegal activity. Aside from monitoring behaviour, it may also be used to handle any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Substitute for Hubstaff
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 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’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help monitor if employees use too much social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can take note of the sites (and even the url of the specific page) that workers see during work hours, in addition to the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be monitored and the time spent on these can also be listed.
The data is displayed neatly, and supervisors can see the page name of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in one glance. They can also go to the links displayed to confirm if workers really are letting time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Screen Monitoring
Monitoring individual screens is too much of a hassle and can be very 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 quality that can 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. In this way, managers can determine if employees are working in 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 displays. Employees would also be able to look at the screenshots taken from their displays just so that they’ll be ensured 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 screens are monitored 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 these instances are found.
HubStaff can then compare the overall time in which 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% can mean that a worker is taking too much time on the desk doing nothing, or if an employee is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool displays the productivity rate of every member of the team. This way, the tool may 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 Substitute for 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 vary from employees wanting to complete their jobs early, catch up on jobs, and some are just workaholics who wish to be running as much as possible.
However, it has been proven that too much work could be detrimental as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There is a great reason why there is 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 each week which employees can remain logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time monitoring 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 Workers
Managers working with remote teams may find it tough to communicate and organize 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 difficult 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, 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 much time 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 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 precisely when their places are being tracked.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the entire 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 view each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of the completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also shows whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Substitute for Hubstaff
Besides tracking employee productivity, HubStaff can also make it easier for managers and admins to manage 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 conventional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can capture the first keyboard stroke or mouse activity of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, keeping a list of working hours and wages 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. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Job Tracking for Clients Substitute for Hubstaff
Being transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with clients, as well as 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 done by including clients into the members tab. From there, they could see the phases of the project, as well as the completed and pending tasks.
Third party Applications Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely with other project tracking tools including but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is great 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 since it might make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and team members. To ease your mind, you can be certain that HubStaff lets the whole team know of the whole monitoring system. Employees can make certain that their actions are monitored only during work hours, and precisely how they are being monitored.
However, as a company owner or manager, it is your duty to let your employees 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 and not a surveillance system. Employees can be sure that only the instances of the keystrokes and mouse activity are recorded, and not the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff will not let managers and admins know just what 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.
Just the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock features associated with payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet monitoring and even a concierge accounts.
For those people 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 Substitute for 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 certain that HubStaff can flawlessly perform the job that it claims 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 has to be said that not all businesses might benefit fully from utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is especially suited to modern desk jobs, and for projects where team members use computers for the majority of their time. Take jobs that require 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 on top of a reading assignment in fact
Business owners should also not completely depend on the information 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 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 Substitute for 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 group members that can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans 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. But these are just based on United States laws. It’s best to consult with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are being tracked?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and finish HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once monitoring ends.