With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our notion of a traditional workplace can be different from the rooms full of 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 conventional, remote, or even entirely 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 be aware of unwanted or prohibited activity. Apart 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 Tutorial on Hubstaff
HubStaff includes the features that you would expect from an employee tracking 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 will end up consuming hours of our time, even in the workplace. 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 workers use too much social media and other applications 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 listed.
The information is displayed neatly, and supervisors can see the page title of the visited webpages, the url, and the time spent, all in a single glance. They can also visit the links displayed to verify if employees 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 manage employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature that could enable managers to take screenshots of the employees’ screens at a customizable time period, with 10 minutes as the default option. If it sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it can be set to have the screenshots be partially blurred. In this way, managers can determine if employees are working in 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 look at 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 influence on the behavior 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 detect times of inactivity where none of those instances are found.
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 each member of the group. 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 Tutorial on Hubstaff
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 tasks early, catch up on projects, and some are only workaholics who want to be working as much as you can.
However, it’s been proven that too much work can be harmful as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There is a good reason why there’s a standard 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers monitor if workers are working too much hours each week. They can set the maximum time each week which workers can remain logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. This way, workaholic tendencies are suppressed, and that workers will not be given the incentive to put in a lot of time to work and sacrifice rest and personal time.
Monitor the Location of Employees
Managers working with remote teams might 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 difficult if workers are commuting from one place to another, or if they are doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff in their telephones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be utilized. With this, managers 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 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 on their phones, this can be seen as too intrusive of a tool. However, same as the rules on iOS and Android applications, employees will know precisely when their places are being tracked.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the entire group report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to offer a report on the status of each job 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 displays whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Tutorial on Hubstaff
Aside from monitoring 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 businesses. And, better than traditional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can capture the very first keyboard stroke or mouse action of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a record of working hours and wages is also made simpler. HubStaff’s payroll managing 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.
Project Tracking for Customers Tutorial on Hubstaff
Being transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it effortless to communicate with customers, in addition to assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it simple for clients to take a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply done by including clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the phases of the project, in addition to the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely with other project tracking tools such as but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is great news for business owners who are already using other project management software.
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Employee Spying?
You might be wondering if using HubStaff to handle employees can be counterproductive since it might make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and staff members. To ease your mind, you can be sure that HubStaff lets the whole 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 business owner or manager, it is your responsibility 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 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 activity 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 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 administration. The enterprise feature comprises fleet tracking and even a concierge account.
For those who are ready to pay on an annual basis, then the cost per person per month of their paid plans will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Tutorial on 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 do the job that it claims to do. The user interface is clean and intuitive, and is not at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for employees not knowledgeable about the software.
However, it must be stated that not all businesses might benefit fully from using HubStaff. HubStaff is specially suited to contemporary desk tasks, and for projects where staff members use computers for the majority of their time. Take jobs that require a 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 rely on the information that HubStaff collects to ascertain if their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply a project management software using tools and features that will allow you to gauge the performance of workers and other members of the team. 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 Tutorial on 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 who can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of 2 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 are available on their site. But these are just based on United States laws. It is wise to check with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are being tracked?
A: Yes, employees can manually start and end HubStaff monitoring and have it run in the background. HubStaff does not collect any data once monitoring ends.