With the rise of internet work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, 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, remote, or even entirely online workplaces.
An employee tracking software is used to track whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, in addition to screen and look out for unwanted or illegal 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 Desktop Alternative to Hubstaff
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 often, a few swipes on any social media app will wind 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 monitor 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 workers 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 these is also listed.
The data is displayed neatly, and managers 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 confirm if employees really are allowing time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Screen 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 can enable managers to take screenshots of their employees’ screens at a customizable time period, 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 partially blurred. 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 should be noted that employees 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 assured 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 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 measure of employee activity. HubStaff can detect keyboard strokes and mouse interaction and detect times of inactivity where none of those instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the overall time in which the mouse or keyboard is busy to the overall 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 an employee is taking too much time on the desk doing nothing, or if an employee is doing too slowly.
The dashboard for this tool shows the productivity rate of each 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 given time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Desktop Alternative to 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 tasks early, catch up on jobs, and some are only workaholics who wish to be working as much as possible.
However, it’s been demonstrated that too much work could be detrimental as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there’s a regular 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers track if workers are working a lot of hours per week. They can set the maximum time each week which workers can stay logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. In this manner, 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 hard to communicate and organize the team. Some employees may be jumping from place to place for work, and also be working from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be difficult if employees are commuting from one place to another, or if they’re 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 monitor the location of the 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 requires employees to install HubStaff in their phones, this may be seen as too intrusive of a tool. However, same as the principles on iOS and Android applications, employees will know precisely when their places 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 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 workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Desktop Alternative to 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 digital 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 machine manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a list of working hours and salaries is also made simpler. 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. Money transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Job Tracking for Customers Desktop Alternative to Hubstaff
Being transparent to clients is key for establishing trust for your company. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with customers, 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 adding clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the stages of the project, in addition to the completed and pending tasks.
Third party Software Integration
HubStaff can integrate nicely with other project monitoring 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 might be wondering if using HubStaff to manage employees can be counterproductive as it may make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and staff members. To ease your mind, you can be certain that HubStaff lets the entire team know of the whole monitoring system. Employees can be sure that their actions are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they’re being tracked.
However, as a business owner or manager, it is 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 monitoring system.
To put it simply, HubStaff is a tracking system rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the instances of their keystrokes and mouse activity are recorded, and not the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff won’t let managers and admins know what exactly their workers 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.
Just the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes associated with payroll management. The enterprise feature includes fleet monitoring and even a concierge accounts.
For those who are willing 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 Desktop Alternative to 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 promises to do. The user interface is clean and intuitive, and isn’t at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers not knowledgeable about the software.
However, it has to be stated that not all companies might benefit fully from using HubStaff. HubStaff is specially suited to contemporary desk jobs, and for projects where team members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that take a 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 reality
Business owners should also not completely depend on the data 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 can help you gauge the performance of employees 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 Desktop Alternative to 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 that may 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 are available on their site. However, 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’re 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 tracking ends.