With the rise of online 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 conventional, remote, or even completely online offices.
An employee monitoring software is used to track whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, in addition to screen and be aware of unwanted or illegal activity. Aside from monitoring behavior, it may also be used to manage any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Employee Review
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 media app will wind 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 managers know when it’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help track if employees use too much social media and other applications that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can take note of the sites (and even the url of the specific page) that employees visit during work hours, as well as the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications can also be tracked and the time spent on these is also listed.
The information 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 visit the links displayed to confirm if employees really are letting time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Tracking individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be very awkward if done personally. But then, it’s necessary for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it is 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 option. If it sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it could be set to have the screenshots be partially blurred. This way, managers can determine if employees are working on their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It should be noted that employees 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 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 screens are tracked 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 employee 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 overall 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 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 displays the productivity rate of each member of the group. In this way, the tool can 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 Hubstaff Employee Review
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries such as Japan where it’s an unofficial standard. Reasons can range from employees wanting to finish their jobs early, catch up on projects, and some are just workaholics who want to be running as much as possible.
However, it’s been demonstrated that too much work could be detrimental as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There is a great reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work each day.
HubStaff can help managers track if workers are working a lot of hours each week. They can set the maximum time every week that employees can remain logged on for work. Following the maximum time has been reached, then the time monitoring tool stops. In this manner, workaholic tendencies are suppressed, and that employees won’t 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 hard to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees might be leaping from place to place for work, and even be operating from cafes or other workstations.
Setting up unplanned meetings can be hard if workers are commuting from one place to another, or if they are doing field work.
Members of the group can install HubStaff on their smartphones 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 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 can be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. However, same as the rules on iOS and Android programs, employees will know precisely when their locations 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 project on a weekly basis. On the team dashboard, managers can see each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of the completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also displays whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Employee Review
Besides monitoring employee productivity, HubStaff can also make it easier for managers and admins to handle payrolls and manage accounts.
Timesheet and Payroll Management
HubStaff can be a virtual check-in and check-out mechanism for businesses. And, better than conventional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can capture the first keyboard stroke or mouse action of the day for each worker.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, keeping a record of working hours and salaries 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 simple. Cash transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Project Tracking for Customers Hubstaff Employee Review
Becoming transparent to customers is key for establishing trust for your business. HubStaff makes it easy to communicate with customers, in addition to assure them that things are moving as agreed upon.
HubStaff makes it simple for clients to have a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply done by adding clients into the members tab. From there, they could 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 that are already using other project management software.
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Employee Spying?
You may be asking yourself if using HubStaff to manage employees can be counterproductive since it may make a feeling of distrust between managers and team members. To ease your mind, you can be sure that HubStaff lets the whole team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can make certain that their actions are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they are being tracked.
However, as a business owner or manager, it’s your responsibility to let your employees know beforehand that your office will be implementing HubStaff. Additionally, 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 certain that only the instances of the keystrokes and mouse actions are recorded, rather than the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff will not let managers and admins know what exactly 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 $10, 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 monitoring and even a concierge account.
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 Hubstaff Employee Review
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 intuitive and clean, and isn’t at all confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers not knowledgeable about the software.
However, it must be said that not all businesses 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 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 rely on the information 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 will help you gauge the performance of employees 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 Hubstaff Employee Review
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff stores the screenshots and other data using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of group members that can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of 2 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 consult 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.