With the rise of online work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our notion of a workplace is steadily changing. Now, our concept of a traditional workplace can differ 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 completely online offices.
An employee tracking software is used to track whether or not employees are keeping on with their responsibilities, as well as screen and be aware of unwanted or illegal activity. Aside from monitoring behavior, it may also be used to handle any type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Hubstaff Hacker News
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 often, a few swipes on any social networking app is going to 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 employees use too much social media and other applications that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can take note of the websites (and even the url of the specific page) that employees see during work hours, as well as the time they spend on it. Traffic from applications may also be monitored and the time spent on these can also be recorded.
The information is displayed neatly, and supervisors can see the page title of the visited pages, the url, and the time spent, all in a single 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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Display Monitoring
Monitoring individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be quite awkward if done personally. But then, it’s necessary for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it’s 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 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 partially blurred. This way, managers can determine if employees are working in their desks rather than playing games or watching movies, without exposing possible sensitive information.
It must be noted that employees 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 that they’ll be assured that this feature is implemented only for reasons related to work.
That said, this still has an influence on the behaviour 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 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 total time where the mouse or keyboard is busy to the total time spent working. HubStaff considers 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 group. This way, the tool can 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 Hubstaff Hacker News
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries such as Japan where it is an unofficial standard. Reasons can vary from employees wanting to complete their jobs early, catch up on projects, and some are only workaholics who wish to be running as much as possible.
However, it’s been proven that too much work could be harmful as productivity and creativity 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 employees can remain logged on for work. After the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. In this manner, workaholic tendencies are curbed, 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 hard to communicate and coordinate the team. Some employees may 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’re doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff in their smartphones so that the employee location monitoring feature can be used. 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 in 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 exactly when their locations are being tracked.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the whole team report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to provide a report on the status of each job 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 displays whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Hacker News
Besides 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 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 system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, maintaining a record of working hours and salaries is also made simpler. HubStaff’s payroll managing 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 simple. Cash transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set interval.
Project Tracking for Customers Hubstaff Hacker News
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 going 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 could see the stages of the project, in addition to 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 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 since it may make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and staff members. To ease your mind, you can be sure that HubStaff lets the entire team know of the entire monitoring system. Employees can be sure that their actions are monitored only during work hours, and precisely how they are being tracked.
However, as a business owner or manager, it’s your responsibility to let your workers know beforehand that your workplace 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 monitoring system and not a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the cases 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.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock features related to payroll management. 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 price per person per month of the paid plans will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Hubstaff Hacker News
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 in any way confusing, requiring only minimal orientation for workers not familiar with the software.
However, it must 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 take a lot of reading for instance, where employees might appear 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 reality
Business owners should also not completely rely on the information that HubStaff collects to determine whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply a project management software with tools and features that will help you gauge the performance of workers and other members of the group. 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 Hubstaff Hacker News
Q: Where do the screenshots go?
A: HubStaff shops the screenshots and other data using Amazon AWS.
Q: Is there a maximum number of team 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 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’re 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 tracking ends.