With the rise of internet work-from-home jobs and freelancing, our concept of a workplace is steadily changing. Today, our notion 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 established in the United States, offers its services for traditional, distant, or even entirely online offices.
An employee monitoring software is used to monitor whether or not employees are keeping on with their duties, as well as screen and be aware of unwanted or prohibited 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 Privacy Concerns
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 media 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 is helpful if supervisors know when it is becoming a problem. HubStaff can help monitor if employees use too much social media and other programs 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 can also be monitored and the time spent on these can also be 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 a single glance. They can also go to the links displayed to confirm if workers really are allowing time slide on sites unrelated to work.
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Display Monitoring
Tracking individual displays is too much of a hassle and can be quite awkward if done personally. But then, it is crucial for when a remote workplace setup is in order where it’s 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 interval, with 10 minutes as the default. If this sounds too much of an invasion of privacy, then it could be set to have the screenshots be partly blurred. In 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 must be noted that workers would understand that this feature is activated on their screens. Employees would also have the ability to look at the screenshots taken from their displays just so 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 worker activity. HubStaff can detect keyboard strokes and mouse interaction and detect times of inactivity where none of these instances are present.
HubStaff can then compare the overall time in which the mouse or keyboard is busy to the total time spent working. HubStaff considers a productivity rate of at least 60% as a great sign. Productivity rates of less than 60% may mean 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 team. This way, the tool may also be used to see how many members of this team are working on a project at a specified time.
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Work Limit Monitoring Hubstaff Privacy Concerns
Working overtime is also becoming more of a standard, even so in countries like Japan where it’s an unofficial standard. Reasons can vary from employees wanting to finish their jobs early, catch up on projects, and some are only workaholics who want to be running as much as possible.
However, it has been proven that too much work can be detrimental as creativity and productivity declines without enough rest. There’s a good reason why there’s a standard 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 each week that workers can stay logged on for work. Following the maximum time has been reached, then the time tracking tool stops. In this manner, workaholic tendencies are suppressed, and that employees will not 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 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 hard if employees are commuting from one place to another, or if they are doing field work.
Members of the team can install HubStaff in their smartphones so that the employee place monitoring feature can be utilized. 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 locations and how long 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 on their phones, this may be seen as overly intrusive of a tool. But 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 team report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to offer a report on the status of every 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 shows whether employees are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Hubstaff Privacy Concerns
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 be a digital check-in and check-out mechanism for businesses. And, better than conventional systems where timesheets can be cheated, the HubStaff timesheet tool can record the first keyboard stroke or mouse action of the day for each employee.
Managers can also pause the system manually for breaks.
With HubStaff, keeping 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 simple. Cash transfers for payroll can even be automatically set to weekly, monthly, or on a set period.
Job Tracking for Customers Hubstaff Privacy Concerns
Becoming 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 easy for clients to take a peek into the progress of jobs. This can be simply accomplished by including clients into the members tab. From there, they can see the phases of the project, as well as the completed and pending tasks.
Third party Applications Integration
HubStaff can integrate well with other project monitoring tools such as but not limited to Asana and Trello. This is good 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 handle employees can be counterproductive since it may make an atmosphere of distrust between managers and team 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 precisely how they’re being monitored.
However, as a company owner or manager, it is your duty to let your workers 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 sure that only the instances of their keystrokes and mouse actions are listed, rather than the actual keystroke that they register. HubStaff will not let managers and admins know what exactly their employees 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 $10, while the Premium and Enterprise plans cost $10 and $20 respectively.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock attributes related to payroll management. The enterprise feature comprises fleet tracking and even a concierge accounts.
For those people who are ready to pay on an annual basis, then the cost per person per month of their paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Hubstaff Privacy Concerns
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 promises to do. The user interface is intuitive and clean, and isn’t in any way 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 jobs, and for projects where staff 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 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 simply a project management software with features and tools that will help you gauge the performance of employees and other members of the group. This is in no way a virtual or artificial intelligence office 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 Privacy Concerns
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 who may use HubStaff?
A: The paid programs 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. But these are just based on United States laws. It’s best to check with a lawyer for international users.
Q: Can employees choose when they are being monitored?
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.