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 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 completely 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 type of workplace and make it more productive.
Monitor Productivity and Improve Coordination with HubStaff Zoho People and 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 networking app will end up consuming hours of our time, even at work. Assessing on important notifications from time to time is acceptable, but it’s helpful if supervisors know when it’s becoming a problem. HubStaff can help monitor if employees use an excessive amount of social media and other programs that hamper productivity.
HubStaff can pay attention to the websites (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 monitored and the time spent on these can also be listed.
The information is displayed neatly, and managers can see the page title 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 workers really are allowing time slide on websites unrelated to work.
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Screen Monitoring
Tracking individual screens 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 handle employees in person.
HubStaff has a feature that could enable managers to take screenshots of their 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 could be set to have the screenshots be partly 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 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.
That said, this still has an influence on the behaviour 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 step of worker 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 total time spent working. HubStaff believes a productivity rate of at least 60% as a great 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 every member of the group. This way, the tool can 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 Zoho People and Hubstaff
Working overtime is also becoming more of a norm, even so in countries like Japan where it is an unofficial standard. Reasons can range from employees wanting to complete their jobs early, catch up on projects, and some are just workaholics who want to be running as much as possible.
However, it has been proven that too much work could be detrimental as productivity and creativity declines without enough rest. There’s a great reason why there is a regular 8 hours of work every day.
HubStaff can help managers track if employees are working too much hours each week. They could set the maximum time every 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 rest and personal 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 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’re 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 track the location of the 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 overly intrusive of a tool. But same as the rules on iOS and Android applications, employees will know precisely when their locations are being monitored.
Project Progress Monitoring
HubStaff lets the whole group report on the progress of their tasks. HubStaff can then use this to provide a report on the status of each project on a weekly basis. On the staff dashboard, managers can see each individual employee’s working hours and a summary of the completed and uncompleted tasks. The dashboard also shows whether workers are online.
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Payroll, Timesheets, and other Miscellaneous Features Zoho People and Hubstaff
Aside from tracking employee productivity, HubStaff can also make it easier for managers and admins to handle 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 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 easier. 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 Clients Zoho People and 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 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 including clients into the members tab. From there, they could see the stages of the project, as well as the pending and completed tasks.
Third party Software 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 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 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 be sure that their activities are monitored only during work hours, and exactly how they are being monitored.
However, as a company owner or manager, it’s 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 rather than a surveillance system. Employees can be certain that only the cases of the keystrokes and mouse actions are recorded, and not 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 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.
Only the Premium and Enterprise plans unlock features related to payroll administration. The enterprise feature comprises fleet tracking and even a concierge account.
For those people who are willing to pay on an annual basis, then the price per person per month of the paid programs will be slashed down to $5, 8$, and $16, respectively.
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Verdict Zoho People and 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 claims 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 must be said that not all companies might benefit fully from utilizing HubStaff. HubStaff is especially suited to contemporary desk jobs, and for projects where team members use computers for most of their time. Take jobs that take a whole 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 on top of a reading assignment in reality
Business owners should also not completely rely on the information that HubStaff collects to ascertain whether their employees are being productive or not. HubStaff is simply a project management software using features and tools 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 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 Zoho People and Hubstaff
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 can use HubStaff?
A: The paid plans have a minimum of two users and limit of 350 users.
Q: Why is implementing HubStaff in businesses completely legal?
A: HubStaff has complete legal permissions for use, and resources regarding them are available on their site. However, these are only 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 tracking and have it run in the background. HubStaff doesn’t collect any data once monitoring ends.