“The first step towards change is awareness.” – Nathaniel Branden.
The above quote fits flawlessly in today’s employee management scenario, where employers are using more and more tools to gauge workforce performance and productivity. Being aware of what employees are doing in real-time and how well they are performing goes a long way in improving their output, cementing their growth, and providing them with better assistance.
Be it freelancers or permanent staff that they are working with, employers today want to know each activity being performed on each of their projects in real-time. However, keeping track of all their moves and movements is indeed a challenging affair.
The ongoing pandemic has made it even worse for human resource professionals, who are finding it all the more challenging to keep tabs on their remote staff.
Organizations having field employees find it quite difficult to measure the productivity and movements of their staff accurately. On the other hand, field employees like sales/survey teams, medical representatives, etc. also find it cumbersome to showcase their productivity remotely to their managers. Hence, more and more such organizations are looking for technologies that can help them reduce such complexities and streamline their operations with real-time insights.
Though many standalone applications are being developed to help organizations manage their staff, business accountability, organizational data security, and employee statistics accuracy are still major concerns in all industries.
While most modern HRMS applications offer attendance monitoring features, most of them neglect productivity and task tracking, thus organizations looking to automate their HR operations either have to purchase a bunch of software products or be complacent with their existing processes.
Thankfully, today, highly agile and efficient workforce management solutions are available, which can take care of all your employee and project monitoring needs. This review will focus on Hubstaff – a globally recognized staff management software that empowers employees and employers to boost productivity, measure effort, and work smarter.
So let’s discover what Hubstaff is all about and what it is capable of doing.
Introduction to Hubstaff
Hubstaff is an advanced time-tracking and productivity monitoring tool that helps organizations keep track of their employees and tasks. It features several helpful modules that help real-time tracking of staff activities and movements, automates payroll, and generates reports with great ease.
Available as a web, desktop, and mobile app apart from a Chrome extension, Hubstaff helps you track each employee’s work hours, understand what they are working on and how much they have accomplished, irrespective of their location. In addition, the application helps you keep track of your project budgets, payroll, schedules, and progress through an intuitive and minimalistic dashboard.
Hubstaff lets you manage the productivity of your remote team and helps boost staff efficiency while building trust. It allows you to view the websites and apps that your teams frequent and the time they have spent. You can also view screenshots, check mouse and keyboard usage, and view detailed reports on how productive they have been throughout the day.
Besides measuring your staff hours and viewing timesheets, you can also use Hubstaff to track the time your teams spend on each task and project. You can also view various reports on your team’s performance over a selected period and provide approvals directly from the application. Using Hubstaff’s dashboard, you can get a quick overview of how each project is managed and create custom widgets for viewing essential metrics.
Hubstaff integrates seamlessly with over 40 essential apps and tools (including Zapier) to help you handle administrative and operational tasks like a champ. It enables you to automate payroll and invoicing for your teams, allowing you to manage project budgets based on hours, billing rates, or freelancer pay rates. As a result, you can build to-dos, create custom project budgets, assign team members to tasks, and control costs throughout the lifecycle of your projects.
Apart from assisting you in tracking your project cost in real-time, Hubstaff also helps you get notified when each project stage nears completion. Additionally, the application allows you to set budget and time limits on tasks and alerts you when they are exceeded. This helps you bring down costs and complete assignments within the stipulated budget and time.
Hubstaff helps you manage your employees from anywhere and track their location in real-time through GPS and geofencing. It allows you to create and schedule work orders effortlessly and manage employees in multiple locations for better resource planning and allocation.
To support organizations of various types, Hubstaff has created three separate applications for different types of workforce monitoring needs, which are:
- Hubstaff Time: For employees’ time tracking and reporting
- Hubstaff Desk: For managing teams, tasks, and employee activities
- Hubstaff Field: For remote teams requiring GPS, geolocation, and team management
Now that we know what Hubstaff is let us dive in to find out the software’s key features.
Key Features of Hubstaff
Hubstaff offers several powerful features for effective workforce management and monitoring, they are:
1. Advanced Employee Oversight
Hubstaff allows you to monitor the productivity of your employees and visualize your work in progress. It enables you to view the apps and URLs that each employee has visited and measure their activity levels through keystrokes and mouse clicks. Hubstaff also provides you the option to take screenshots and know when your employees are idle. This helps you apprise them better based on their data, which is sent to you regularly.
2. Time & Attendance Tracking
Since time is an essential factor in any field of work, Hubstaff enables you to track the time your team spends on each task, project, client, location, or work order. The application generates detailed timesheets based on date, assignment, and projects, which are then sent to you for approval.
For field teams, Hubstaff’s iPhone & Android apps help teams log their attendance while on the move. You can also plan, schedule, and modify shifts and get notified when your staff deviates from/misses their shifts.
3 .Geofencing & GPS
Hubstaff’s geofencing feature helps employees log in automatically when they arrive at a specific location. The solution helps track employee location in real-time and view routes taken and hours spent at each job site.
Their attendance is automatically calculated based on their assigned shift and the hours they have worked. This helps create automated and accurate time cards that help minimize paperwork, reduce labor overheads and offer precise cost estimates.
4. Productivity Management
Hubstaff’s dashboard helps you view your entire team’s productivity at one go and prioritize tasks. It enables you to measure activity rates and reduce inefficiencies/bottlenecks in your processes for greater productivity.
Both you and your staff can see how productive they have been, what they worked on, and how much time they have spent on each task. You can also set custom goals for your staff and provide them with achievement badges once they succeed.
5. Easier Payroll & Invoicing
With Hubstaff, you can set pay rates for each team member and project for accurate invoicing. The application also automates the invoicing process and helps generate detailed invoices for your staff.
Each payment generates a separate report which is shared instantly with employees. Moreover, Hubstaff makes it easy to separate non-billable hours from actual work time and share it with your clients.
6. Project Budgeting
Another significant advantage of Hubstaff comes in the form of its state-of-the-art project budgeting features. The application helps you stay on top of your project commitments, set budgets and time limits for each task.
In addition, it enables you to get notified when projects get completed, and budgets start exceeding the set limits. This facilitates faster and more accurate billing to clients based on data, improving transparency and building trust.
7. Detailed Reports
Hubstaff offers various reports that help you gauge team efficiency, agility, and growth. These reports are highly customizable and filtered based on time, team members, clients, or tasks.
Reports can also be shared, scheduled, adjusted, and downloaded to mitigate your administration efforts and provide the correct pay to your in-house/freelancing teams. The video below shows how you can use Hubstaff’s reports to gain insights on various business aspects.
8. Mobile Time Tracking
Using Hubstaff’s dedicated apps for Android and iOS, you can easily track the attendance of your remote team members, create shifts and adjust attendance. It allows your staff to clock in and out from anywhere or login automatically through geofencing.
You can also use the mobile app to view an employee’s real-time location, late/missed shifts, assign tasks, and time-off requests. Additionally, you can review and approve timesheets directly from the app dashboard.
Apart from the above features, Hubstaff helps you create policies for your teams and fix their shift times, holidays, and break times. The solution also allows you onboard your staff in minutes and customize rights for each employee based on their role and project.
Our Final Verdict
Hubstaff has left no stone unturned to ensure that teams of all sizes and types can improve their productivity, oversight, and control over their operations in no time. Available for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android in SaaS and on-premise solutions, it covers the entire gamut of employee and task management and tracking with dedicated modules for measuring efficiency, effort and costs involved.
Be it time-tracking, reporting, workforce monitoring, timesheet management, payroll, or reporting that you need, Hubstaff does it all, and with great elan and accuracy.
The application is also very user-friendly and has a robust 24×7 support team behind it, making it a great addition to any organization needing to streamline its workforce and tasks. We are therefore inclined to give Hubstaff a ‘Perfect Ten’ in our review owing to its massive potential in transforming the future of workforce management.
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