Time Tracking and Productivity Monitoring Software to Help Businesses Embrace the Global Workforce

In a Nutshell: A growing number of companies in a range of business categories see the advantages of a distributed workforce. Whether you’re fully remote or have a hybrid structure, the challenge is to keep track of your remote hires and contractors — and the work they do — without making them feel and behave as if they’re under a microscope. Hubstaff oversees productivity and projects, manages payroll and payments, and generates actionable insights from real-time performance metrics while saving time and incenting teams to improve. Hubstaff helps businesses of all sizes work with talented people everywhere in the world.

In case you don’t know, the cat’s out of the bag when it comes to remote and hybrid work. COVID may have accelerated the transition from office buildings to dining rooms and spare bedrooms. But the paw prints were on the wall long before the pandemic demonstrated the viability and desirability of working from home for millions.

It just took a while for momentum to gather. Significantly, the digital links that make work from home possible also multiply the options for owners and managers interested in outsourcing or partnering on a contract basis. It turns out that digital transformation can put people anywhere in the world in the same virtual office.

That’s a good thing because it means new possibilities for businesses at every level — from the SMB to the enterprise — and in all categories for whom remote or outsourced work is a value add. It can mean cost savings, especially for businesses that rely on contract partners. It also brings the opportunity to choose the best workers from a vastly expanded, even global, pool.

The only question is which tools to adopt to make it happen. Hubstaff, which started connecting entrepreneurs to global contract partners in the relatively ancient times of 2012, has become a leader in the time management and productivity metrics space. Hubstaff even includes online payroll and payments to pay teams more efficiently.

At last count, more than 112,000 businesses worldwide used Hubstaff to manage and pay their workforces. Each month, the platform tracks over 21 million hours, helps complete more than 4 million tasks, and facilitates the processing of over 300,000 payments.

Chief Product Officer Cody Rogers said Hubstaff just keeps growing as more business owners and managers seek to leverage the flexibility and desirability of remote work with a platform dedicated to solving pain points and supporting customers along the way.

“The pandemic opened a lot of eyes to the future of work,” Rogers said. “People realize they don’t have to hire just in their city or country and that they can find talented people everywhere.”

In the financial space we cover here at CardRates.com, Hubstaff helps companies like Credit Sesame (which provides tools to help consumers improve their credit scores) gain the efficiencies necessary to increase their value to customers.

But no matter what business category you’re in, Hubstaff can help you do better business by making it easier for you to work with employees and contractors where they are and vice versa.

However, using Hubstaff is not like being in a Big Brother situation where the employer is constantly standing over the employee’s work. Instead, it keeps everybody in the loop about who knows what and when.

For example, workers and contractors have access to their data, can edit and remove items, and control when Hubstaff starts and stops during their workflow.

Hubstaff also gives managers control over the privacy level they require. For example, admins can monitor employees by ordering screenshots of work in progress with details blurred.

The blurred screenshots constitute proof of work without compromising potentially personal information elsewhere on the worker’s or contractor’s screen.

“We’re useful when you need to increase transparency and trust around your business while understanding the work your remote employees and contractors are doing,” Rogers said. “The level of privacy is up to the organization and what they need in their culture.”

It’s a mix and match when it comes to products and services within the Hubstaff platform, which works everywhere you’d expect it to work. Apps for Mac, Linux, Chromebook, Windows, Android, and iOS offer the same seamless functionality.

Time tracking services include automatic timesheet generation and GPS time tracking at location-based job sites. The tracking app works across platforms, and analytics and reporting functions can help improve project and overall business outcomes.

Workforce management elements encompass scheduling, attendance, overtime tracking, billing, and invoicing. All told, more than 20 reports add context to the data moving through Hubstaff in real time.

“The productivity metrics are super powerful,” Rogers said.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports several U.S. states with work-from-home rates of up to 30% or more. Interestingly, data from the District of Columbia — the seat of the nation’s capital — shows that 56.5% of workers there are based wholly or partially at home.

Hubstaff’s combination of time tracking and productivity metrics gives a complete picture of what people are working on, wherever they are. Reporting reveals specifics like meeting time to help managers understand not just when but how much they’re working on organizing projects and clients instead of writing lines of code, for example.

Workforce management functionality lets managers set time and work-hour limits to prevent contractors from exceeding 40 hours per week or eight hours a day.

Hubstaff includes robust payroll and payment services. Whether your teams track time through Hubstaff or through another app, the seamless workflow allows you to create and assign projects and tasks, assign them to those who need to track them, and incorporate pay rates and pay frequencies.

Then, you can pay your workers or contractors automatically or manually, depending on your preference.

“When you make the effort to put in pay rates, you really start to see how much you’re spending,” Rogers said. “You can understand the profitability of different projects and clients.”

Platform integrations that extend the platform’s functionality are a mainstay at Hubstaff. Integrations with leading providers like Wise and Deel accommodate the patterns and habits of business categories relying on remote work to pay people quickly and easily.

Integrations with project management platforms like Asana and Trello, the Slack communication program, and payment, accounting, and invoicing platforms such as PayPal and Quickbooks extend the platform in many directions.

“What’s still surprising is a lot of people will manage teams with a really simple timer and no monitoring at all,” Rogers said. “Your hires could be doing other client work and just assuming you don’t understand.”

If you’re not a business owner, put yourself in the shoes of one, and you’ll quickly realize the typical predicament of those who embrace remote work and global contracting.

If you’re paying people hourly and you’re spending money out of pocket to hire a team of developers remotely in another country, shouldn’t you be able to see the work as it’s in the process of completion? Wouldn’t you want to have some transparency in that work and not just trust without verifying?

That’s what Hubstaff enables you to do. Hubstaff’s depth and breadth of features help owners and managers stay abreast of their remote-work challenges. The basis of that commitment is the company’s core principles of transparency, access, and control manifested in those features.

“It’s not just time tracking — we have great productivity metrics that help teams be efficient and productive while flagging unusual activity and setting up notifications for whatever you want to know,” Rogers said.

Rogers said it’s a challenge to compute average ROI from using Hubstaff because each company is different in how it organizes itself and uses the platform. After a free 14-day trial, companies from the startup stage to the enterprise level take advantage of price tiers that add functionality as they progress.

Looking ahead, the Hubstaff team looks forward to developing additional creative ways to use the mountains of data at its disposal. As more companies worldwide turn to remote work and global contracting, Hubstaff has more opportunities to connect the dots by helping customers measure themselves against industry averages and benchmarks.

Meanwhile, the team also concentrates on supporting the many customers it has. Frontline teams communicate with customers daily. The product department has an internal competition for quarterly customer outreach.

App and email surveys measure the zeitgeist among the customer base. And a customer advisory board offers high-level insights. On the horizon are more analytics and reports and more focus on payroll and payments as the glue that holds the platform together.

“Businesses that connect Hubstaff to how they pay their people get the most value,” Rogers said. “We’re focused on the payments piece and making that easier for people.”