She says that companies that use monitoring software should communicate why it’s necessary and exactly how they’ll use the information gathered. “Technological oversight that’s too invasive can make employees feel that their employers don’t trust them.” “A successful remote work situation requires trust on the part of both parties in an employment relationship,” she says. But it also runs the risk of crossing the line into surveillance. “Using a monitoring software like Hubstaff to allow remote employees to track their time in cases where they bill clients for labor costs offers clear benefits,” says Liz Malatestinic, a senior lecturer in Human Resource Management at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. He says trials of Hubstaff have tripled since March and that the company converts around one in every five users into a paying customer (the software costs between $7 and $20 per month per user). Nevogt says interest in employee-monitoring software has surged over the past couple of months as teams have shifted to remote work amid the coronavirus crisis.

It can even calculate a productivity score based on the percentage of the workday an employee spends typing and moving the mouse. The software enables employers to track everything from the websites an employee visits while on the clock to their GPS coordinates (a feature some companies use to verify that salespeople are visiting clients). Nevogt founded Hubstaff in 2012 with fellow entrepreneur Jared Brown in response to his own struggles managing a remote team at a start-up. “It’s more about verifying that a time sheet is accurate.” “It’s not really us sitting there monitoring the work being done,” he says.

And he hopes the bosses who use Hubstaff’s software don’t, either.

The cofounder and chief executive of Hubstaff, a Fishers company whose employee-monitoring software is used by 11,500 paying customers worldwide, has no interest in cracking the whip every time an employee opens Facebook. Dave Nevogt doesn’t want to be Big Brother.

Hubstaff meaning