The five-day in-office work week is gone for good, but that presents difficulties for employers, according to a recent ZipRecruiter survey. The survey found that "the number one downside of remote work [that] employers cite is difficulty observing and monitoring employees"

Even as business leaders institute limits on working from home or mandate some forms of return-to-office policies over the past year—43 percent, according to the survey—they still encounter difficulty in observing and monitoring their employees when the employees are not in the office.

“It’s an incredibly challenging, frustrating and disorienting time for employers when the tool they relied on most, observing employees in-person, is gone,” ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak told CNBC. 

The demand for employee monitoring software increased since 2020, CNBC previously reported, but companies still have not been able to measure remote workers’ performance effectively. One key disadvantage is that such software may be able to record clock-in and clock-out times, as well as keystrokes or emails sent or received, but it cannot qualitatively measure productivity.

“It’s hard to know which measure these software programs track even matters,” said Pollak. “A lot of knowledge work is done in video meetings, or offline in phone calls, research and brainstorming, and it’s impossible to quantify all of that.”

Workplace surveillance can also backfire as it could undermine employees’ confidence in their managers and desire to be productive, which can lead to increased turnover, CNBC reported, citing research from the Journal of Management.

Fewer than 26 percent of U.S. households have someone working from home at least one day a week, down from a peak of 37 percent in early 2021, according to Census Bureau data cited by CNBC.

Only 16 percent of companies with office jobs that could feasibly be done remotely require employees to be in the office five days a week, the survey found. Even among the 43 percent of companies that have set tighter limits around remote work and mandated some form of return-to-office over the past year, only 14 percent have required workers to come back five days a week, the survey found. 

This could be attributable to workers’ still preferring remote options. ZipRecruiter reported that remote jobs posted on its site get more than three times as many applications than similar in-person jobs, on average.