For software engineering, four hours of actual work per day is probably average even on-site.
The more someone becomes unavailable for communications, knowledge sharing, and meetings, the more work they create for their teammates and managers who have to compensate by tracking everything down, re-hashing missed meetings, re-communicating things that should have been covered the first time and so on.
It’s not enough to just write four hours of code every day and then disconnect, even if the average coder is also only writing four hours of code.
The solution is to find ways to knowledgeshare that don’t require everyone’s attention at the same time - like a well maintained wiki, or recorded knowledge sharing sessions.
Consensus building may well require synchronous communication, and it should be made clear to remote workers which meetings are cruft and which are important. This can be accomplished by publishing meeting agendas and goals prior to the actual meeting.
I think at the end of the day it is important to recognize that different people work differently and accommodations have to be made for all sides to contribute effectively. By that I mean some people need to sit in a meeting with a person that is presenting slides to learn, but someone else might pick up the same material via one paragraph and a diagram + access to the code, and someone else might work better with a whiteboard presentation.
I prefer async written communication (email) because it leaves behind an easily searchable record to reference in the future.
In all this thread I see a lot comments about bad remote employees, but bad managers often find scapegoats and blame them when they are the real problem, but its easy to cover that up with some of the more blackhat management techniques.
For example, I realized that he was pushing voice comms because then there wasn't a record of what he said. I later found out he takes notes during these voice comms but not accurately, so then he can "reference his notes" to spin the narrative to other team managers or c-suite. He would also then use those notes to misrepresent your statements to other people. arminiusreturns said he loves this idea, umm no I said I was open to the idea... stuff like that.
Managers like this make me want to turn on my corporate machiavelli, but I hate that side of me and just want to do good work, without all that. If thats how the game has to be played though... fine.
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver...
Has held true at all 7 jobs I have ever had.