I'm a remote worker and I'm sure it's occasionally a pain that I'm at the gym, or sleeping, or otherwise not responding on Slack or whatever.
However, like many remote workers I work in a distributed team across several time zones. So it's not just "he goes to the gym in the afternoon," it's more like one person leaves the office in one time zone in order to beat the traffic jams, while another person in another time zone has to pick his daughter up from school, another in a third time zone gets up really early but can't do night calls because of family life, and so on. Slightly wonky schedules actually give us more coverage in case of crises, and the only way we could ever line everybody up for the same work hours would be to fire half the team.
We manage it all pretty well by scheduling our meetings in advance, not being afraid to pick up the phone, taking ownership of our work, and having senior people in different zones who can help fix urgent problems.
(However I totally agree with the "need for trust" comment above. I worked locally before going remote in this job, and also in two of the three other remote jobs I had in the past.)
However, like many remote workers I work in a distributed team across several time zones. So it's not just "he goes to the gym in the afternoon," it's more like one person leaves the office in one time zone in order to beat the traffic jams, while another person in another time zone has to pick his daughter up from school, another in a third time zone gets up really early but can't do night calls because of family life, and so on. Slightly wonky schedules actually give us more coverage in case of crises, and the only way we could ever line everybody up for the same work hours would be to fire half the team.
We manage it all pretty well by scheduling our meetings in advance, not being afraid to pick up the phone, taking ownership of our work, and having senior people in different zones who can help fix urgent problems.
(However I totally agree with the "need for trust" comment above. I worked locally before going remote in this job, and also in two of the three other remote jobs I had in the past.)