I work from home and it's less than half and half for our team. But working from home doesn't mean you don't communicate. Email, Document collaboration, Regular VC all contribute to the visibility of your work. No one can take credit for my work because I'm extremely visible through multiple channels. I don't even show up at the office more than once every few months.
Visibility doesn't have anything to do with being in the office. It has everything to do with communication and you can do that with a VC pretty much as easily as you can face to face.
It's worth noting that, in a lot of companies without an established work-from-home culture, you need to over-communicate in order to compensate for the lack of physical presence in the office. As the saying goes, when you're out of sight, you tend to be out of mind. Therefore you always have to remind people that you're in front of your computer or on the phone busting your ass, instead of watching TV or taking a nap, which is what people assume you're doing by default because that's what they would be doing if they were at home.
Github checkins, Hipchat comments, JIRA tickets opening and closing, emails, texts, etc. If you work from home I recommend :
1. Overcommunicating, which also creates documentation
2. Leaving an audit record, like a time log
3. Going to as many office social functions as possible. You can up your visibility as much with one party as you can with ten days in a cube.
This is exactly right. When someone asks the question what was "Joe" doing yesterday there should be at least one person who can say "I was working with him via {email,chat,phone,VC} on that thing we had discussed earlier." Or... "Oh, didn't you see his email? He sent out that design doc for further discussion" or some other variant. Even in companies with an established work from culture it's important to communicate frequently and with detail.
That requires the other parties to realize this, too. You can send all the emails you want, have all the video chats you want, and IM to your heart's content, and it'll be worthless unless your boss is receptive to it.
And it works the other way. If you are in the office all the time, but no one knows about you or what you are doing or were you are at, the same thing can happen.
So being at home is completely irrelevant to this story, except that it may make it slightly easier.
Visibility doesn't have anything to do with being in the office. It has everything to do with communication and you can do that with a VC pretty much as easily as you can face to face.