Yeah that's always been an issue at offices and I think while it changed a bit is still an issue with WFH.

My dad told me a story about his work place when I was a kid. There was this guy that would come in at like 6 am and leave at like 2:30pm. One day their boss, who came to the office at 10 every day for whatever reason was annoyed or something and publicly reprimanded the guy for leaving so early. His colleagues however knew that he was both a good worker and that he was in early, not slacking and basically told their boss to shut it. It probably helped that they were in a unionized shop :)

I would hate a public whiteboard. I think it would very easily be seen as or even used as corporate control. A lot things that seem like a good thing actually aren't. Like unlimited vacations. In general people take less vacation under such policies. Of course there are people that abuse it and actually "take it too far" but mostly social pressures like not wanting to be "the guy that took the most vacation" reduce the amount of time you take. Especially in NA where a culture of overwork exists in many places. Personally I keep good track of how many vacation days I take and try to take the same number every year. 30 days is very reasonable.

Now to come back to the topic of perception. It's hard to talk about somehow but I think talking about it with your colleagues is the only way. As a team (not coming from HR or "corporate") you should come up with team agreements. If you don't make them explicit they are still going to be there but it will be unspoken and (mis) interpretable. So a team agreement might be that everyone is supposed to be available in a certain time frame. Because you as a team talk about it you can (hopefully) find an arrangement that works for everyone. Joe always has to get the kids from school at 3 and is back at 4, no problem. Everyone knows to either wait or send their questions to him in an async friendly format during that time. Jane is an early bird and will have a PR ready before most others even started their day but leaves at 2.

This only works well in small groups I believe and if there is room for overlap where you can actually talk and bond. Very few people overall can work effectively in a completely async fashion. The world does not mostly consist of people that can do this well. But for most small "Seal teams" you can find an arrangement which works. You usually won't be able to find an arrangement that works well for an entire company of 10000 people.

An example of what to do when you don't have 100% overlap. Bouncing something off someone can also take the form of a PR. Here I have to plug metrics. I really detest metrics. They incentivise using tools in just one specific way so as to show good numbers. "Time to merge" must be below X. Screw that, we have a team in 5 time zones and we have a tiny amount of real time communications overlap so we use async communications which includes just making a decision and implementing it that way and putting it up as a PR asking "I thought about this and I had these 3 options. I thought this was the best one because X, Y and Z. What do you guys think"? By the time of the next in person (well Video :)) overlap some people have had time to take a look and we can discuss or they have replied. I might need to redo some stuff or adjust it. That takes time. My metric will suffer. But using the PR for this made good use of a tool we already have to solve an issue. But in a company of 10000 people you will have managers of manager of managers that look at metrics only. Or at the fact that Joe didn't respond to the question they asked at 3:05 for an hour.