At Adaptavist, we perceive staff value by the contributions they make to the business. Because we all work from home, from locations all over the UK, visibility of online presence is vital...
I can't remember whether it was Stewart Mader (from Atlassian / Wiki Paterns) or Peter Reiser (from Sun Microsystems), but recently I read an article that indicated some staff feel that they are "losing power" by publishing their knowledge for other staff to see - they feel that if all their "secret" knowledge becomes easily accessible by others, they'll become expendable and may lose their job.
Organisations that have started using wikis or other forms of collaboration already know this to be the complete opposite of the truth - if a company had to lay off workers, they'd lay off the people that have not made a visible contribution to the company, the people who try not to get noticed. Staff who regularly share knowledge become more widely known within the organisation and thus their status as a guru within the company increases and their jobs are more secure as a result. They're also more likely to be asked to participate in prestigious projects and are often seen as thought leaders or experts within their area of the business.
In an online distributed company like Adaptavist, this is especially true - if a member of staff isn't contributing to some online resource they literally aren't doing any work!
Obviously, some staff will contribute more frequently than others depending on job role. For example, Emma is currently doing some screencasts showing how to use Theme Builder - they take a while to develop so it's important that people are aware of that. Regular communications about work in progress therefore becomes important to ensure that other staff know progress is being made.
One of the key benefits of online contributions is they are easy to highlight as examples of "this really impressed us" - like Emma speaking Japanese, Sandra setting up a newbie forum or James adding [tutorials]. When such contributions are highlighted, it boosts the status of the people involved in those contributions within the company and promotes others to do the same.
