The great debate.

One well-known communication executive laughed at what he termed "chit-chat," the personal news of employees, the comings and going, the births, marriages and bowling scores.

That's not the stuff of real communication," he argued, and no self-respecting editor would have any truck with the stuff."

His opponent, a man heavy with the years of wisdom, said hell no, that's precisely what employees want to read: they want to read about themselves. He contended that it is precisely such information that humanizes the impersonal, faceless corporation.

"The little people are important, too, he said.

Where do you stand on that argument?

Twenty years after the Great Debate I was chairing a workshop at an IABC international conference. I forget what the topic was, but one of the panelists-he was from Mississippi, as I recall-allowed that every June he includes pictures of all the high school graduates whose parents work with his company.

Another panelist expostulated that such material was not proper to a company publication, whose purpose is to inform employees about significant issues facing the company.

It was then that the meeting fell apart. Each of the 50 persons in the room could not wait to be heard; each had a vehement opinion on the subject In the back of the room a woman charged that the anti-high-school-picture crowd were nothing but elitists.

"You guys," she said, "forget that the little people are important, too."

Her very words. I grimaced, thinking of the Great Debate, and wondered if we had learned anything in the past 20 years.

Where do you stand on the question?

To find out, the editors of the Ragan Report asked their readers, "Do you think personal news about employees has a place in employee publications?"

Posing the question, I reminded myself that I had yet to attend an IABC international conference when I have not heard at least one speaker refer unkindly to this form of employee news.

"We have long since passed the time when employee communication means weddings and bowling scores," goes a typical comment. I need not finish the idea because you yourself have probably heard it expressed as well-that what today's employee cries out for is information about the problems and vital issues confronting the organization.

It is as if many editors and speakers at conferences are living in different worlds. The anti-bowling-score commentators don't live in the world that I see, one that includes thousands of publications crossing my desk, and a large proportion of them carrying news about weddings, births, deaths, and-shame! shame!-bowling scores.

Ragan Report readers seem to feel the same way, because 65 percent of them embraced the idea of personal news in employee publications. But the platitudes used to express them remained the same.

One response (in favor of personal news): "When most of us stopped being editors and became corporate communicators, it became un-chic to see ourselves as purveyors of Joe and his fish' stories. Unfortunately, most of our fellow employees are still interested in much of the same old stuff."

A different point of view: Carrying personal news about employees degrades the publication. Space in a publication is too important to waste."

So one can see how far we have come since the Great Debate in the early fifties. Not very far. Despite the technological miracles, despite the video and the audio, the electronics, the E-Mail, the computerized benefits statements, employee annual reports, the corporate policy letters to middle management, the upward communication-all done with growing sophistication and effect-employee communication people have not yet agreed upon what to communicate.

Don't believe it? A half-dozen colleagues ask about the spirit of openness existing in their organizations. Let me start things by recounting a few recent conversations.

A New York editor told me that a lawyer instructed her to remove the word "spearhead" from the annual report. Why? It brought to mind, he said, a phallic symbol.

One public relations director of a small college in the US South explained that she could issue no news releases, no report, no publication without the president's having approved it. She was awaiting an OK on page proofs for the year's first issue of the alumni magazine. It was july.

When three new senior vice presidents were appointed, the editor carried their one-column mug shots in a vertical arrangement because he needed something to balance horizontal elements in the lower part of the page. His boss disagreed. Up and down? That means the person pictured at the top is most important, doesn't it? No, the editor explained; they each have the same title, the story and headline make it clear that they are equals. The boss asked, "How long will it take to re-make the page?" That's why the October issue came out in December.

You can add your own stories-of the PR people who must get a dozen clearances for everything they do, of the president who takes home page proofs of the annual report to see what his wife thinks, of the story that can't be used because it is secret-only to find that it is featured on the evening's TV news show.

I relate these stories only to stress that what inhibits good communication within organizations is the fear of communication and the fear of candor. Which amounts to the same thing: communication cannot be successful unless it is candid.

Yes, many organizations, especially large ones, do the right thing.

They organize face-to-face communication programs with people who have the answers. They stimulate upward communication through a variety of programs. They hold video conferences not possible 20 years ago. They encourage employees to develop skills by using in-house educational programs.

What's more, communication people in these large organizations understand that communication neither begins nor ends with words on paper. They spend much money in improving communication between first-line supervisors and the rank-and-file. They conduct expensive surveys to see how effectively they are communicating.

Today's sophistication, as compared with the days when the new IABC was formed 20 years ago, can be seen in the numbers. IABC began its life in 1970 with about 3,000 members; today it has more than 11,000. That's only one indication that organizations want to improve their communication with employees. Survey after survey shows that top executives understand that the progress and perhaps even the survival of the organization depend upon getting employees on their side.

Are we making progress? Only an optimist would say yes. It is hardly necessary to say one more time that the actions of corporations-the mergers, the acquisitions, the takeovers, the downsizings, the LBOs, the enrichment of officers at the expense of employees and shareholders-speak with a deafening roar that transcends any words or communication programs we can devise.

A communication manager with a Fortune 500 company told me how he had to scrap his entire issue because a personnel vice president had second thoughts about an article that he had already approved. Cost: $11,000.

An editor tells me that for his bimonthly 16-page magazine he must obtain an average of 44 approvals. Is this the picture of a company fearlessly communicating the truth?

Some years ago a telephone company editor told me how all his readership surveys showed that employees were reading his publication. "And yet," he said, "I don't believe the surveys. In my bones I know they're not reading it. I get no feedback. They don't talk about it. I don't see them reading it. There is nothing that tells me that my publication is doing its job."

Whenever one hears an editor talk like this, put your money on him or her. They're right, not the surveys. The editor knows what's good communication: it's the stuff the lawyers keep out. It's the stuff that people talk about in the company cafeteria. It's worry about compensation and the employee's questions whether it is equitable or not. It is concern about where the company is going and where the employees will go-or fail to go-with it.

Practically all the research of the past 20 years reveals that employees want straight answers to their questions, straight information about their organization, candid talk from their leaders. This research, whether it comes from IABC or academic institutions, is widely known. Moreover, there is little disagreement about it. The speakers at IABC conferences are right: we do need more than bowling scores.

The problem is that we have not been able to find the right voice, the candid voice, the voice of friends talking over coffee, in our communication efforts. For the most part, we have confined our efforts to the surface facts, almost always good, and occasionally had. For the rest, we have remained happy with platitudes that proclaim that people want to read about people, that stories should be told through people, that in an age of nuggetized communication people like to see themselves in pictures.

Whenever I hear these arguments I ask what employees would rather read about-the courageous employee who has overcome the disabilities of childhood polio or a comparison of salary scales in which they might compare their earnings with those of their coworkers. People laugh. The question answers itself. In other words, the infatuation with human interest stories and personal news about employees is an unwitting and unconscious evasion of candid communication about what employees find truly important.

Maybe in the next 20 years we can make greater strides toward genuinely honest communication. Let's all try.