alt Hacker News> In a lot of cases, there will be something going on in their private life they are struggling with. If you help them with that, or at least help them navigate work around this, you will end up with a great team member.
Note that there already has to be a pretty high level of trust between that employee and their manager for this to work; if I don't feel like I can trust my manager, I will absolutely keep my lips zipped about anything not directly work related.
Oh absolutely, and it would be my responsibility to build this. In fact, I don't even need details. I just prefer to know about a team members situation and have a plan around it, before clients, internal customers, our boss and HR start coming knocking with hard questions or worse.