Excerpt: Communication and counseling for poor performance is a supervisor’s primary responsibility. Employees usually don’t discuss personal problems with you, and that’s ok. But if performance doesn’t improve you have to take action necessary to improve that performance. Keep in mind that you can only suggest or advise the employees to get help. And that’s what this video is all about. As a supervisor you have no control over personal problems, nor can you be expected to solve them. You can explain how these problems are affecting the employee’s job performance, and the consequences of not improving. But you can only suggest or advise the employee to seek help for personal problems. Identifying behavior changes, emotional stress, health problems, and performance changes are early signs of employee problems. When problems begin to establish a pattern, and then work performance deteriorates, the problem should be recognized and documented. Supervisors frequently believe that their only course of action is to endure the employee or fire them. Understanding the causes and affects of losses connected with troubled employees can go a long way towards correcting this assumption. Troubled employees are a serious business liability and expense. Property damage, personal injury, lost sales, rejects, reworks, loss of skills, production delays, wasted materials, management time and energy, and increased insurance costs to name just a few.