About
Fifteen years in the corporate world, and a great deal of it worth bringing home.
Why this exists
When I hired a helper for the first time, I did what most people do. I asked friends, I read forum threads, and I ended up making a significant decision about my own home half blind.
It did not go badly. It went vaguely. Nobody had written down what the job was. Nobody had said out loud what good looked like. When something was not working, I corrected it in the moment, which meant I was managing by interruption, and she was working out the rules by trial and error.
It took me embarrassingly long to recognise what was missing: a proper onboarding plan and real expectation management. It was my MBA thesis that opened my eyes.
What I do
I work in commercial excellence, sales control and analytics, and have done for fifteen years. In practice that means I design how organisations define roles, set standards, measure whether people are actually succeeding, and decide what to do when they are not.
In 2025 I did an MBA. My thesis looked at leadership in the household and trust in cross-cultural teams, and I ran a survey of employers in Singapore as part of it. That is where the two halves met. The problem I had been solving in companies for years turned out to be sitting in my own kitchen, unnamed and undiagnosed, because nobody thinks of a home as a place where a job needs defining.
Everything The Shared Standard publishes is that method, brought home and written down. The workbooks are the applied output of the research, not a new career.
What the research found
I asked employers what the hardest part of hiring had been. 59% named managing their own expectations. That came ahead of checking references. It came ahead of dealing with the agency.
Read that again, because it took me a while. The single most common difficulty in hiring a helper, according to the people doing the hiring, is located in the employer.
That is not a criticism of employers. It is a description of an untrained management task. Nobody is taught how to define a household job, because a household is not supposed to be a workplace, except that the moment you employ someone it is one. And a household with staff is a small operation.
What The Shared Standard publishes
Three workbooks. One framework: choose, lead, do.
The name is the whole idea. Not your standard, imposed on her. Not her habits, tolerated by you. Set by you, shared with her, adjusted so it holds. I could not find another book in this market that does that, and it is the only part of this I would defend to the last.
What The Shared Standard is not
It does not certify anyone. It is not affiliated with the Ministry of Manpower or any government body, and nothing it publishes is legal advice or a substitute for checking the current requirements yourself.
It does not sell placements, and it takes no referral fees from agencies. There is nothing to sell you except the books and the tools that go with them, and the helper never pays for any of it.
It does not deal in national stereotypes. Where origin matters, it matters because a rule binds you, and the rule is named with its source.
The company
The Shared Standard Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore private limited company, UEN 202534330H, registered in 2025. I am the founder, director and author.