Choose
Before you meet a candidate.Define the job, price the hire properly, and ask the questions that actually predict whether a placement lasts.
Book 1, Hiring a Domestic Helper in Singapore
Read moreA household with staff is a small operation. Run it like one.
Research-backed workbooks for Singapore households who employ a domestic helper. Choose well, lead clearly, run it smoothly.
The Shared Standard, household operations for Singapore homes with a helper.
The reframe
The problem is usually not the person you hired.
We asked employers in Singapore what the hardest part of hiring a helper was. Sixteen of the twenty-seven who answered that question named the same thing, and it was not the candidate.
It was managing their own expectations. That came ahead of reference checks. It came ahead of dealing with the agency.
Which means the most common failure in a household with staff is not a hiring failure. It is that nobody wrote down what the job was, what good looked like, or when the two of you would sit down and talk about it. Those are operational problems. They have operational fixes, and the fixes work regardless of who you hired.
The framework
Choose. Lead. Do.
Three books, one framework. Each one covers a different moment, and you only need the one you are in.
Lead
Day one to day ninety.Onboarding, one written standard the two of you agree on, and a check-in rhythm that catches problems while they are still small.
Book 2, The First 90 Days with a New Helper
Read moreDo
Day one onwards.The practical standards themselves. Cleaning, laundry and home health for humid and air-conditioned homes. Written for her, bought by you.
Book 3, The Domestic Helper Training Handbook
Read moreNot sure which one you need? Every book opens with a one-page guide that tells you. Which book do I need today
The difference
One standard. Written by both of you.
Most advice in this market picks a side. Agencies sell you a placement and a set of house rules. Forums tell you what other employers tolerate. Neither produces the thing that actually makes a household work, which is a single written standard that the employer and the helper built together and both understood before anything went wrong.
That is what the word shared is doing in our name. Not your standard, applied to her. Not her habits, tolerated by you. One document, two authors.
It is harder than writing rules. It is also the only version that survives a bad week.
Evidence
What sits behind the books
Primary research
A survey of employers in Singapore, run as part of an MBA thesis on cross trust teams, graded 1.2. Published in full on this site with sample size and method.
Singapore only
Every regulatory and cost figure is sourced to the agency that sets it, with the date the source page was last updated. No figures borrowed from other markets.
Five competitor segments analysed
Agencies, training providers, platform courses, general household books and forum advice. The gap each one leaves is why these books exist.
Three published titles
Print and digital. Written, tested with readers, and revised before release.
Free tool
Before you interview anyone, write down what the job actually is.
The interview and values tool is free. It gives you the questions that predict whether a placement lasts, and it tells you which of the popular ones predict nothing.
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About
Who writes this
Lisa Gewald has spent fifteen years designing how sales organisations define roles, set standards and measure whether people are succeeding. The same problem shows up in households, undiagnosed and usually blamed on the wrong person.
She employs a helper in Singapore. She wrote the first of these books because she could not find one that treated the situation as an operations question, and she wrote the other two because the first one was not enough on its own.