About
Fifteen years designing how organisations define roles and set standards. The same problem shows up in households.
Why this exists
I employ a helper in Singapore. When I hired for the first time, I did what most people do. I asked friends, I read forum threads, I let an agency send me profiles, and I ended up making a significant decision about my own home on the basis of a twenty minute conversation and somebody else's reference letter.
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.
I spent fifteen years fixing exactly this problem in companies. It took me embarrassingly long to recognise it at home.
What I do professionally
I work in commercial excellence, sales control and analytics. In practice that means I design how organisations define roles, set standards, measure whether people are succeeding, and decide what to do when they are not. Fifteen years of it, across regions and functions.
The thing you learn doing that work is that almost nothing that looks like a people problem is one. A team missing its number is usually a team where the role was never properly defined, the standard was never written down, and the review cadence does not exist. Fix the structure and most of the character diagnoses evaporate.
In 2025 I did an MBA. My thesis looked at trust in cross-cultural teams, and as part of it I ran a survey of employers in Singapore who employ a domestic helper. It was graded 1.2.
I expected the survey to tell me something about the helpers. It told me something about the employers.
What the research found
I asked employers what the hardest part of hiring had been. Sixteen of the twenty-seven who answered that question 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, and small operations fail for operational reasons, not because of the character of the people in them.
What The Shared Standard publishes
Three workbooks. One framework: choose, lead, do.
They are workbooks rather than books because reading about this changes nothing. The output of each one is a document you and she both have: a job description, a written standard, a check-in schedule. Something that exists on paper on a Tuesday in month seven when you cannot remember what you agreed.
The name is the whole idea. Not your standard, imposed on her. Not her habits, tolerated by you. One standard, written by both of you. No other book in this market does that, and it is the only part of this I would defend to the last.
Everything regulatory in these books is sourced to the agency that sets it, with the date. I would rather print a range than a figure to the cent, because a number printed to the cent is wrong within a year and then sits in a book for five.
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 three books and a free tool.
It does not tell you which country to hire from, and it will not tell you what people from anywhere are like. Where origin matters, it matters because a regulator in that country has set a rule that binds you, and those rules are stated with their source.
The company
The Shared Standard Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore private limited company, UEN 202534330H, registered in 2025 and formerly named Culture & Consciousness SG Pte. Ltd. I am the founder, director and author.
Alongside the writing I built the business the way I would build any commercial function: primary market research first, then a competitive analysis across five market segments, pricing benchmarked against regulated market spend, a defined funnel from the free tool through to the books, and a financial model with unit economics by channel. It is the work I do professionally, applied to my own P&L, and I found it a useful thing to have done.
The books are published. The business runs without me.
Contact
For press, research enquiries or bulk orders, write to hello@thesharedstandard.com.