An employer's failure to communicate performance standards leads to a costly tribunal ruling
A Singapore employer has been ordered to pay $30,000 to a former audit manager after the Employment Claims Tribunals found her dismissal during probation lacked just cause or excuse.
Tribunal Magistrate Joel Tan found that the employer's performance assessments were unreliable and that the employee had never been given a meaningful opportunity to understand or meet the standards against which she was ultimately judged.
The claimant was engaged on April 21, 2025, as a regional internal control audit manager, subject to a six-month probationary period. She brought 15 years of audit experience to the role.
In the months that followed, concerns began to emerge, though largely on one side of the relationship.
The audit manager's reporting supervisor formed a view that she lacked passion, initiative, and engagement, but never raised those concerns with her directly.
The supervisor also never conducted any of the periodic performance reviews required under the company's own probation management process, and never explained what a passing competency rating required.
The employee only then read for the first time the comments, ratings, and scores her supervisor had recorded in the probation evaluation form on October 16, 2025.
This was the same day she was handed two weeks' notice of termination, with her last day of employment set on October 31, 2025.
She subsequently filed a claim under s 14(2) of the Employment Act 1968, alleging dismissal without just cause or excuse.
Tribunal finds assessments unreliable
The employer argued the dismissal was justified by documented poor performance.
The claimant had scored 71% against the required 80% threshold on her performance goals, and an average competency rating of 2.4, rounded down to 2, against the required 3.
Tan, however, was not persuaded. On the competency review, he found that the reporting supervisor had assigned below-average ratings across six of ten competencies without any documented justification, and without ever explaining to the claimant what was required to achieve a passing rating.
"The oral justifications offered at the hearing amounted to little more than impressions untethered to any defined standard and unsupported by any documented observation," the tribunal's ruling read.
"Ratings produced by that process could not be accepted as reliable evidence that the claimant fell below the competency threshold."
Crucially, had any one of those six competencies been rated 3 instead of 2, the claimant would have passed the competency threshold entirely.
On the performance goals, the tribunal found the deductions applied across all four goals were similarly unjustified. The respondent was also not able to prove the alleged shortcomings existed in several instances.
Where deficiencies were found, including the claimant's refusal to provide interim audit reporting despite being asked twice, the tribunal held that a proven shortcoming was not automatically a proven basis for the deduction applied, particularly where the claimant had never been told those matters would carry such weight.
The tribunal also found that the weightage of one goal had been silently doubled without the claimant's knowledge, after a fifth goal was removed and its 10% weighting reassigned.
This move, according to the magistrate, meant the claimant "found herself assessed against a goal that had quietly doubled in significance."
"Ignorance of a standard and inability to meet it are different things and treating them as equivalent is precisely the error that a structured probation management process is designed to prevent," Tan said.
"Unfortunately, the respondent did not implement its probation management process in the way that it was designed."
The employer was ordered to pay the claimant $30,000, the maximum permissible under the claim limit, plus $300 in costs and $60 in disbursements.
