Company fired woman during probation but fails to prove poor performance, to pay her S$30,000 for wrongful dismissal

She also did not conduct any of the periodic documented reviews the probation process required.

The woman was left to navigate a set of qualitative descriptors without any guidance on how they should be practically applied to her work or what she needed to demonstrate to achieve a passing rating, said the magistrate.

Since she was on probation, she would naturally be unfamiliar with the company’s specific methods, priorities and ways of working, and could not be expected to intuit what each competency required, said Mr Tan.

The responsibility for making those standards clear fell on her supervisor, and the magistrate found she had not discharged it.

The ratings themselves demonstrated this, as every entry in the probation evaluation form meant to record the supervisor’s justification for each rating was left blank. The justifications were only given orally at the hearing and the magistrate found they did not withstand scrutiny.

For example, the supervisor said the woman “could have a bit of difficulties in teamwork” and especially in “some of the communication” and that she “might not be that passionate” about certain tasks.

The supervisor also said there was a “gap” between her expectations of the woman’s work standards and her actual performance. She also said the woman could have been “more proactive” in decision making and was uninterested in how the company was doing.

The magistrate said these impressions revealed a supervisor who had formed a view of the woman – that she lacked passion, initiative and engagement – but who did not explain the standard against which that view was formed, or demonstrate that the woman had been measured against it in any principled way.

The magistrate stressed that it was not that the woman had no areas for improvement, but said identifiable shortcomings are not the same as proven failures against a defined standard.

“Put another way, the ratings produced by this process were, in substance, (the supervisor’s) impressions dressed up as a suitability review,” said Mr Tan.

SUPERVISOR’S CRITICISMS

The supervisor shared various issues she had with the woman’s work. For example, she pointed to an email in September 2025 where the supervisor expressed frustration that “format/font/aesthetic are important”.

She claimed that the woman had been provided with a template with the correct formatting, but her deliverables consistently had formatting issues, requiring her to personally rectify them.

The woman responded that she had used the template provided and had not been told what specifically was wrong.

The supervisor had also tasked the woman with conducting a process audit of the some of the company’s business segments, saying that preparing an audit plan should not be difficult for someone with 15 years of audit experience.

The woman replied asking for a specific scope, saying the assignment could not proceed without a clear scope and review objective.

The magistrate found that the company had not established that any formatting deficiency existed of a nature or extent that would justify treating it as a performance shortcoming.

On the audit assignment, the magistrate found that while the supervisor’s instructions were high-level and open-ended, they were not so vague as to be incapable of execution.

He accepted that it had been shown to be difficult to engage the woman in this assignment, which was not completed. However, while the woman’s failure to engage adequately with this assignment was a genuine shortcoming, it did not justify the score she received and the company could not rely on a scoring process it never disclosed.

He noted that at no point in the supervisor’s evidence did she criticise the quality of the woman’s audit work, which is arguably the core of what is required in one of her performance goals.

THE COMPANY’S OTHER WITNESSES

The company had called two other witnesses, a man who was involved in the assessment of the woman in the probation evaluation form and a human resources (HR) officer.

The man testified that he had independently formed the view that the woman was unsuitable for confirmation, drawing on more than 20 years of experience he had within the organisation.

He said the woman was “simply not up to expectation” compared with other employees who could adapt and adjust within three to four months. He also repeated concerns about her failure to meet deadlines but acknowledged that his assessment was based largely on feedback from her supervisor.

The magistrate said the man’s evidence did not assist the company’s case for the same reason that his assessment rested on a comparison against an unstated benchmark.

The HR officer said she had conversations with the woman demonstrating that she was aware that she was underperforming.

Two months into the job, the woman told HR that she was not coping well with the workload and the company took this feedback into account and hired a contract employee.

The woman initiated another conversation with HR in August, saying she did not think she would pass probation because she was not a good fit in the department and that she did not consider her supervisor to be qualified to manage her, given her lack of audit experience.

The woman asked if she could change her reporting line or transfer to another department, but was told this was not possible. The woman then said resignation might be her only option, but the HR officer said this remark was likely made in frustration as no resignation letter followed.

The magistrate accepted that the woman had been genuinely concerned about her prospects but did not accept that these conversations advanced the company’s case.

If anything, it was consistent with the woman’s account that she had identified a mismatch between what her supervisor valued and what she considered the substance of her role. This was not an admission of incompetence but a reflection of the expectation gap disclosed by evidence.

MAGISTRATE’S FINDINGS

Mr Tan concluded that the company’s case rested on its assessment that the woman had fallen below the suitability standards in her probation evaluation form, justifying her dismissal.

However, the company was unable to establish that the individual scores and ratings producing the woman’s aggregate result were justified.

Mr Tan said the assessments across both the competency review and the performance goals were unreliable, with the supervisor assigning below-average ratings to the woman without ever explaining to her what a passing rating required or without conducting any periodic documented reviews mandated by the company’s own probation management process.

The supervisor also failed to record a single word of justification in the evaluation form itself, and her oral justifications during the hearing amounted to “little more than impressions untethered to any defined standard and unsupported by any documented observation”, said Mr Tan.

The same pattern recurred for the performance goals. In no case did the company establish that the woman had been clearly told that the issues would carry the weight that the deductions in scoring implied, said the magistrate.

He added that one of the goals had its weightage silently doubled without the woman’s knowledge.

“An employer who has not made its performance standards clear cannot then rely on an employee’s non-conformity with those standards as evidence of unsuitability,” said Mr Tan.

“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. Unfortunately, the (company) did not implement its probation management process in the way that it was designed.”

Mr Tan stressed that he was not endorsing an absolute requirement that employers must exhaustively articulate every performance standard for every employee.

“There will be cases where such articulation is unnecessary – for instance, where an employee’s failings are so material that any reasonable employer would regard them as gross incompetence, or where the employee is sufficiently senior that a preexisting understanding of what competent performance entails can reasonably be assumed,” he said.

In such cases, the employer need not spell out what should otherwise be self-evident, but this was not such a case, said Mr Tan.

“Although the claimant was an experienced audit professional, the matters for which she was criticised were not failures of audit judgment,” he said.

The issues were largely peripheral and the kind of expectations that an employee unfamiliar with a new organisation’s culture and practices would require guidance on, said Mr Tan.

The burden of providing that guidance fell on her supervisor, he said.

While the evidence established that the woman was not without her shortcomings, Mr Tan said he was not convinced that they demonstrated that she was incompetent or unsuitable to be confirmed for regular employment, such that the dismissal was a justified and proportionate decision by the company.

However, he found there was no evidence to support the woman’s claims about language discrimination or retaliatory action on the basis of “whistleblowing”.

Mr Tan found that the woman would have, at the very least, been employed for a further three months under an extended probationary period if not for the wrongful dismissal.

She was therefore entitled to three months of her gross pay, which would have placed the full award at S$34,500. However, the prescribed claim limit for the proceedings is S$30,000, so that is what she won.

The magistrate said he would have awarded the woman an additional two months’ salary for compensation for harm, but the ceiling had been reached.

He also ordered the company to pay the woman S$360 in costs and disbursements.