Part of the Kitchen Foundations track. Lesson 1 of 10.
The sequence
Arrive early.
Find out who is running the shift.
Ask where things are before you need them.
Do the task you were given, completely.
And ask what to do next before you finish.
The decisions
When to ask. Before, not during. A question at the start of a task costs seconds; the same question halfway through costs the task.
And a question asked during a rush costs the person answering it more than it costs you — which is why the time to learn where things are is at four, not at nine.
What to do when you finish. Ask. Standing still is the only genuinely wrong answer, and it is the most common one.
And whether to say you do not know. Yes, immediately. A guess that goes unstated becomes someone else's problem an hour later, and in this trade the cost of an unstated guess is almost always larger than the cost of asking.
What you are reading
Who actually runs the shift, which may not be the person with the title.
And the pace — what normal looks like here, so you have something to compare a bad night against.
What goes wrong here
Standing still.
A task half-done and abandoned for a new one.
And a guess unstated.
Verification
At the end of the shift, ask what you should have done differently. Ask it once and listen to the answer.
The boundary
None specific.