Asking for help

For the people doing the work.

Raise a request from the task you’re on. Your coordinator sees it immediately, with your name and your area attached.

Pick the kind

Five options, and the one you pick changes who deals with it and how fast:

Missing gear — something that should be here isn’t. Usually the fastest to fix, because somebody generally knows where it is.

Need another person — it’s a two-person job and you’re one person. Don’t struggle with it; that’s how people get hurt.

Instructions are unclear — the steps don’t match what you’re looking at. Always worth raising. It means the plan is wrong, and if you don’t say so the next person hits the same wall.

Safety concern — anything that could hurt someone. Read the section below.

Something else — when none of the above fit. Say what’s wrong in your own words.

Say what you’re looking at

One or two sentences. Write what you can see, not what you think it means.

“The cable case for the stage isn’t in the storage room” is useful. “Problem with the cables” means someone has to come and find you to learn anything.

A photo saves a conversation almost every time.

Then carry on

You don’t have to stand and wait. Move to something else if you can.

Your request doesn’t get lost while you work — the space cannot be called ready until somebody has resolved or withdrawn it. It stays visible until it’s dealt with. That’s the point of raising it rather than mentioning it to someone in passing.

ReadyFactor is not an emergency channel

Worth being blunt about.

A request goes into a queue that a coordinator reads when they look at their screen. That might be seconds. It might not be.

If something is dangerous right now — someone is hurt, something is falling, something is burning — put the phone down. Shout, call, pull the alarm, get a person. Do that first and raise the request afterwards, or not at all.

The safety category exists for “this will hurt someone if it isn’t fixed” — a trip hazard across a doorway, a cable run where people will walk, a light rig that isn’t secured. It’s for preventing the emergency, not reporting one.

What happens next

Your coordinator takes ownership — you’ll see that somebody has it — and then resolves it, usually with a note about what happened.

If it turns out not to have been a problem, it gets withdrawn. That’s not a telling-off. Raising something that turned out to be fine is exactly the behaviour that catches the things that aren’t.