Getting to Know Your Employees Questionnaire Templates
Six free getting to know your employees questionnaire templates covering working style, communication, feedback, and recognition. Editable DOCX files.
Getting to Know Your Employees Questionnaire
Six questionnaire templates for small business: a standard version for the team you already have, a first-week version for new hires, a how to work with me one-pager, a recognition preferences form, a ten-question printable version for a shift team, and a spreadsheet with a thirty-question bank and a team summary. Editable DOCX and XLSX, export to PDF in one step. No signup.
For about two years I ran a team on guesses. I decided one person liked working alone because she was quiet. I decided another wanted a public thank you because he was not. I assumed everybody wanted feedback the way I want feedback, which is immediately and in writing. I was wrong on all three counts, and I only found out because I eventually asked.
That is what this questionnaire does. It is not a personality test and it is not an engagement survey. It is a short list of practical questions about how somebody works, how they want to hear from you, and what recognition actually lands with them, filled in once and kept somewhere their manager will look at it again.
There are six versions here, because the sheet you hand a new hire in week one is not the sheet you hand somebody who has been with you three years. Five download as editable Word documents and one as a spreadsheet, free, with no email form in the way.
What This Questionnaire Is
A getting to know your employees questionnaire is a signed, voluntary form that collects one person's working preferences: their best hours, their communication channels, how they want feedback delivered, and what recognition means to them. The manager reads it and changes something as a result.
Three things it is not. It is not an employee survey, because it is signed rather than anonymous and it measures nothing. It is not a personality assessment, because it produces no score and no type. And it is not a new hire information form, which collects addresses and tax details rather than preferences.
The reason to bother is narrow and practical. Most of what a manager needs to know about an individual is invisible from the outside, and guessing at it produces exactly the kind of well-meant mistake I spent two years making. A ten-minute form removes most of it.
Which Version Should You Use?
Match the form to the person and the moment. Somebody already on the team gets the standard version, somebody five days in gets the first week version, and a crew that fills things in with a pen between shifts gets the ten-question page.
6 Free Getting to Know Your Employees Questionnaire Templates
Download all six together, or take the individual versions you need. Five are editable Word documents and one is an Excel workbook with four tabs, so you can drop your company name in, cut any section you do not want, and print or send it as it is. No email gate, no account.
Template 1: Getting to Know Your Employees Questionnaire (Standard)
The default, and the one to send the whole team. Thirty-one questions across seven sections covering how they work, how they communicate, how they want feedback and recognition, what would help, and an optional personal section, followed by a manager block for the three changes you are making.
Template 2: New Hire Getting to Know You Questionnaire (First Week)
Fourteen questions for somebody who has been here five days. What they understood the job to be before they started, how they learn fastest, what is still confusing, what they are waiting on, and how they want to be introduced to everyone else.
Ask these in week one, not on day one. The morning somebody starts is already full, and the useful answers about what is confusing only exist once they have hit something confusing. FirstHR sends it as an onboarding task with a due date so it does not vanish under the paperwork. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.
Template 3: How to Work With Me (Working Style One-Pager)
A single page somebody writes about themselves and hands to the people they work with most: hours, channels, how they want work handed over, how they make decisions, what they need when something goes wrong, and what they are trying to get better at.
Fill one in yourself and hand it over at the same time. A sheet that only travels upward reads as surveillance, and the manager's version is usually the more useful document anyway, because most teams are guessing about their boss more than their boss is guessing about them.
Template 4: Recognition and Rewards Preferences Questionnaire
Four minutes on where recognition should happen, whose acknowledgment counts most, what form it should take, what would genuinely land, and what attention to avoid. It closes with whether they want a birthday or a work anniversary marked at all.
This is the version that pays for itself fastest. Recognition aimed wrong is worse than none, because the person who dreads being named at the all-hands experiences the all-hands as a penalty, and pairing this form with a broader recognition program stops you spending a budget on the wrong thing.
Template 5: Short Getting to Know You Questionnaire (10 Questions)
One printable page for a shift team: what name to use, how to reach them, what they like most and least about the job, how they want corrections delivered, whether praise should be public, and what they are good at that nobody asks them to do.
Template 6: Team Preferences Tracker (Spreadsheet)
Four tabs: a thirty-question bank sorted by category with a skip-if column, a team summary with one row per person, a rollout tracker, and an actions log recording what somebody asked for and what actually changed.
| A | B | C | D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Category | Question | What it tells you | Skip if |
| 2 | Working style | What time of day do you do your best focused work? | When to protect their calendar | |
| 3 | Working style | What does a genuinely good work day look like, start to finish? | What to build more of into the week | |
| 4 | Working style | What wrecks a working day for you? | The interruption to remove first | |
| 5 | Working style | One long uninterrupted block, or several short ones? | How to shape their schedule | Fixed shift pattern |
| 6 | Working style | When you get stuck, what do you do first? | Whether to check in or stay out of the way | |
| 7 | Working style | How much detail do you want when work is handed to you? | How to brief them without hovering | |
| 8 | Communication | Best way to reach you during the day? | The channel to actually use | |
| 9 | Communication | Best way to reach you when something is urgent? | What to do at seven in the evening | |
| 10 | Communication | How quickly should someone expect an answer from you? | A response window the team can agree on | |
| 11 | Communication | A ten minute call, or a written thread you answer when free? | How to run the next disagreement | |
| 12 | Communication | How much notice do you want before a plan changes? | How far ahead to warn them | |
| 13 | Feedback | How do you like to hear that something went well? | Whether praise should be public |
Getting the Questionnaire as a Free PDF
Every template here downloads as an editable Word file, and a PDF is one step away: open it in Word, then save it as a PDF. In Google Docs the same export lives under Download in the File menu. Put your company name in and delete the sections you are not using before you export.
Word is the format to edit in and PDF is the format to hand out. A PDF prints the same on every machine, will not be changed by accident on the way back to you, and drops straight into a first-week packet. Keep the Word file as your master so next year's revision starts from something you can still edit.
What to Ask, and How to Word It
Four groups of questions carry almost all of the value: how somebody works, how they communicate, how they take feedback, and what recognition means to them. Everything else on the form is optional decoration around those four.
The wording matters more than the topic. Broad questions about values and motivation produce broad answers that no manager can act on, while a question with a specific decision behind it produces something you can change on Monday. The test is simple: if you cannot name the thing you would do differently depending on the answer, cut the question.
| Weak question | Better question | What the better one gets you |
|---|---|---|
| What is your working style? | What time of day do you do your best focused work? | A meeting you can move next week |
| Do you like feedback? | Would you rather hear that something needs fixing in the moment, or at our next 1:1? | How to open the next difficult conversation |
| How do you like to be recognized? | Would you rather be thanked in front of the team, or just by me? | Whether the all-hands mention is a reward or a penalty |
| What motivates you? | What is one thing that would make your job easier next month? | A fix you can make in a week |
| Tell us a fun fact about yourself | What are you good at that we are not asking you to do? | A skill you may be paying somebody else for |
| Are you happy here? | What would you like to do more of, and less of? | The two answers a stay conversation is built on |
Two structural choices lift the response rate. Put the optional personal section last and label it clearly, so nobody feels ambushed by a question about their weekend halfway through a work form. And mix free text with tick boxes rather than making everything open, because a page of blank lines takes twenty minutes and a page of options takes five.
Leave room for the answer you did not anticipate. The single most useful line on my own version is the last one, which just asks whether there is anything else the manager should know. It is where somebody mentioned a standing commitment on Thursday afternoons that we had been quietly scheduling over for months.
Questions to Leave Off the Form
Keep health, disability, family medical history, religion, age, and family status off the questionnaire entirely. A friendly form is exactly where these appear, usually dressed up as an icebreaker about family or a helpful request for a list of allergies, and neither framing changes what you are collecting.
The practical rule is to ask what somebody needs rather than why they need it. You do not need a diagnosis to buy a different chair, you do not need a religion to give somebody a specific day off, and you do not need an allergy list to order food that everyone can eat.
| Do not ask | Why it is a problem | Ask this instead |
|---|---|---|
| Do you have any health conditions or a disability? | A disability-related inquiry, unlawful unless it is job-related and consistent with business necessity | Is there anything you need from us to do your job comfortably? |
| Does anything run in your family, health-wise? | Family medical history is genetic information, which an employer may not request | Leave the subject off the form entirely |
| Do you observe any religious holidays? | Invites protected information you have no reason to hold | Which dates in the year matter most to you for time off? |
| How old are you, and when do you plan to retire? | Age is protected for workers 40 and over under the ADEA, and the retirement question reads as a nudge | What do you want to be able to do here in two years? |
| Are you married? Do you have children? | Family status carries discrimination risk and answers nothing you need | Are there hours in the week that are difficult for you to work? |
| List your food allergies | An allergy can be a medical condition, and the list becomes a medical record | Anything we should know when we order food for a team event? |
One more habit is worth building. Where an answer does turn out to be medical, because somebody volunteers it in a free text box, take it off the questionnaire and file it separately, since medical information about an employee belongs in its own confidential file rather than in the personnel file alongside their preferred coffee order.
How to Run It Without It Feeling Like a Test
Say what the form is for, say it is optional, and say who will read it, all on the form itself rather than in a covering message nobody keeps. Then send it to the whole team at once, so nobody wonders why they were singled out.
Timing decides the quality of the answers as much as the wording does. A form sent in the week of a layoff, a reorganization, or a bad month reads as a threat assessment no matter how it is phrased. A form sent in an ordinary week reads as an ordinary question. If you have just changed something significant, wait a month.
Three failures account for almost every questionnaire that gets run once and never again, and none of them is about the questions.
The half-empty form deserves a specific note. When somebody skips a whole section, that is a data point rather than a defect, and chasing it teaches everyone that optional was not meant. Take what you were given, act on it, and the second round will come back fuller than the first.
What to Do With the Answers
Pick three answers per person that you can act on within a month, make those changes, and tell the person which change came from which answer. That last step is what makes the exercise repeatable, because it proves the form was read by somebody rather than filed by somebody.
| What somebody tells you | What to change | By when |
|---|---|---|
| Best focused work happens before ten in the morning | Move the stand-up, or let them skip it and read the notes | Next scheduling cycle |
| Would rather be thanked privately | Take the name off the all-hands slide and send a message instead | Immediately |
| Wants feedback in the moment, not saved up | Stop banking notes for the 1:1 and say it the same day | Next occurrence |
| Chat notifications break their concentration | Agree a response window in writing so nobody expects instant replies | Within two weeks |
| Wants more of the customer-facing work | Hand over one account and review it at the next 1:1 | Next month |
| Does not want a birthday marked | Take the date out of the team calendar | Immediately |
The answers belong in the meeting you already hold rather than in a new one. Read the form before the next one to one, pick the two answers that surprised you, and ask about those instead of walking down the page. The surprises are where the value is, and the rest is confirmation.
Store the completed forms where a manager can find them and nobody else can browse them. A shared drive folder that the whole company can open is the most common mistake, and it undoes the promise printed at the top of the form.
Keeping this alive across a team is the part that quietly fails on paper. FirstHR collects the questionnaire as an onboarding or check-in task with a due date, captures the acknowledgment with built-in e-signature, and stores the answers against the employee profile with restricted access, so the preferences travel with the person when their manager changes. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.
FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a survey vendor and not a law firm. It runs the sending, the signing, and the record alongside the rest of your HR documents, while what you ask, what you change, and what your state expects of employee data stay with you and a qualified professional. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a getting to know your employees questionnaire?
It is a short, voluntary form that asks an employee how they work best, how they prefer to be contacted, how they want feedback delivered, and what recognition actually means to them. Unlike an engagement survey it is signed rather than anonymous, because the whole point is to act on one person’s answers rather than to measure a mood across the company. Unlike a personality assessment it produces no score, no type, and no label, only preferences that a manager can use next week. And unlike a new hire information form it collects nothing administrative: no Social Security number, no address, no bank details. It usually takes ten to fifteen minutes to complete, is read by the manager and the owner, and is worth almost nothing unless the conversation and the changes that follow it actually happen.
What questions should a getting to know you questionnaire include?
Four groups carry most of the value. How they work: the hours their best focus lands in, whether they want one long block or several short ones, how much detail they want when work is handed over, and what wrecks a working day. How they communicate: the everyday channel, the urgent channel, how quickly an answer is normal for them, and how much notice they want before a plan changes. How they take feedback: in the moment or at the 1:1, spoken or in writing first, and who they want to hear it from. And what recognition means: in front of the team or in private, whose acknowledgment counts most, and what attention they would rather not receive. Add an optional personal section they can skip entirely, and close with one question about what would make their job easier next month.
How do I get a getting to know your employees questionnaire as a free PDF?
Every template on this page downloads free as an editable Word document, and a PDF is one step from there. Open the file in Word, put your company name in, delete any section you are not using, then choose Save As and pick PDF. In Google Docs the same export sits under Download in the File menu. Word is the format to edit in and PDF is the format to hand out, because a PDF prints identically on every machine and cannot be altered by accident. Keep the Word file as your master so next year’s version starts from something you can still change. If you want people to type into it rather than write on it, send the Word file itself or add form fields with a PDF editor. There is no email form and no account on any of these.
Should a getting to know you questionnaire be anonymous?
No. This one is signed, and that is the difference between it and an engagement survey. You cannot move a stand-up out of somebody’s best focus hours, stop naming them in company-wide messages, or hand them the customer work they asked for if you do not know who wrote the answer. Anonymity belongs to the questions where honesty carries a cost: how people rate their manager, whether they feel safe raising a problem, whether they intend to leave. Those belong in a separate anonymous survey with enough respondents that nobody can be identified from their answers. Keep the two instruments apart. Mixing them gives you a survey people are afraid to sign and a preferences form too vague to act on, which is the worst of both.
What questions can an employer not ask an employee?
Keep health, family, religion, age, and national origin off the form entirely. Under the ADA regulations it is unlawful to require a medical examination of an employee or to ask whether an employee has a disability, or about its nature or severity, except as the regulations allow, principally where the inquiry is job-related and consistent with business necessity. Under the GINA regulations an employer may not request, require, or purchase genetic information, and family medical history counts as genetic information, so any question inviting somebody to describe what runs in their family is a problem. A friendly, well-meant form is exactly where these questions tend to appear, usually disguised as an icebreaker about family or an innocent request for a list of food allergies. Ask what somebody needs rather than why they need it. This is general information, not legal advice.
How often should you send it out?
Once a year for the whole team, plus once in the first week for anybody new. Annual is frequent enough to catch the changes that matter, since preferences move after a promotion, a change of manager, or a shift in what somebody does all day, and it is infrequent enough that nobody experiences it as another survey to ignore. The refresh is easier than the first round: show people what they wrote last time and ask what has changed, which takes about five minutes and produces sharper answers than a blank page. Pick a fixed date so it does not depend on remembering, and put the next refresh date on the form itself. Between rounds, the answers belong in the regular one to one rather than in a separate meeting.
What is the difference between this and an employee engagement survey?
An engagement survey measures how a group feels and is designed to be anonymous, aggregated, and compared over time. A getting to know you questionnaire collects one person’s preferences, is signed, and is designed to change what their manager does next week. The output is different too: a survey produces a score you present to the team, while this produces two or three concrete changes for one individual, such as moving a meeting, switching a channel, or stopping a public shout-out somebody dreads. Small teams should run both, at different times and for different reasons, and should never combine them into a single form. A survey is how you find out something is wrong across the company. This is how you find out what one person needs on Monday.