The short answer
An ESG questionnaire in transport and logistics almost always asks for numbers, not names. Think of the total number of employees, the distribution between permanent and temporary contracts, the share of full-time and part-time work, the gender breakdown, sick leave rates and the number of workplace accidents. These are figures that count as baseline information under the VSME standard for SMEs, and you can substantiate them with a payroll system report without any name appearing on paper.
The reason these particular numbers come up is that the VSME standard treats personnel as a social topic alongside the environmental topic. A customer who is themselves subject to reporting obligations must be able to say something about the people in their supply chain, and transport and logistics is a sector where safety and staff turnover carry weight. What a customer with fewer than one thousand employees may ask you for has been limited since March 2026 to what appears in that standard; anything beyond that you may refuse. To quickly establish where exactly that line falls for your situation, use a brief check that shows you where you stand in five questions.
What numbers specifically come up
In practice it is always the same categories that appear. The total number of employees, usually broken down by FTE, shows the size of the organisation. Beyond that, you are asked about the type of employment relationship: how many people work on a permanent contract and how many on a temporary contract or through a recruitment agency. For a transport company with drivers who are sometimes deployed via a planning bureau, that is a meaningful distinction to make.
Beyond that, a questionnaire often asks for the ratio of men to women in the workforce, the sick leave percentage over the past year, and the number of reported workplace accidents. In a sector where driving, loading and unloading is physical work, that last figure carries relatively significant weight. Some questionnaires add the number of training hours per employee, as an indication of how much a company invests in developing its personnel.
What does not belong
What these questionnaires explicitly do not include is names, employee numbers traceable to one person, or individual salary data. The VSME standard calls for aggregate figures: totals, percentages and averages at company level. If you receive a question asking for individual data, that is a good moment to ask back why that information is needed at that level of detail.
Where you get the figures from
Most of these numbers are already in your payroll records. A standard report usually provides the number of employees, the contract type and the total FTE as at a reference date. The sick leave percentage typically comes from the same system or from your occupational health service's report. The number of workplace accidents is, as it should be, already recorded because you must document it for other purposes too.
So the work is not about collecting new data, but about transferring existing numbers in the form the questionnaire requests. In doing so it is important that you confirm what has been read from the documents yourself: the system reads the figures, you determine whether they are correct for your situation. How that step works is explained at the page that explains where the information comes from.
Once recorded, it stays in place
A second advantage of these figures is that they barely change after the first time. The number of employees changes gradually, and so does the contract distribution. By keeping the file after the first questionnaire, you only need to check whether the figures are still correct for the next questionnaire, instead of diving into the payroll administration again. If there is a change in the standard that specifically affects your personnel figures, you will be notified of it.
For information about how these data are handled, and in particular how personal data are processed within the platform, read more on the page on privacy and data protection. For a broader overview of what is covered in an ESG questionnaire for your sector, the overview of topics per situation is a good starting point.
Check what applies to you
Which personnel figures are exactly requested from you depends on the questionnaire you received and who sent it. Paste the questions into the free cap check to see which ones fall within and which ones fall outside the VSME standard, or do the quick scan to get a first indication within a few minutes of where your company stands.