I have a small team, do I also need to answer personnel questions

Five employees is not an exemption from the personnel module

Yes, personnel policy counts even with five employees. The VSME-basic module makes no distinction by company size within the SME sector: the questions about working conditions, health and safety apply to every organisation that uses the standard, from five to five hundred employees. What does change with a small team is the nature of the answers — not whether you have to give them.

Specifically, it concerns the same fields as in a larger company: whether there is a policy for health and safety at work, whether everyone receives at least the statutory minimum wage, and whether staff are covered by a collective labour agreement. With five employees, "policy" is often not a separate document but a few fixed agreements — that is a valid answer, provided it is factually correct. Where the file has no source for it, such as a formally documented safety policy that simply does not exist, the answer should remain "no", even if that feels unnecessarily strict for a small team.

Basis in Article 1 and 3, no threshold per number of employees

The VSME-basic module of EFRAG is designed as one set of indicators for non-listed SME undertakings without a size threshold within that target group; Directive (EU) 2022/2464 governs the broader reporting obligation to which this standard applies, but voluntary application by smaller suppliers does not itself require a minimum number of employees. If you are unsure whether a specific item — for example the male-female distribution in the workforce — is practically fillable with a team of five, that is a question about how you formulate the answer, not whether you skip the field.