This working style survey template asks people to choose between two short statements at a time, so you learn where a team actually leans instead of watching everyone agree with everything. The pairs print in the side by side Pairs style, the signature look of this question type: the two statements sit next to each other across the page, each with an empty box centred above it and a rule between the boxes and the text. That style suits short statements, which is what every statement here is. If your statements run to a full sentence or two, use the one statement per line style instead, the way the Forced-Choice Pairs Survey for youth program staff does. It has 13 questions and prints on two pages, with the whole pair block on the first one.
What this survey measures
The eight pairs at the heart of the form set a working-together preference against a heads-down focus preference. One statement says a person thinks best out loud with someone else, the other says they think best alone and bring it to the team afterwards, and people mark the box above whichever comes closer to how they like to work. Both statements in every pair are attractive, which is the point: a rating scale would collect a page of agreement, while a forced choice makes the trade-off visible. Which of the two sides carries the working-together statement changes as you go down the block, four on the left and four on the right, so nobody can answer the whole thing by picking every left-hand statement and no side reads as the approved answer. Four short background questions follow, covering tenure, role, team size, and time spent in meetings.
Every working-together statement is worth one point and every heads-down statement zero, and the eight pairs are grouped as one scale that totals from 0 to 8. The bands read as leaning toward heads-down focus, balanced, or leaning toward working together. Because each answer is a choice between two things rather than a rating of one, the totals are ipsative: they say which of the two orientations is stronger inside a person, not how strongly that person holds either one. Read them as a comparison within a person and across a team, never as an absolute level of anything, and do not treat a low total as less collaboration than another team's low total.
How to use it on paper
Print the form and hand it out at a team offsite, in a new manager induction, or at the start of a workshop on how the team works together. Each pair prints as one row: two statements side by side, an empty box centred above each one, and the shared instruction printed once above the whole block. People mark one box in each pair with a blue or black pen. Scan the completed forms in a batch and PaperSurvey reads every mark, totals each person's orientation score, and shows the distribution and the pair-by-pair split in your dashboard.
When you take the results back to the team, lead with the pair-by-pair split rather than the individual totals. A pair that splits close to evenly is worth a conversation, because it usually means two reasonable habits are quietly colliding in the same week, and a pair almost everyone answers the same way tells you a shared norm you can lean on. Because the scores are ipsative, avoid ranking people by their total: two people on the same total can want very different things.
Customize this template
Rewrite the statement pairs for the tension you actually want to surface, such as speed against thoroughness, or planning ahead against staying flexible. Keep both statements in a pair equally attractive, keep them to roughly ten words each so they fit their half of the page, and go on swapping which of the two sides carries which pole. The pole travels with the statement rather than with the side, so swapping sides never disturbs the scoring. You can add or remove pairs and adjust the score bands to match, change the background questions, or run the same form as a web survey alongside the printed one and analyze both together. If your rewritten statements grow past about a dozen words, switch the block to the one statement per line style, which gives each statement the full width of the page, or drop the divider with the plain side by side style.
Preview the PDF above, or use this template to run it with your team this week.