Stephen Duke
Stephen Duke

Employee Listening & Engagement Strategist

I help organizations hear their people and act on it.

Most organizations don't have a listening strategy. They have a survey calendar. The difference is whether your people trust that what they say actually changes things, and whether leaders are willing to prove it.

Open to full-time Employee Listening, Engagement & Culture roles

Based in Portland, OR · Open to remote · Willing to relocate to Asia-Pacific

View resume → Get in touch →
86% → 91%
Great Place to Work Participation Two consecutive company records for global engagement
7
Employee Communities Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) built and scaled. 4 launched from scratch with full infrastructure
Annual→Always‑on
Listening Infrastructure Piloted, launched, and managed Workday Peakon company-wide, moving from annual surveys to continuous listening
160+
Glassdoor Responses Delivered within a consistent 5-day SLA, aligned to leadership voice and company values

“Stephen co-created and led our multi-channel listening and engagement strategy... His authenticity, empathy, and commitment to creating meaningful employee experiences had a lasting impact on our culture.”

Annette Alexander, Chief People Officer at WP Engine

Selected work

Building a continuous listening strategy from scratch From a once-a-year survey to an always-on system: pilot, CEO approval, company-wide launch. Read it → Growing an ERG program from one community to seven Each new community started from what employees asked for, with a handbook to make it repeatable. Read it → Treating Glassdoor as a listening channel 160+ reviews answered within five days, in leadership's voice and the company's values. Read it →

How I think

The Listening Loop: five stages, with trust as the foundation. Skip one and people stop believing that speaking up changes anything.

  1. 01Build the conditionsCreate safety before asking anything
  2. 02Listen & captureHear what's said and what isn't
  3. 03Translate & actTurn themes into visible action plans
  4. 04Close the loopShare what's heard and what's next
  5. 05Reinforce the whyEach round builds more trust
Explore the Listening Loop → Try it The Listening Check Six questions, about two minutes. See which parts of your listening program are working and which need attention. Take it → Listening Session GuideA one-hour plan for taking survey themes back to employees, with a template you can adapt. Use it →

About

The throughline across every role I've held is trust: how it gets built, what breaks it, and what becomes possible when it actually exists.

It started in Employee Resource Group work and culture sessions, long before "listening" was in my title, and led to co-designing WP Engine's first continuous listening strategy from scratch. That's the work I want to keep doing: building listening programs people trust.

The Listening Loop in one minute

Let’s talk.

I’m looking for a full-time role where I can go deep on facilitation, listening design, and helping leaders act on what they hear, at an organization where people keep speaking up because they’ve seen it matter.

View LinkedIn →