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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

Alexandra Samuel

Building a thriving hybrid culture is essential for success in the new workplace.

Digital workplace expert | Author of Remote, Inc.

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The New Workplace Hybrid: What Should It Look Like?

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In the post-pandemic world, the time-honored rules of work no longer apply. ALEXANDRA SAMUEL shows us how to carve a path towards a thriving and productive hybrid work culture. With generative AI programs like ChatGPT, remote work is more possible than ever before. A digital workplace expert and author of the timely and practical book Remote Inc., Alexandra brings over 25 years of experience as a hybrid worker to her presentations, helping audiences conceptualize and act on new ways of working in the modern age.

“Hybrid gives us the opportunity to create a new world of work, and a new kind of workplace—one that combines the commitment and energy of the traditional office with the flexibility and focus of working from home.”— Alexandra Samuel

The most successful organizations will embrace the new hybrid model of work as a way to renew their organizational culture, fuel effective collaboration and attract the most talented employees. But how do we foster that kind of culture in between off-sites and Zoom cocktails? How do we strengthen collaboration without back-to-back video calls? And how do we re-establish the office as a core part of our working rhythms, when so many employees are cozily remote?

The key is to shift how managers and employees think about flexibility in this new world of work. “Flexibility isn’t about picking your days in the office, or how often you come in,” Alexandra says. “Real flexibility is about aligning your team to make the most of their face-to-face time, so that they have more focus and flexibility on their days at home.”

That’s the kind of flexibility that comes from understanding how to combine office and remote time in a way that makes the most of each setting. In her new book Remote Inc.: How to Thrive at Work…Wherever You Are, Alexandra teams up with productivity guru Robert Pozen to lay out a roadmap for effective hybrid work.

The most successful hybrid employees adopt a “business-of-one” approach, explains Alexandra, meaning that they take on the responsibility and accountability of a small business owner. They define their work in terms of goals and deliverables instead of by the eight-hour workday; embrace a rhythm of “punctuated collaboration” that uses structured check-ins to complement solo work; and use the focus of their at-home days to deliver even stronger results. Both the book and Alexandra’s eye-opening talks teach professionals to organize their priorities, communicate effectively, structure online meetings, and maintain a healthy work-life balance in the context of hybrid work.

A regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Harvard Business Review, CBC, and JSTOR Daily, Alexandra is a prolific writer whose articles on management, hybrid work, and tech culture have earned extensive media coverage. The author of the Work Smarter with Social Media series for Harvard Business Review Press, Alexandra has long experience helping people navigate the digital workplace. As the data journalist for the annual Forbes list of the World’s Most Influential CMOs, she has a deep understanding of how top brands and executives navigate digital transformation and the realignment of employee and customer experience in a hybrid world. She works regularly with companies like Twitter, Sprinklr and Microsoft on reports and workshops that address the biggest challenges in digital business.

Alexandra began her career in technology as the research director for the Governance in the Digital Economy program, leading a Toronto-based research program for a global consortium of government leaders from her home office in Vancouver. As the VP Social Media for customer intelligence software company Vision Critical, Alexandra led a social media analytics pilot program while working from home so she could homeschool her autistic son. And as the co-founder of Social Signal, Alexandra built one of the world’s first social media agencies while working out of her home with her husband and their first hires. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, where her dissertation was the first comprehensive study of hacktivism (politically motivated computer hacking). While at Harvard, Alexandra researched the impact of technology on social capital for Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking book, Bowling Alone.

Testimonials

As I started looking for experts to share practical tips and strategies to help our customers manage the remote and hybrid experience, I found Alexandra. She came highly recommended as a passionate, authentic speaker on this topic. Alexandra was a pleasure to work with and always responsive. The webinar audience comments were overwhelmingly positive. I highly recommend her as a speaker for your next event!

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Testimonials

Alexandra listened to the briefing that we gave her, which meant that she uniquely tailored her keynote to the needs of our audience. It was so perfectly aligned to the workshop prior to her speaking, that it really added to our meeting. Alexandra was engaging, confident, and backed all her points up with research—we especially valued that she prompted us to think differently about how we approach our hybrid workplace. I would certainly recommend Alexandra as a keynote speaker.

BC Lottery Corporation

Testimonials

Alex is amazing! We just loved her, and the audience did as well.

SGI/SGI CANADA

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Speech Topics

Artificial Intelligence

Work Smarter with AIDoing Your Best Work with the Power of Artificial Intelligence

The era of artificial intelligence has arrived. But how do you get your team up and running with AI, so that you see immediate productivity and performance benefits? This practical and engaging talk lays out the steps that take teams from AI anxiety to AI mastery, while enhancing team trust and collaboration.

The author of the Harvard Business Review’s “Work Smarter with Social Media” series, Alexandra Samuel is a master at explaining how to use technology to improve productivity and support collaboration. In this session, you’ll learn how to use AI to conquer digital overload, accelerate innovation and improve your team’s deliverables. You’ll get memorable, creative case studies that can inspire your team’s AI use, and leave with a roadmap for helping your team work smarter with AI.

Corporate Culture

Forging the Hybrid WorkplaceCulture and Collaboration in the New Office

The Covid pandemic catalyzed an overnight shift to remote work, but the real transformation lies ahead. With offices reopened, organizations are learning to manage teams that mix in-person and remote workers, and employees are still learning to manage their schedules to get the best of both worlds. This transition offers the ideal opportunity for employers to renew their culture and strengthen team collaboration—not just by asking employees to spend some time in the office, but by providing employees with the guidance they need to make the most of their days at home.

“These hybrid arrangements will require a massive rethinking on the part of bosses,” author Alexandra Samuel observed in her cover story for The Wall Street Journal’s Work from Home report. “No longer will they be able to manage remote workers like they’re office employees whose desks happen to be really far apart.”

In this inspiring and pragmatic presentation, Alexandra draws on her extensive research (distilled in her book Remote Inc.) and long experience with remote work to show your managers and team the way forward. Starting with identifying the unique advantages of time in the office, as well as the unique advantages of time at home, she’ll show you how to build an organizational model and culture that enables employees to shift between lively collaboration and focused solo work. Alexandra will leave your team ready to turn your remote + office combination into a powerful competitive advantage for attracting great talent, enabling strong performance, and delivering excellent results.

Leadership

The Oreo RevolutionHow Managers Can Transform Organizational Culture

We love stories about bottom-up, grassroots change, especially in contrast to the command-and-control, hierarchical model of organization. In this talk, digital workplace expert and Wall Street Journal contributor Alexandra Samuel explains why the next workplace revolution will look more like an Oreo, and run from the middle out—led by the middle managers who are creating a new organizational culture for the hybrid, digital workplace.

Alex lays out the research that shows that while the C-suite is often led by extroverts who overvalue in-person collaboration and undervalue what we can accomplish together online, middle managers sit closer to both employees and customers and work more like the people they manage. These managers have a direct stake in ensuring high performance and service excellence — but also in promoting employee engagement and wellbeing and preventing burnout. In this inspiring and provocative talk, Alex explains why middle managers are going to drive the renewal of organizational culture, and lays out the specific steps that managers can take to level up engagement and performance on their own teams.

ChatGPT and Generative AI

The New Hybrid Work: AI + HumansManaging the Changing Landscape in the Future of Work

The rise of AI and the rise of remote work aren’t two separate forces driving us towards a new workplace: They’re deeply connected changes that can only be understood and addressed in tandem. In this thought-provoking keynote, Alexandra Samuel explains how the AI revolution will be profoundly shaped by our experience of remote and hybrid work, and how the advent of AI will help address some of the biggest challenges around remote work and the return to office, like isolation and digital overload.

Drawing on more than two decades of work on digital transformation and productivity, Alex shows how the productivity, performance and personal benefits of AI depend on integrating our thinking about work location (remote vs office) with our thinking about work collaboration (with humans vs with AIs). Alex’s practical and engaging approach to working with technology gives audiences a clear and actionable roadmap for leading their teams through a period of profound change, as well as inspiring and memorable stories from the new workplace.