Lejla is a senior leader and owner of Kolibri Consulting, providing fractional COO services and specializing in strategic, leadership, and operational matters for law firms. She is also an executive coach working with numerous leaders across Canada.
Lejla is a CPA-CA with a Master of Professional Accounting (MPAcc) and over 15 years of advisory experience including over 10 years in senior leadership roles in prominent professional services organizations. She started her career at KPMG, and then moved into a senior regional leadership role at Grant Thornton where she led various initiatives such as integrating over 20 M&A deals, spearheading the creation of new departments, and leading multiple national projects. Lejla is also a certified Professional Project Manager, Change Management Professional, and Coach and taught courses at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business.
Hybrid Work
The return to the office continues to be a controversial topic, with the discussion having shifted from whether it’s going to happen, to how it’s going to work. With the evolution of employer and employee needs and expectations comes a myriad of questions, considerations, challenges and opportunities. Organizations have an opportunity to not just re-occupy the office but to seize this moment to define a new and better way to work. The pandemic flattened previous cultural and technological barriers, resulting in more people with a choice of where to do their best work. This shift has caused firms to rethink the purpose of the workplace itself. For employees, going to the office is about much more than sitting at a desk and attending meetings – all of which can be done remotely. The future office considers a more holistic approach, creating in-person experiences that make it easy, make it work, and most of all, make it worth it.
Panelists:
Sara Forte is a lawyer, mediator, workplace investigator, speaker, entrepreneur, community builder, mother of 3, and backyard henkeeper. Sara founded Forte Workplace Law in 2016, a boutique employment law firm with offices in Surrey and Calgary that include a team of 13 lawyers.
In addition to their representative work, Sara and the Forte Workplace Law team offer an innovative respectful workplace offering, StandUP Teams™. This program includes bystander training, an emerging best practice that Sara wrote about recently in Canadian Lawyer
Magazine. Sara is also Chief Happiness Officer of Not Your Average Law Job, a project focused on lawyer
happiness and wellbeing.
Sara built out a new office space for the firm in 2021, with a focus on an environment that nourishes both
productivity and well-being. Her commitment to crafting a peaceful, welcoming, and invigorating workplace was showcased in a recent news article “Greening the office: It Started with a Tree”.
Blair Lill is the Chief Operating Officer at Singleton Reynolds, Blair is responsible for firm strategy and the overall day-to-day operations of the Firm. He is a member of the Management Committee, Partner Compensation Committee, and provides strategic input to Firm direction and opportunities. Blair oversees the activities of Finance, HR, IT, Marketing & Business Development, Knowledge Management, Litigation Support, and Office Services.
Shalisha Senkow is part of the Colliers Workplace Advisory team, specializing in providing strategic solutions to respond to the shifting needs of the workplace. Shalisha is an experienced strategy and change consultant and has worked across industries and geographies to develop and implement workplace transformations. Over the past year, she has worked with several legal firms, both national and regional, to guide them in the development of workplace and flexible work strategies to meet the unique needs, business strategies, and culture of each firm.