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I could probably write an entire book about my experience in academia, but I’ll try to be short. I will share my vision. It will be up to you to decide.Before I jump into my outrage, enjoy checking this link .I come from a family of a scientist. My father had been fond of science since childhood and spent his entire life conducting experimental research in chemical physics. Naturally, this played a significant role in forming my personality. Despite its collapse, the USSR had left an atmosphere of significance of science as a cultural construct that naturally flourished during Cold War, and I got to pick up that smell of science by reading books on physics and mathematics, reading stories about scientific breakthroughs and amazing Soviet sci-fi novels, solving competitive puzzles and playing chess. Not some lame Lord of the Rings or Marvel geeky stuff that has no direct connection with kids interested in science (no offense, but truly scientific and geek consumerist culture are different things!). I consider myself science-oriented to the bone and will probably stay that way for the rest of my life.Naturally, one thing led to another. Behind my back, I have left Moscow State University for my undergraduate degree, and the University of Pittsburgh for my Ph.D., and two post-docs, one in France, the other in Texas, USA. Plus I’ve had an informal joint work with one research group in Moscow. The area of my work was always changing, and, as of today, I’ve accumulated tremendously wide knowledge in the field of computational mathematics and applications. I had two instances when I was close to being accepted to MIT, one time as a grad student and the other time as a post-doc (I turned down the invitation for an interview). I’ve had publications, conference talks, seminars. I was helping to write grant proposals. I was teaching. I was looking to become tenure-track professor at some point.Then I quit.Slowly, over the years, I felt that something just didn’t connect right. I was observing my colleagues, my advisors, those of higher academic status, those writing recommendation letters for me, those I co-authored with. And they were acting as if everything was fine and should stay that way. They played by the rules that my organism felt repulsion towards. It was an echo chamber for mostly useless but at the same time highly competitive everyday activity. And then I realized it.SCIENCE DOES NOT EQUAL ACADEMIA.Science is all about scientific method. Objectivity. Reproducibility. Consistency. Impact. Let’s call that ORCI for short. Potentially, you could be even a street cleaner or construction worker to do science if use ORCI right. I was a romantic fool to believe that as long as you stay true to these ideals, you will stay in academia for as long as you like, even if:You don’t publish for long just because you still need time for fresh ideas that meet the criteria above, especially impact. You feel like you wanna puke when your advisor tells you to publish monthly some incremental BS that nobody will ever read, even he himself. But hey, it’ll be in your CV! Oh, and in the publication list inside your grant proposal. What can be more important than grants?You don’t wanna visit conferences for talks about similar mediocre results, half of which you don’t even understand because those assholes talk too fast and don’t give you time to think clearly and calmly, while leaving no room for discussion. You’re just fully aware you simply can call a guy via Skype if you need some details from a recent paper of his. Why go through so much travel stress? Oh, they have a beach in that town that your advisor wants you to visit in spare time while networking with a potential employer? Then why don’t they say clearly that it’s the actual reason they wanna spend the grant money for, not to listen to the results and discuss ideas!You ignore talking to some random professor at lunch about stuff you’re not interested in because your fields don’t even match, even if the guy is ready to write you a professional (but dumb) recommendation letter if you talk smoothly to him and pretend you’re interested. You still believe that you’re valued by your work that’s openly accessible, not by how smoothly some other guy writes about you. Fuck networking!I truly believed academia was the only remaining hide-out from BS world created by non-scientists around us that hold all the money. But reality is, as long as academia needs money from those non-scientists in forms of grants, it will be corrupt and mediocre as well.Academia is a social construct and is about organizing work of scientists in a way that would sustain its overall existence. The fact that scientists manage to make impact is not due to efficiency of academia, but rather contrary to it. They are exceptions, and we should be grateful to those exceptions!Below is my red-pill list about academia that you probably may not want to hear. I admit some of the points may be exaggerated, but I hope you’ll get the idea. And yeah, the list is far from exhaustive.Even if you have high citations, most likely only people from your field or those you interacted with (so that’s how they heard about your work) have generated those citations. That doesn’t mean they fully understood your paper and spent enough time trying to read through every detail that you’ve worked so hard on. Your paper will be forgotten very soon. You only need it as another bonus to your CV to advance your career, not to make actual contribution. Science is not about speed. It took Richard Feynman decades to come up with his ideas for quantum electrodynamics, simply by accumulating and reviewing existing knowledge in physics. Rushing won’t help you make a contribution. But as of today, academic science is all about the disgusting Publis Or Perish culture, implicitly created by the need to seek finance from grant-givers who don’t praise slowness.It’s interesting that I feel that writing a post here on Quora about academia being a bad life choice may have even more impact than writing research papers.Follows from the previous point. You don’t have time to fully appreciate results of other people. It took me a month to fully understand and fucking orgasm from the beauty of Approximate Minimum Degree algorithm while working in industry. And it’s only one fucking paper! I was building tests, ruining tons of paper, pens and writing code only to finally form the long-awaited understanding in my head! In academia, you see tons of citations in introduction sections, and I simply can’t understand how you cite those without checking them for BS thoroughly! And how am I supposed to contribute without building on top of what I fully understood and am confident in?In the field I worked in (computational mathematics), the current tendency is that you’re expected to produce positive result no matter what. If you show that some method does not work because such and such but don’t offer any improvement, you’re likely to be rejected. People forgot that negative result is a result. The “successful business” attitude now poisoned academic science.Papers have errors that many people don’t even check (R.I.P. Reproducibility). After long and hard work, I once found an error in a highly cited paper and contacted the guy directly by e-mail. His response seemed annoyed, but he agreed with my observation. Nothing happened after that. He still has high citations and enjoys his academic work. To them, it’s like “meh”. No thanks and no job invitations to me either.Papers are rejected by reviewers due to lots of bias and personal preferences. They didn’t like notation, they didn’t understand what you wrote, they didn’t other blah-blah-blah. Even when they accept, you’re forced to go through lots of revision, sometimes by learning and using graphical software (these wussies wanna see nice pictures with blue curves on your data graphs instead of red ones, how cute!) You spend valuable time on this crap and can’t even put it in the report for your grant as a reasonable time spending because everybody expects to hear cloudy positive words about your so-called research.Also, I’ve heard at least a few stories of how papers that contained ideas that made huge impact many years later were rejected at first, and so they were just put into technical reports or simply uploaded for open access somewhere.Grants are given to those with the most convincing grant proposals. The latter does not imply any actual connection with future scientific work and methods. The committee may actually have hard time understanding what you mean. I simply have no idea how I can write about what I’m gonna do (because thinking of ways to conduct research already implies conducting it because it involves generating ideas! It’s a dead circle!) and, worst of all, what I’m gonna get as a result! Damn, that’s the whole idea of science, you don’t know until you try!! But to be a successful grant eater, you need to learn to convince uneducated committee members about how your field will give golden rivers in return by throwing tons of narrow-focused scientific terms at them to leave them impressed.High competition in academia is due to lack of positions. There are more nerds than there is money for them. This creates certain rules that many have to follow in order to allow for easier selection of appropriate candidates. The filtering process may not even involve scientific criteria in any way! Wrote a tiny bit of doubt in your research statement when applying for a tenure-track position rather than highly-emotional passion-fueled motivational crap (doubt is a normal part of cognitive process in science, assholes!)? Next!(Applies to the Western segment of academia) Highly politicized campuses. This is related to the previous point also, since if you don’t follow the rules, you’re outta college. Said a terrible joke during a lecture to amuse your students? Out of college, you sexist/racist dick! Also, enjoy visiting tons of so-called “trainings” about PC culture and diversity. In industry, your boss is interested in the actual result you can produce and doesn’t want you to spend time on such shit!You need to keep generating network to prepare for your next job search and keep sending hundreds of applications, even if you’re currently more interested in keeping working on your ideas and not thinking about deadlines related to career. This is exhausting and destroys all motivation and creativity. Even if you send over 400 applications, you’re still not guaranteed to get an offer. Worst of all, colleges now(even small ones) are so full of themselves that they require you to submit paperwork that specifically targets their position and campus, so you can’t just create one package for all without subsequent editing and specialized “ass-licking”!Lack of transparency in everything pertaining to academia. When some professor from outside is invited to give a talk and my advisor tells me “You really need to meet Prof. ***”, all I do is wait for him to finish his sentence. But the sentence is complete. To academic people, it’s normal to talk this way and assume I already know why the fuck I need to talk to that or another guy. But I don’t! Is it to ask a question about his recent paper? Is it to ask about job openings in his department? Is it about to propose to write a paper together? WHY DON’T YOU SAY CLEARLY WHAT YOU MEAN!? But the attitude is that you’re expected to engage in conversation that may lead to some additional node in your networking graph, that’s all. Jesus, it has to be so natural and spontaneous, that it sometimes seems easier to approach a chick in a bar than some academic guy on a conference.(The saddest one) By the time you get your tenure and finally retire, you suddenly realize how lone you are. No wealth, no active social life other than with the same aging nerds at conference lunches, and no significant impact in science. At least in industry, you have a much higher chance to acquire more wealth. Only 20 or so people around the globe that are familiar with your narrow-focused field will be remembering about you on a few occasions. You replaced your fundamental and valuable knowledge and learning ability with extremely narrow competence. Can you even learn anything beyond your field now that you’re so old?Too much stress that doesn’t pay off. Once you’re home, your brain still keeps working. I have nothing against it. In fact, that’s how I was used to be working in science. But what I meant was that you’re forced to keep planning, writing, preparing, emailing, i.e. doing everything but thinking!A joke (or could be a real story) about Ernest Rutherford says that once he was walking in a department hall late at night and suddenly saw one of his grad students stuck in the lab. When Rutherford asked him about what the heck he was doing that late at night, the student proudly announced that he was working. Rutherford’s response was ‘Jesus Christ! When do you have time to think?’Peter Higgs once admitted that he wouldn’t have been able to discover his boson had he worked in today’s academia. No wonder Grigory Perelman sent academia to hell in 1996 so he could keep working alone at home at the pace he wanted. That allowed him to solve one of the Millennium Prize problems by the beginning of 2000s.Enjoy reading this letter that I found in the depths of internet. At some point I realized I’m happy I didn’t get to MIT.My vision is now final. Academia these days is a circus and is highly disconnected from science. I’m not saying this is somebody’s definite fault, it was probably natural and expected to happen since getting to academia now is as open as it is to get a job in industry, provided you work hard enough. Romantic times of Newton and Euler are long gone. With so many people there, some restrictions, competition and definite corruption in the scientific conduct was bound to happen. My realization is that if you truly love science and wanna stick with it, raise your own money via non-academic means and, when you’re rich enough, open your own lab. Problem is, you may not want to go back once you’re rich. The new comfort zone will be too strong to leave…I left academia two years ago and was never happier. I now work in a private company and write software for numerical methods used in chemical industry. And you know what’s funny? That I get to use scientific method here on the job much more often than I did in academia! The team lead gives me an assignment to search, choose and compare between various strategies and methods in order to choose the best one. I have no deadlines, and I can work at my own pace. They can’t criticize my work beyond their own knowledge, cause most of them are chemists and they barely have any idea what I’m doing on the lower level, but they look at the actual result that my work led to. Such lack of stress is when you begin to flourish! And this is where I started doing my best in following ORCI principles that I mentioned above, and never felt more fulfilled. Shame on you, academia, shame on you! At least industry is honest in its desire to raise money by doing what is demonstrated to work, while academia is pretending to do science. Interestingly, many people in academia were advising me against leaving it, claiming that “Industry is so routine and boring!”. I agree that it might be usually the case, especially if you’re not picky. It’s just that my case turned out really lucky!I don’t have any solution for you other than highly unrealistic one that I mentioned, i.e. raise your own money and open your lab, but I wish you luck with whatever you do in the future.UPDATE: After I quit academia, I read a book (yeah, I finally got enough time for myself) called Microbe Hunters . The book is about the birth and continuing growth of microbiology. My father really liked this book and was saying he sometimes regretted becoming a chemist instead of a biologist. Despite not being a biologist either, I felt like I haven’t read a more interesting and amazing book about history of science than this masterpiece presented. It contained a brilliant demonstration of what I call a scientific method! That was a true science! Reading this book was the last nail in the coffin of academia in my life.

We recently addressed this question/topic in an article. Re-posting it here:According to Forrester Research 34 million Americans work from home today. This number is set to reach a staggering 63 million by 2016, comprising 43% of the US workforce. If we extrapolate this to a global workforce, there are potentially hundreds of millions of people willing to work as part of a distributed team. In the new world order, the best talent doesn’t reside in one location: it’s more distributed than ever.Highly skilled and talented distributed workers know that they can work just as effectively from anywhere while also attaining a better work-life balance. Employers should consider this a win. According to IBM, people who work remotely are 50% more productive. This sentiment is also shared in thevideo by application development phenom @DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails and founder of 37signals (makers of Basecamp). Organizations that embrace distributed teams are also able to break free from the geographic limitations of sourcing talent, and are able to cast a wider net to attract and retain the best quality talent at lower costs. Take for example hiring a junior engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Intense competition, the high cost of living and other in state and government mandates means hiring an inexperienced coder will probably cost you over a hundred thousand dollarsper year. Add in the cost of leases, office infrastructure and paying for services like mobile devices, and costs quickly spiral.While some might argue that distributed teams make communication harder, inhibit collaboration or never allow for a company culture to form, the trend still points to a future of managing a distributed workforce. We should learn to embrace it.The Distributed Agile Approach — Think Global. Code Global.Companies like WordPress.com: Create a free website or blog, Basecamp, Github, Treehouse, Upworthy, Stack Exchange and many more are 100% distributed. Over 150 startups are 50% distributed with less than one-third of them having a presence in Silicon Valley. At Scalable Path we are a distributed, agile team of over 1000 developers, designers and marketers. We’ve been running and improving Distributed Agile since 2010, and over 25% of our clients have been running remote teams for at least 18 months, while 80% of our talent has been with us for over 2 years.For us, creating productive distributed agile teams is key in client satisfaction and employee retention, and even more important in being able to deliver valuable applications and projects — on time and on budget. The keys to success of a digital agile approach aren’t far off from traditional agile methodology, but they do have unique characteristics that make them work.Communication and CollaborationAsk any practitioner of agile and they’ll tell you that communication and collaboration are probably the most important attributes to delivering projects on time. With distributed teams, being good at this is even more pronounced. Fortunately, the tools and technologies available today to distributed teams can nearly match the ultimate communication and collaboration tool of meeting face-to-face. But as we know, distributed workforces are the future so you’ll probably being seeing less and less of your colleague in person. Communication and collaboration tools for the Distributed Agile team include:Online task tracking and project management tools. Choose your tools wisely. Physical backlogs with sticky notes are great in some cases, but don’t translate well to a distributed team. Use online tools to enable smooth and dynamic project and task management, easy prioritization, visibility and transparency and better collaboration. Project and Task Tracking Tools: Trello, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, BasecampVirtual Meetings and Collaboration. In-person exchanges are special, allowing people to be fully in each other’s presence, and communicate with voice, facial expressions and body language. These nuances usually get lost in with emails and text communications, which can lead to miscommunications and disagreements if not handled correctly. However, modern communication tools enable easy and seamless voice and video calls, which means we can approximate in-person meetings with regards to what we hear and see in people’s faces. As a bonus, many tools also enable other forms of collaborative features such as screen sharing, which makes passing around print-outs and huddling around a single computer a thing of the past. The prevalence of these tools is making their cost zero in some cases, meaning that teams and individuals can spin up ad-hoc meetings to resolve issues or discuss a topic. Meeting and collaboration tools: Google Hangouts,GoToMeeting, Skype, appear.in, RoomGroup Chat, Not Email. At Scalable Path, we communicate with our clients, teams, and third-parties via Slack instead of email. Slack is one of a new breed of organizational chat tools which allows groups to have text conversations and collaborate in an effective and efficient manner. You can set the context of channels to discuss particular projects or topics, and people can communicate directly if needed. There is also the notion of public channels, where the whole organization can communicate, and private channels, where only invited individuals can chat. Instead of having many email messages and threads, it’s much easier to see the history of a conversation and collaborate. We see an increase in communication and collaboration within organizations where we implement Slack. Check out Slack, it’s free to get started. Another great tool that accomplishes a similar goal is HipChat, but the barrier to entry is larger for organizations. Other Tools: 10 alternatives to SlackWork with teams with high time zone overlap. Working with teams with significant time zone overlap allows tight collaboration without affecting work-life balance. Having distributed teams with large time differences negatively affects team dynamics and in the long term is unsustainable, and usually requires duplicating leadership for each time-zone isolated team. Scalable Path assembles project teams with healthy overlap in working hours so that teams members can work with each other.Build self-sufficient teams. Teams should be designed to run autonomously. Direct communication between team members should be encouraged over top-down management. Every team should include people with all of the skills needed to develop the product they are working on. Try avoiding splitting individuals’ time across different teams as this leads to unnecessary bottlenecks and inefficiencies due to context-switching. Teams needing outside support should be free to seek it as long as the impact to other people’s productivity is not affected, or if it is, get the proper approvals. Slack and group chat tools enable easy communication with people outside of the immediate working team.CultureDoesn’t culture develop from being physically together? Admittedly, it can be difficult for a team to build a positive rapport when members are unable to catch up at lunch or hangout after work. But culture goes beyond meals and libations. It’s also about seeing a vision, aligning to a mission, creating a sense of community and belonging and having loyalty to a project that gets people excited about work. Here are a few tips on building culture with distributed teams.Get to know people personally. Spend time with your team members before or after calls. Get to know about their interests, books they’re reading, things they’re doing offline. Building personal relationships helps build trust and bridges cultural differences which leads to people being more open about their opinions. It helps build relationships that go a long way in retaining employees. People like feeling appreciated, and sharing their passions. As social media sites like Facebook show us, people are willing to share their lives virtually.Create a place for people to share interesting or funny online content. At Scalable Path, we have #frontend, #backend, #design, #random #general, and other channels in Slack where people share ridiculous things and ridiculously interesting things like news, new technology, and ideas. Once we started doing this, a culture started to emerge and people working on different projects started to get to know each other. It’s like having a virtual water cooler where impromptu conversations happen and it’s been great!Create room for innovation. We encourage everyone within our organization to work on personal projects. Some of our leaders are actually using our developer network to build their side projects. It keeps their creative juices flowing and makes them more effective with client engagements.Be introspective and iterate. In Agile fashion, organizations should be open to change and ask themselves what’s working and what’s not working, and aim to iterate and improve over time. You are probably not going to get everything right the first time around, but it’s possible to improve over time.Guest appearances by non-team members. At Scalable Path, we have webinars featuring thought leaders and experts once a month. It helps our team stay abreast with the latest techniques and a gives the team a sense of what’s happening around the world. Within client projects we encourage cameos from other people, for example a VP/CTO/CEO to share updates, insights, news. Best of all, through hangouts, we are able to get thought leaders from across the world to talk about their experiences.Have once a month inter-team meetings. We have monthly updates with our leadership team to share learnings, developments and goals. It makes everyone feel they’re part of a bigger mission. During these meetings we encourage the sharing of ideas and giving feedback on ways to improve.Invest in personal development. Offering free trainings and reimbursements for personal growth go a long way in developing culture. It helps employees make leaps within their professional life and keeps them happier.We’ve listed many techniques that are helpful for running Distributed Agile teams. It can’t be stressed enough, however, that the most important thing for a team is to have a positive environment where people feel safe to express themselves and try new things. Without the right culture as a foundation, tools and processes won’t get you very far.The equation is different for every organization, but the points outlined above are a great place to start. We find that these concepts are not just applicable to application development teams, and work well for many other businesses. Once the organization is comfortable with a Distributed Agile model, there should be clear improvements in communication and collaboration, which translate into better delivery of valuable products to end users and stakeholders.Originally published at www.scalablepath.com.Scalable Path is a premium talent marketplace with a worldwide network of great developers, designers and experienced project leaders. Looking to develop a product or hire top talent? Get in touch. Premium Talent On-Demand | Scalable Path

We recently addressed this question/topic in an article. Re-posting it here:According to Forrester Research 34 million Americans work from home today. This number is set to reach a staggering 63 million by 2016, comprising 43% of the US workforce. If we extrapolate this to a global workforce, there are potentially hundreds of millions of people willing to work as part of a distributed team. In the new world order, the best talent doesn’t reside in one location: it’s more distributed than ever.Highly skilled and talented distributed workers know that they can work just as effectively from anywhere while also attaining a better work-life balance. Employers should consider this a win. According to IBM, people who work remotely are 50% more productive. This sentiment is also shared in thevideo by application development phenom @DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails and founder of 37signals (makers of Basecamp). Organizations that embrace distributed teams are also able to break free from the geographic limitations of sourcing talent, and are able to cast a wider net to attract and retain the best quality talent at lower costs. Take for example hiring a junior engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Intense competition, the high cost of living and other in state and government mandates means hiring an inexperienced coder will probably cost you over a hundred thousand dollarsper year. Add in the cost of leases, office infrastructure and paying for services like mobile devices, and costs quickly spiral.While some might argue that distributed teams make communication harder, inhibit collaboration or never allow for a company culture to form, the trend still points to a future of managing a distributed workforce. We should learn to embrace it.The Distributed Agile Approach — Think Global. Code Global.Companies like WordPress.com: Create a free website or blog, Basecamp, Github, Treehouse, Upworthy, Stack Exchange and many more are 100% distributed. Over 150 startups are 50% distributed with less than one-third of them having a presence in Silicon Valley. At Scalable Path we are a distributed, agile team of over 1000 developers, designers and marketers. We’ve been running and improving Distributed Agile since 2010, and over 25% of our clients have been running remote teams for at least 18 months, while 80% of our talent has been with us for over 2 years.For us, creating productive distributed agile teams is key in client satisfaction and employee retention, and even more important in being able to deliver valuable applications and projects — on time and on budget. The keys to success of a digital agile approach aren’t far off from traditional agile methodology, but they do have unique characteristics that make them work.Communication and CollaborationAsk any practitioner of agile and they’ll tell you that communication and collaboration are probably the most important attributes to delivering projects on time. With distributed teams, being good at this is even more pronounced. Fortunately, the tools and technologies available today to distributed teams can nearly match the ultimate communication and collaboration tool of meeting face-to-face. But as we know, distributed workforces are the future so you’ll probably being seeing less and less of your colleague in person. Communication and collaboration tools for the Distributed Agile team include:Online task tracking and project management tools. Choose your tools wisely. Physical backlogs with sticky notes are great in some cases, but don’t translate well to a distributed team. Use online tools to enable smooth and dynamic project and task management, easy prioritization, visibility and transparency and better collaboration. Project and Task Tracking Tools: Trello, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, BasecampVirtual Meetings and Collaboration. In-person exchanges are special, allowing people to be fully in each other’s presence, and communicate with voice, facial expressions and body language. These nuances usually get lost in with emails and text communications, which can lead to miscommunications and disagreements if not handled correctly. However, modern communication tools enable easy and seamless voice and video calls, which means we can approximate in-person meetings with regards to what we hear and see in people’s faces. As a bonus, many tools also enable other forms of collaborative features such as screen sharing, which makes passing around print-outs and huddling around a single computer a thing of the past. The prevalence of these tools is making their cost zero in some cases, meaning that teams and individuals can spin up ad-hoc meetings to resolve issues or discuss a topic. Meeting and collaboration tools: Google Hangouts,GoToMeeting, Skype, appear.in, RoomGroup Chat, Not Email. At Scalable Path, we communicate with our clients, teams, and third-parties via Slack instead of email. Slack is one of a new breed of organizational chat tools which allows groups to have text conversations and collaborate in an effective and efficient manner. You can set the context of channels to discuss particular projects or topics, and people can communicate directly if needed. There is also the notion of public channels, where the whole organization can communicate, and private channels, where only invited individuals can chat. Instead of having many email messages and threads, it’s much easier to see the history of a conversation and collaborate. We see an increase in communication and collaboration within organizations where we implement Slack. Check out Slack, it’s free to get started. Another great tool that accomplishes a similar goal is HipChat, but the barrier to entry is larger for organizations. Other Tools: 10 alternatives to SlackWork with teams with high time zone overlap. Working with teams with significant time zone overlap allows tight collaboration without affecting work-life balance. Having distributed teams with large time differences negatively affects team dynamics and in the long term is unsustainable, and usually requires duplicating leadership for each time-zone isolated team. Scalable Path assembles project teams with healthy overlap in working hours so that teams members can work with each other.Build self-sufficient teams. Teams should be designed to run autonomously. Direct communication between team members should be encouraged over top-down management. Every team should include people with all of the skills needed to develop the product they are working on. Try avoiding splitting individuals’ time across different teams as this leads to unnecessary bottlenecks and inefficiencies due to context-switching. Teams needing outside support should be free to seek it as long as the impact to other people’s productivity is not affected, or if it is, get the proper approvals. Slack and group chat tools enable easy communication with people outside of the immediate working team.CultureDoesn’t culture develop from being physically together? Admittedly, it can be difficult for a team to build a positive rapport when members are unable to catch up at lunch or hangout after work. But culture goes beyond meals and libations. It’s also about seeing a vision, aligning to a mission, creating a sense of community and belonging and having loyalty to a project that gets people excited about work. Here are a few tips on building culture with distributed teams.Get to know people personally. Spend time with your team members before or after calls. Get to know about their interests, books they’re reading, things they’re doing offline. Building personal relationships helps build trust and bridges cultural differences which leads to people being more open about their opinions. It helps build relationships that go a long way in retaining employees. People like feeling appreciated, and sharing their passions. As social media sites like Facebook show us, people are willing to share their lives virtually.Create a place for people to share interesting or funny online content. At Scalable Path, we have #frontend, #backend, #design, #random #general, and other channels in Slack where people share ridiculous things and ridiculously interesting things like news, new technology, and ideas. Once we started doing this, a culture started to emerge and people working on different projects started to get to know each other. It’s like having a virtual water cooler where impromptu conversations happen and it’s been great!Create room for innovation. We encourage everyone within our organization to work on personal projects. Some of our leaders are actually using our developer network to build their side projects. It keeps their creative juices flowing and makes them more effective with client engagements.Be introspective and iterate. In Agile fashion, organizations should be open to change and ask themselves what’s working and what’s not working, and aim to iterate and improve over time. You are probably not going to get everything right the first time around, but it’s possible to improve over time.Guest appearances by non-team members. At Scalable Path, we have webinars featuring thought leaders and experts once a month. It helps our team stay abreast with the latest techniques and a gives the team a sense of what’s happening around the world. Within client projects we encourage cameos from other people, for example a VP/CTO/CEO to share updates, insights, news. Best of all, through hangouts, we are able to get thought leaders from across the world to talk about their experiences.Have once a month inter-team meetings. We have monthly updates with our leadership team to share learnings, developments and goals. It makes everyone feel they’re part of a bigger mission. During these meetings we encourage the sharing of ideas and giving feedback on ways to improve.Invest in personal development. Offering free trainings and reimbursements for personal growth go a long way in developing culture. It helps employees make leaps within their professional life and keeps them happier.We’ve listed many techniques that are helpful for running Distributed Agile teams. It can’t be stressed enough, however, that the most important thing for a team is to have a positive environment where people feel safe to express themselves and try new things. Without the right culture as a foundation, tools and processes won’t get you very far.The equation is different for every organization, but the points outlined above are a great place to start. We find that these concepts are not just applicable to application development teams, and work well for many other businesses. Once the organization is comfortable with a Distributed Agile model, there should be clear improvements in communication and collaboration, which translate into better delivery of valuable products to end users and stakeholders.Originally published at www.scalablepath.com.Scalable Path is a premium talent marketplace with a worldwide network of great developers, designers and experienced project leaders. Looking to develop a product or hire top talent? Get in touch. Premium Talent On-Demand | Scalable Path