I wanted to share an exercise today that you can use if you are introducing a new hire to a remote team, and the goal is to build a lot of positive energy in the team, or laugh a lot in the meantime. This game is called Mind-Meld! All Star Trek Fans can cheer now :) Essentially you suggest a really generic word that has a lot of associations, such as "Christmas", or "Seaside" and ask everyone to think of the first word to come to mind when they hear this word. Once they have this word in mind they either raise their hand on camera or use the raise hand icon on whichever platform you host on. You then invite two of the volunteers to come on screen and give them a 3 second countdown, where after they have to shout out their word at the same time. I have played this a lot with groups. What I love about it is that it is a Win-Win type of game. If the pair have different words, the group laughs, and if they match, the group cheers. In the case of non-matches, you ask for a word(other than the original suggestion) that connects these two words. To facilitate this effectively, cut the game after 3 matches, or 3 big laughs! Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash