Why it's time to retire the "recharge and hit the ground running" email
Dec 24, 11:59PM ET. You hit send on your year-end email to the team.
Subject: Thanks for an Amazing 2025. Here's to 2026!
You've included the usual: gratitude for their hard work, recognition of a challenging year, and a reminder to "take time to recharge". Maybe even a line about "coming back refreshed and ready to hit the ground running in January."
Now imagine how it lands.
Your employee opens it the next morning while their kids are unwrapping presents. Their living room is covered in wrapping paper, tiny legos, stickers, and even worse, glitter. They have no childcare in sight for days. They don't have the right batteries to power half the toys they bought, and can't explain the difference between triple A and D to a kid.
"Take time to recharge"?
Your employees don't need permission to recharge. Most of them won't actually be able to recharge in any meaningful way — not when "time off" looks like holiday logistics, family obligations, and keeping small humans alive without school or childcare.
What they actually need? Structured time to reflect. And most companies aren't giving them that.
Leaders: think before you send that email.
It's well-intentioned. It might even be sincere. But your employees don't need permission to recharge. Most of them won't actually be able to recharge in any meaningful way — not when "time off" looks like holiday logistics, family obligations, travel chaos, and keeping small humans alive without school or childcare.
What they actually need? Structured time to reflect. And most companies aren't giving them that.
The burnout paradox
We know burnout is at record highs. Every report confirms it. So companies respond by offering access to meditation apps, mental health resources, wellness stipends, mindfulness workshops. All good things. But here's what they're missing: you can't app your way out of a structural problem.
Your employees don't need another resource to squeeze into their already-packed lives. They need actual time to be mindful. Time that's protected. Time that's modeled from the top. Time that's built into how your organization operates, not tacked on as a benefit they're supposed to access "whenever they need it."
Because here's what actually happens in most organizations:
Week of Dec 23: Frenetic close-out. Deals to lock in, performance reviews to finalize, comp planning, 2026 budgets, year-end parties squeezed between everything else.
Dec 24-Jan 1: "Time off" (see above: wrapping paper, wrong batteries, glitter everywhere)
Jan 2: Immediate reentry. Board meeting prep. Q1 execution mode. Hit the ground "running."
Where's the pause? Where's the space to actually process what just happened before you charge into what's next?
The case for retrospectives
As a student of agile, I learned that retrospectives aren't optional — they're built into the methodology. What worked, what didn't, what to do differently next time. The best learnings are captured when they're fresh. Wait too long and you lose clarity, fall into the same traps over and over.
I do this debrief with my five-year-old every night. Before bed, when she's calm and receptive, we talk about the wins and losses from the day. Not because I'm trying to turn bedtime into a performance review, but because I know: reflection is how people evolve. It's how you integrate learning instead of just accumulating experiences.
If this works for a five-year-old processing her day and agile teams processing a sprint, why don't you build this into how your organization operates?
Because it's hard to work these pauses into the organizational pace. Convincing a busy executive to put a meeting on the calendar to talk about what just shipped feels nearly impossible. You've convinced yourself there isn't time.
Maybe the best holiday gift for your team isn't time off. It's time to think.
So here's the real gift you can give your team this year: Don't just tell them to recharge. Build reflection into the calendar.
Make the first week of January about retrospective, not reentry. Not "hitting the ground running." Not back-to-back meetings and board prep. Actually pause.
What does this look like in practice?
Team retrospectives: What worked in 2025? What didn't? What do you want to take forward, what do you want to leave behind?
Individual reflection time: Not "if you can find it" time — actual blocked calendar time for your employees to think through their own performance, growth areas, what they need to succeed in 2026.
Leadership modeling: If you're asking your team to reflect, you need to be doing it too — and making it visible that you're doing it.
This isn't about delaying Q1 execution. It's about making sure you're executing on the right things, informed by what you actually learned.
Most companies say they value continuous improvement. But you can't improve what you don't examine. You can't learn from what you don't process. Without that space, there's no learning, just steamrolling.
So this year, skip the "recharge" email. Or at least, follow it up with something more valuable: structured time to think before the next sprint begins.
Grant your employees time to reflect — not just on metrics and KPIs, but on what worked, what didn't, what they want to carry forward. Make that first week about integration, not just reintegration.
That's the gift. And it's one your employees will actually be able to use.
