How to kick off the new year with your team

The best way to kick off the new year with your team is to spread it over the first two weeks back instead of packing it into one big meeting. Spend the first week reconnecting (a team lunch and short check-ins), then use the second week for a short look back and look ahead, agree on one team goal framed as something you'll do, and close with something social. Below is a dated plan for January 2027, a 45-minute session agenda, and a version for remote teams.

Why the first two weeks are worth planning

People are unusually open to change at the start of a year. In a 2014 study in Management Science, Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis found that gym visits, Google searches for "diet" and commitments to personal goals all rose after "temporal landmarks" such as the start of a new week, month or year. They called it the fresh start effect.

That's an argument for using January deliberately. It isn't an argument for a long strategy presentation on the first day back, when inboxes are full and people are still catching up with each other. Reconnect first; the planning goes better once people have talked.

The two-week plan for January 2027

New Year's Day 2027 falls on a Friday and Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, January 18, according to the federal holiday calendar, so the first two full weeks back run January 4 to 15. The timing below is our guidance; shift it if your team returns later.

When	What	Length	Notes
Mon, Jan 4	Team lunch	60 to 90 min	No agenda beyond catching up. Book or order in December.
Tue, Jan 5 to Thu, Jan 7	Manager check-ins with each team	30 to 45 min	What's on everyone's plate, what slipped before the break, what needs attention this week.
Tue, Jan 12 or Wed, Jan 13	Look back, look ahead session	45 min per team	Agenda below.
Thu, Jan 14	Teams share their one goal	5 min per team	A short all-hands, or a written post if the company is large.
Fri, Jan 15	Social close	2 hours	An afternoon outing, a long lunch or an early happy hour. Book by mid-December.

Avoid scheduling anything big on the first morning back. People need a few hours to clear what piled up.

A 45-minute look back, look ahead session

Run it per team, not company-wide, so everyone gets a turn to talk. Our suggested agenda:

1. 5 minutes: Each person names one thing from last year they're glad the team did.
2. 10 minutes: What worked? Write answers on a shared board, one idea per note.
3. 10 minutes: What didn't? Same format. Keep it about how the team works, not about individuals.
4. 15 minutes: What's the one thing we'll do differently this quarter? Group similar ideas, then vote.
5. 5 minutes: Write the winning goal as a sentence that starts with a verb, and name who owns it.

Keep the facilitator's opinions out of it until the vote is done. When people help shape the goal, they have a reason to keep it.

Pick one goal, and phrase it as something to do

Twelve goals agreed in January is a list nobody can hold in their head. Pick one, for one quarter.

How you phrase it matters too. In a 2020 study in PLOS ONE that followed 1,066 people for a year after setting New Year's resolutions, 58.9% of those with approach goals (something to start or do more of) considered themselves successful, compared with 47.1% of those with avoidance goals (something to stop). The study was about personal resolutions, not teams, but the lesson carries over: "Have lunch together every other Friday" is easier to keep than "Stop working through lunch."

Some team goals in that shape:

• Hold a team lunch every other Friday.
• Take every new hire to a welcome dinner in their first two weeks.
• Do one team outing a month, chosen by a team poll.
• Hold a 30-minute retro at the end of every project.

The same study found that people who got a modest amount of support, such as naming someone to check in with and getting a monthly follow-up, did better than both the group with no support and the group with more intensive support. For a team goal, that's an owner and a short monthly check. Put the check on the calendar now. If your goal involves regular events, the guide to building a team event calendar people actually check covers how to lay out the year.

Low-effort kickoff activities

If you want something more structured than lunch, these work for teams of up to about 20 (our guidance; split larger groups by team):

• A predictions board: everyone writes a few predictions for the year: work, industry, pop culture. Seal it and open it in December.
• A two-minute show and tell: one thing each person read, made, watched or learned over the break.
• One word for the year: everyone writes one word for how they want to approach the year. No explanation needed.

The remote team version

The same plan works for distributed teams with a few changes:

• The day-one lunch becomes a 45-minute video lunch. If you send meal money, ask payroll how to handle it: IRS Publication 15-B treats gift cards and other cash equivalents as never excludable as a de minimis benefit, however small.
• Run check-ins on video, and keep the look back, look ahead session to a shared online board.
• Add 30 minutes of unstructured time in the first week, a video call with no agenda, since remote teams don't get the hallway catch-ups that office teams do.
• If any remote people live near each other, the social close can be a local meetup instead of another call.

The remote team outing toolkit has more formats and a rule for picking times across time zones.

Where TeamOutings fits

You can set up January's lunch and the Friday social close in TeamOutings in December, with the place, time and cost per person, and let people reply Yes, No or Maybe. If the team can't agree on where to go, run a poll on the activity or the date. If your goal is a monthly outing, each one gets its own chat and photo album, so by December you have a record of the year. TeamOutings doesn't send reminders or calendar invites, so add those yourself. For the planning steps behind each outing, use the team outing checklist and timeline.