From leave admin to leave taker: J’s search for joy on the road to recovery

Being motivated by a desire to help others, inspired by the opportunity to build a great culture, and up to the challenge of helping employees and organizations evolve are some of the special ingredients that make for a great People Ops teammate. While some folks start in HR straight away, others come into it after a life experience that pushes them to want to help others—often in a way they themselves were not. It’s what drove our founders to start Cocoon, and how our leave champion, J, came to her current role as a Benefits Program Manager. J is a powerful example of someone who translated both her positive experiences and struggles in life (and on leave) into concrete solutions, policies, and processes to ensure others would be better supported and equipped to face what the real world and their work life presented. 

Meet J on her search for joy

From a young age, J knew the importance of being there for her family, and that good health wasn’t something to be taken for granted–that’s because J took leave to care for her mother who eventually lost her battle with breast cancer when J was only 23. “When you lose someone that you love so much, it really changes your perspective on life. I started questioning what my purpose was. I realized life was really short and asked myself if I was doing exactly what I wanted to do? Was it bringing me joy?” Upon reflecting, she realized that she wanted to make a bold change, trying her hand at a career in fashion. She stayed in the fast-paced industry for a decade before realizing it was time to switch it up again—this time by starting a family.

“When I got pregnant with my daughter, I remembered that life lesson of how short life was and I knew I didn’t want to miss a single day with her. So I resigned and shifted all that purpose and energy into being a mom and just absolutely loved it.” Adding a son into the mix a few years later, J made each day with her young family count. As her kids grew, J started dabbling in part-time work, once again, asking herself what brought her joy. “I knew I didn’t want to go back to fashion, which was too much travel and intensity,” J says. “I realized, you know, I’m really passionate about helping people. I also really enjoyed the project management side of my work, so that’s when it clicked for me that HR roles worked well with my personal and professional needs.”

She made the full transition back when a part-time role turned into a full-time gig in 2018. Though she had taken on a lot of HR generalist work, she always enjoyed roles focused on leave and benefits most, because they made her feel the impact of her work directly. This eventually led her to become a Benefits Program Manager at a B2C SaaS EdTech company with around 250 employees across the US and Canada. With a team of three, J had a lot on her plate, but it was about to overflow…

From leave admin to leave taker 

In mid-2022, J and her husband were thrown for the loop of their lives as they were both diagnosed with cancer within weeks of each other. Knowing her higher risk for breast cancer, J had always been vigilant about prevention and detection, catching it at an early stage. For her husband, a triathlete unknowingly hosting a growing tumor in his abdomen, however, the diagnosis and treatment were more dire. “I had just enough time to schedule my own surgery, have time to recover, and then get ready to take care of my husband as he underwent his treatment and recovery for what would end up being almost a full year.” 

J ended up taking two leaves: first, a medical leave for her own recovery, then a caregiver leave while her husband underwent treatment. This compounded the complexity, not only having to navigate two types of leave, but doing so while working through her own health problems before turning around to help her husband in his recovery—and with little time to plan and process it all. It didn’t help that her first leave with a different leave administrator went awry. 

“We had one leave rep through our provider to handle everything. They often took too long to respond, or just didn’t respond at all. On top of that, they would send inaccurate manual payroll files, so we wasted a lot of time double-checking and sending files back,” J explains. “I had administered leaves, knew what problems people tended to encounter, so I thought I had a slight upper hand at navigating my own leave. But when you experience it first-hand, it’s even more challenging than you could ever imagine. And it’s downright scary when you don’t know your pay amount or timelines.” The final straw for J came when the leave admin miscommunicated her return date to her manager by eight weeks, causing chaos at work and home. “I just thought, there's no way I could let this happen to anybody else,” J asserts.

Luckily, even before J had taken her first leave, the Benefits team was already in talks about how they could improve the leave experience, cut ties with their outsourced leave provider, and Cocoon was slated as the top option to replace it. “My experience made me even more compassionate for people going on leave, and often not under happy circumstances, and dealing with it all. And now I was in a position to make a difference for them, to ensure nobody else would have to go through what I went through,” J reaffirms.

A sunnier horizon on the road to recovery

Though she didn’t have much time after returning from her medical leave before beginning her caregiver leave, J and her team lined up the pieces enough that she could use Cocoon to plan and manage her caregiver leave. This time around with Cocoon, it felt like night and day compared to the first leave experience. Cocoon gave her the peace of mind she needed about submitting paperwork, pay, and timelines so she could focus on caring for her husband on his long road to recovery.

Unfortunately, her husband’s employer didn’t have Cocoon, and they struggled trying to figure out what to do about disability payments that weren’t coming, until J realized Cocoon could still come to the rescue. “My husband wasn’t receiving disability payments, nobody from the EDD was getting back to us, his HR team wasn’t very helpful, so I started poking around in Cocoon to figure out how to contact the EDD,” J explains. “There was an article that explained the process and even gave tips to get through, like which hours are the best to call. It was incredible.” 

Cocoon gave J such a clear sense of the process, that upon returning to work, she had ideas on how to keep improving the leave process for everyone. “Without the manual processes and overall administrative burden of our previous provider, we could finally work on how our organization could craft more intentional and realistic transition plans to help employees ramp back up after leave. We also started drafting two additional leave policies to complement the parental and disability leave we already had.” 

Without the manual processes and overall administrative burden of our previous provider, we could finally work on how our organization could craft more intentional and realistic transition plans to help employees ramp back up after leave.” 

A leave management experience that keeps getting better

Having now been a Cocoon customer for over two years and managing dozens of leaves in Cocoon, J says the complaints they used to hear from leave-takers about their rep have dried up. “In the People Ops world, when we don’t hear anything from employees, we know that things are going well,” J laughs. “For the Benefits team, we’ve reduced our need to oversee the process by at least 50%, and we don’t keep getting stuck in the middle. We have confidence in Cocoon, and don’t need to spend all that time auditing payroll and trying to get a hold of someone. When we do have questions, we get a timely response that makes sense and offers solutions. And I know first-hand how important that is.”

J also appreciates that the Cocoon experience is always improving and evolving. “In our calls with Mike (J’s Customer Success Manager), he always asks what’s working, what’s not, and to have someone with that kind of attitude is so different. And it isn’t just talk—I constantly see how Cocoon listens and makes improvements. I know Cocoon is keeping an eye on our needs and thinking about the future. This approach fits really well with the ethos of our culture, and is reassuring for the leave industry which desperately needs more of it.” 

With her a clean bill of health for herself and her husband, J also rests assured about how she can play her part in helping others overcome the obstacles they face on a leave, or sidestep them entirely by relying on Cocoon. As someone who has pondered, chased, and redefined her purpose, J knows that “when I can help somebody, I find joy and fulfillment in that. I know that what I’m doing matters to someone else, and also to me… and nothing is more important than that.” We couldn’t agree more, J.