Cocoon release notes: what’s new in December 2024

It’s full steam ahead for Team Cocoon as we wrap up 2024. Before we close our laptops for our company-wide Winter Recharge Week (sidenote: highly recommend this), we’ll be busy at work to release more functionality that helps People teams manage leave a little more smoothly. This month, we’re excited to share what we’ve built along the themes of customization, seamless access across multiple Cocoon accounts, and more.

Customize how your company holidays impact leave time

‘Tis the season for more customization in Cocoon. Our Product Team is definitely on the nice list this year for tackling another top request from our community: including holidays in leave calculations. Cocoon Admins can now easily add their company holidays and shutdowns into Cocoon so we can calculate time balances accordingly if they overlap with an employee’s leave. And, you can customize how you want us to handle pay per employee type for any paid leaves. See how it works below.

Multiple entities, one Admin login

More company entities should not mean more problems. Cocoon Admins at companies with multiple entities can now easily access each entity’s dashboard with a one login with a single click, giving you seamless visibility into the full picture of your company’s leaves. Simply log in with your standard work email and use the nav bar to toggle between them. That’s right—no more time spent logging in and out or using jane+doe+300***@company.com as your email.  

Coming soon: A better experience for People teams who take leave

It can be easy to forget that People leaders need to take leave sometimes, too. Starting next month, any Cocoon Admin who also has an employee account will be able to easily switch back and forth between their employee and Admin Dashboards without ever leaving Cocoon. And did we mention we’re building a dedicated dashboard for managers for visibility into their team’s leaves? Down the road, this ability to easily switch between accounts will also apply to Managers who plan their own leaves in Cocoon. Stay tuned for updates in January!

Small changes, big impact

Some launches are flashier than others, but smaller improvements stack up over time to make a real impact to the overall experience for both People teams and employees. Our team is always hard at work to make incremental changes based on our community’s needs. Here are a few recent small but mighty updates we made:

• Reminders for employees to verify benefits payments:  We know how critical it is to verify that employees are paid correctly. Based on your feedback, we added a task to employees’ “My tasks” Dashboard to use our Benefits Verification Tool. All they need to do is enter dates and amounts from one benefits check and we’ll instantly verify whether the daily rate they received matches the rate in our system. With this update, they can easily *check* that task off the to-do list ;)
• Growing into eligibility based on tenure: Compliance is our bread and butter. As of next month, Cocoon’s system will automatically detect if an employee hits an FMLA tenure requirement during a leave, and will instantly trigger all relevant updates from there: send relevant compliance notices, update employees’ leave timelines, and enable them plan additional leave time based on their new eligibility. A small but mighty win for reliable, tech-powered leave.

Have feedback or thoughts on anything above? Feel free to share them directly with our Product Marketer, Libby Buttenwieser, at product-feedback@cocoon.com. Otherwise, we’ll see you back here in 2025 with a lot more updates to share!