More automation for People teams and employees: What’s new in Cocoon February 2024

New year, new Cocoon. Just kidding, we’re still the technology-first company driving the digital transformation of employee leave that you know and love. Only a month into the new year, we’re excited to share the strides we’ve made toward our vision of transforming leave for both employees and People teams. This month’s launches bring even more clarity and automation into the leave management process to free up time for you to focus on the things that really matter. Let’s dive in:

Even more leave pay clarity for employees

Has an employee ever emailed you during leave with a list of 14 questions about their leave pay when they should have been focused on the reason for their leave instead? It’s not a great situation for either person. 

Last year, we launched the employee Pay Tracker to give employees visual insight into their different pay sources to reduce confusion. This month’s update brings even more granular details into the Pay Tracker to help employees understand their leave pay. 

Employees can see their leave pay in each period (both past and upcoming) broken into regular pay, leave pay, expected benefits, and total pay. Seamless access to these details means employees can find answers to their pay questions (a notoriously confusing part of taking leave) in real time right in Cocoon—which means fewer questions about pay popping up in your inbox. And, we’re actively working on complementing these details with more employee pay education through videos and FAQs right in their Cocoon Dashboard. Stay tuned.

Military family leave support (we’ve now got you covered on all FMLA leave types now)

We expanded our platform to include military exigency and military caregiver leaves, rounding out our support for all FMLA-covered leave types. If you need a refresher on military family leaves, we can help out with that too:

Who qualifies for military family leave entitlements?

There are two broad types of military family leave under FMLA:

1. Military Caregiver Leave

This leave is for employees who need to take care of a covered service member with a serious injury or illness. Their relationship to the injured service member may determine their eligibility to take this type of leave.

2. Qualifying Exigency Leave

This leave is for employees who need time to handle urgent issues that have come up because of a family member’s active military duty or their impending call to serve. There may be limits to what constitutes qualifying military duty, reasons for leave, and who is a qualifying family member (the FMLA lists nine categories of qualifying exigencies).

Improved visibility into employee leave events

Next up is our new Leave Log, which gives Cocoon Admins a timeline of key events, updated in real time, for each employee’s leave: submission, forms uploads, status changes, leave date adjustments, and more. This level of visibility further empowers HR teams with the context they need to answer employee questions quickly—no scouring through long email threads or frantically messaging outsourced reps for more information. 

Because employees use Cocoon for key leave tasks like date changes, logging claims tasks, and uploading certain forms, we have the unique power to surface these details to People teams in the way only a true software platform can.

Our latest HRIS integration: ADP Workforce Now® 

Last but certainly not least, we are thrilled to announce that we now offer an API integration with leading HRIS platform ADP Workforce Now® to automatically sync census information from ADP® to Cocoon in real time. Companies that use ADP Workforce Now® can save hours each month that would otherwise be spent manually uploading census files. Put those hours towards something more worth your time and be confident your employee information is always accurate, secure, and up to date. This launch marks Cocoon’s tenth API integration with the top HRIS platforms.

Harnessing the power of technology to evolve quickly for today’s digital workplace 

As a true software-powered leave management system, we have the flexibility to rapidly evolve and innovate based on feedback from our current and prospective partners. From systems that don’t speak to each other to confusion over leave pay and more, we’re committed to solving some of the most challenging parts of taking and managing leave. Expect many more exciting announcements in 2024 as we continue to build the tech-first tools that people-first companies deserve.