Cocoon release notes: what’s new in July 2024

Hello and welcome to Q3! It might be summertime, but Team Cocoon shows no signs of slowing down on evolving our product to better serve the needs of our community. This month’s updates bring more automation to help Admins save time on day-to-day leave management, and improve two key experiences in Cocoon based directly on employee feedback. Let’s dive in.

Easily manage your top to-do’s with our revamped Admin Dashboard

The Cocoon Admin Dashboard got a glow-up this month with the introduction of our new Tasks page. Nobody likes that feeling of “did I forget something really important?” or “I remember seeing an email reminder about something but now I have no idea what it was.” Our Admin Tasks page saves you the time and stress over staying on top of your leave management to-do’s by surfacing all of your tasks in one central place.

At login, Admins will now see a clear list of all high-priority tasks they need to action on: reviewing accommodation or personal leave requests, uploading new census files, or executing repayments to employees. You can filter by status, date, or category, with categories like “Blocking employee” to help you prioritize. And don’t worry—our good ol’ Leaves view is just a click away using our nifty new sidebar nav. Check out the walkthrough below for a preview.

Workday x Cocoon: a LOA match made in heaven 

You asked, we listened (and built the thing). Our two-way integration with Workday is here! Our newest API integration instantly syncs employees’ leave status and dates to Workday in real-time, giving Workday users the full picture of employee leave right in their HRIS. No more painstaking and error-prone manual work to input leave dates in Workday or update them any time an employee changes their plan—which, spoiler alert, happens a lot. Pair this with our integration to automatically sync census information from Workday to Cocoon and save yourself hours per week to do literally anything else.

Learn more →

Uploading paperwork, simplified 

Next up: we’ve made it even easier for employees to upload their medical and claim forms to their “Your tasks” Dashboard in Cocoon. We heard from employees that the previous experience of uploading one big PDF with all forms including (serious health condition, private disability claim, and state claim in some cases) made the next steps a little ambiguous. 

Our new experience breaks out the upload tasks for each unique document type and gives employees clearer guidance to avoid any confusion. And—we now give employees specific instructions and FAQs on how to complete each document type. A small step for the “Your tasks” Dashboard, but a big stride for clarity and ease throughout the leave journey.

Honorable mention: more granular leaves reporting

Last but not least, we’d be remiss not to mention that we’ve added three new columns to the Leaves report based on your feedback. When you download the report from the Leaves tab on your Admin Dashboard, it will now include columns to help you report in more detail about the state of your team’s leave: 

• Employee ID
• Remote ID 
• Employee Payroll ID

A few extra columns on a report might not sound like much, but we get pretty excited about anything that saves our partners time or hassle on manual leave management work. 

From automating admin workflows to take more off People teams’ plates to consistently iterating on the employee experience, our team remains committed to hearing your feedback and pushing the boundaries of what technology-powered leave can look like. Stay tuned for more Cocoon release notes like this one as we head into the second half of 2024.