Cocoon release notes: What’s new in March 2025

Team Cocoon is fresh off our company-wide offsite in Cancun, slightly sunburnt, and excited to share some big developments we’ve been working on for several months. This month we’re all about customization, a key component of our vision to transform the leave experience with technology and great design. 

Unveiling our tech-powered leave experience for Managers 

Leave management is a team sport, which means your leave solution needs to play nicely with your HR team and managers. That’s why we were excited to announce our new Manager Dashboard last month that gives managers the visibility they need to support their teams through leave—removing you and other People team members as a bottleneck.  

Managers now have access to their own Cocoon Dashboard with details into their direct reports' leave timelines, plus access to a dedicated resource library with templates and guidance.

We sat down with members of the Cocoon Product Team to hear more about how we built this prioritizing customer feedback around simplicity and privacy. 

I’m excited about this launch because it’s part of a larger, ongoing effort to truly tailor the Cocoon experience to all the different roles and functions that may touch a leave, giving them the information they need when they need it.”
_{- Sean Miller, Cocoon Product Manager}

Meet the Leaves tab you’ve been dreaming of

Our (belated) Valentine’s Day gift to you this year: several highly-requested updates to the Leaves tab in your Cocoon Dashboard that give you more visibility at-a-glance and help you report on all leaves with even more granularity. After a little glow-up, this page now includes:

• A search bar to look up any employee
• The ability to filter by leave type 
• Labels for leave cadence (“Continuous” or “Intermittent”)
• Helpful tooltips and flags, e.g. important documents an employee needs to upload

Also—as part of this release, our Insights feature is getting its very own page that you can find on the nav bar (they grow up so fast!) Log in to your Cocoon Dashboard to see it IRL.

Small changes, big impact

As always, we can’t neglect to highlight some smaller but (we think!) equally important product releases.

1. Self-serve FAQ editing: This one is a small but very mighty update. Workspace Admins can now easily edit the FAQ employees see in their Cocoon Dashboard. Learn how to do it here.
2. Easier leave date selection for employees: We heard from employees that the experience for updating leave dates was confusing….So we updated it. To edit a leave plan, employees can now choose any dates on the calendar and Cocoon will automatically validate that they’re in line with laws and your policies. If any of the selected time is not covered, we’ll tell the employee exactly how many days they need to remove from their date range and explain why.
3. Streamlined recertification requests: For intermittent medical or caregiver leaves, that require employer review, Workspace Admins can now easily request new or updated serious health condition forms (known as a “recertification”) with a couple clicks. Cocoon will automatically notify the employee, and let you know when they’ve uploaded the new document to fix any deficiencies. 

Coming soon: A new era of customization in Cocoon with bespoke leave approval flows

We’re kickstarting our customization era with new functionality that allows People teams to choose exactly which leave requests (if any) they want to review themselves, and which they want Cocoon’s software to handle for them. Here’s the scoop:

• In Settings, Cocoon Admins can choose to toggle “Leave adjudication” on or off per leave type: parental (disability and bonding), medical (continuous and intermittent), and caregiver (continuous and intermittent)
• Turning adjudication on allows you to review each leave request and approve it, deny it, or request additional information from the employees. 
• Cocoon walks you through the process with step-by-step guidance and automated employee communications.
• Don’t want to take on this work? No problem—adjudication is off by default, meaning Cocoon will handle these decisions for you with our unique processes per leave type. 

This functionality has been a top request from partners and prospective partners for several months now, and we’re excited to see it out in the wild. Check out how it works firsthand with this interactive demo.

Coming soon: More leaves, not more problems

Cocoon knows leave is not one-sized-fits-all. We think about the edge cases, and are building software to make those moments as smooth as possible for both People teams and employees. Cocoon has created a streamlined experience for employees who need to take multiple leaves. This new functionality makes it easy for employees to plan additional leaves, or plan two simultaneous leaves for different qualifying reasons. People teams: as always, we’ve got you covered—Cocoon handles compliance and makes it easy to track and see details for each leave in your Cocoon Dashboard.

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No two companies or teams operate identically. Cocoon is proud to continue to push the boundaries on tech-powered leave management, this time with unparalleled customization for how your team wants to handle leave reviews and approvals, support for multiple leaves, easy self-serve editing to the information your employees see in Cocoon. Have feedback on what else you’d like to customize within Cocoon? Reach out to support@cocoon.com—we’d love to hear from you!